Unleashing IT Magazine, Summer 2013

Summer 2013
In collaboration with Intel®

Unleashing IT Seize innovation,
accelerate business,
drive outcomes.
All through the cloud.
• Cloud-based video streaming
• The new API economy
• Virtual desktop infrastructure
Betting on
the cloud
Jeff Brooks, CIO of Muscogee
(Creek) Nation Casinos, is using
the cloud to unify operations and
create new business opportunities.
Page 7

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cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not
imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. (1307)
Strategies & Solutions
03 Open for business: The new API economy
Application programming interfaces (APIs) are emerging
from the technical weeds and becoming an influential
business tool.
05 Enterprise video streaming, simplified in
the cloud
Why a growing number of service providers and
enterprises are delivering video from the cloud.
Experiences
07 Betting on the cloud
Muscogee (Creek) Nation Casinos is establishing
a “triangle of resiliency” and creating new business
opportunities.
09 Moneris does business—and technology—right
How Canada’s largest credit and debit payments
processor is keeping pace in a fast changing industry.
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Feature
11 Collaborative. Mobile. Secure.
Beyond virtual desktop infrastructure: A new type of
workspace that addresses business, IT, and user needs.
12 Customizing the computing experience for
100,000 users
Lone Star College System has combined a private cloud
with dynamic desktop computing to deliver more value
for students and faculty.
13 Extending education beyond the campus
Oaks Christian School is expanding its online program
and student services with server and desktop virtualization.
14 Modernizing education IT
With a new technology infrastructure, The College of
Idaho is fostering experimentation and innovation among
faculty members.
Cover: Jeff Brooks, CIO of Muscogee (Creek) Nation Casinos

Unleashing IT Seize innovation,
accelerate business,
drive outcomes.
All through the cloud.
Summer 2013
New pathways to business
success
The trails of business achievement have been well
trodden. They are proven, often profitable, and
generally safe.
But they are not the only routes to success.
This edition of Unleashing IT is all about new pathways,
and the trailblazers who are forging them. The
companies and trends highlighted in the following
pages show how different strategies and operating
models—enabled by advanced technologies—can
carve out new go-to-market, revenue, and growth
opportunities.
For example, a number of companies are using
application programming interfaces (APIs) to leverage
their proprietary data and scale their business in new
ways (page 3). Others are putting their video assets in
the cloud to boost their agility and innovation (page 5).
Organizations like Muscogee (Creek) Nation Casinos
are creating new opportunities for customer and
community support (page 7). And Moneris Solutions
is delivering differentiated services in an increasingly
commoditized industry (page 9).
To blaze these new trails, companies need to think
differently. They must question the well worn routes
of the past and present, and search for the new roads
that have yet to be paved. As always, we stand at
the ready to support and enable your pathfinding and
trailblazing efforts.
For more information, follow the links inside or
contact Cisco at 1-800-553-6387 and select option
1 to speak with a Cisco representative. We welcome
your feedback on the articles in this publication at
www.UnleashingIT.com
Sincerely,
Giuliano Di Vitantonio
Giuliano Di Vitantonio
Vice President
Cisco Systems, Inc.
Shannon Poulin
Vice President
Intel Corporation
In collaboration
with Intel®

3
Seize innovation, accelerate business, drive outcomes. All through the cloud.
Business has always been built on
competitive advantage, creating or offering
something unique. Or marketing, selling,
and distributing it better than others.
Maintaining a competitive edge has
traditionally demanded a significant
measure of control: protecting intellectual
capital, dictating the “how, when, and
where” of product and service delivery, and
safeguarding the resources and assets that
help drive a business forward.
Releasing this control would appear to be a
colossal business blunder, a major threat to
an organization, its competitive advantages,
and its ability to succeed. But application
programming interfaces (APIs) are changing
such notions, breaking through longstanding
business rules and the barriers they uphold.
“By exposing and sharing proprietary data
and applications in new ways,” says Todd
Cramer, Director of Product Marketing for
the Data Center Software Division at Intel,
“companies can realize new business
opportunities, new value, and new
revenue streams.”
Out from the weeds
At first glance, APIs appear specialized
and limited, buried in the technical weeds.
A set of protocols and specifications,
they enable applications to interact with
each other and prescribe how those
interactions are handled. They also allow
developers to create new programs and
services that connect to and extend
applications, commonly referred to as
“mash-ups.”
By exposing and sharing proprietary data in new
ways, companies can quickly scale their business
and reach entirely new markets.
Open for business:
The new API economy

Unleashing IT
4
But APIs are no longer just a technology
tool. They are becoming a sweeping and
influential business tool.
“In the past, companies would establish
one-to-one relationships with partners
and customer sets,” says Kin Lane, The
API Evangelist. “If a business is a hub, the
organization would create each spoke
individually. In the new API economy, you’re
allowing others to create spokes for you.”
“APIs offer unique opportunities for
customer and partner stickiness,” says
Nilesh Panicker, Senior Manager of Cisco
Support APIs. “By letting others directly
incorporate your data into their existing
workflows, you are delivering more value
and allowing them to create new value.”
This means companies can syndicate their
data assets, allowing partners to do more work
for them, faster. This not only fosters new
growth, product, and distribution opportunities—
it can also create entirely new markets.
From commerce to social to
enterprise
The broad use of APIs started in the
e-commerce realm. Companies like Amazon
and eBay quickly scaled their partner and
customer ecosystems using APIs. Social
networks like Facebook, Twitter, and
LinkedIn have also liberally employed APIs to
stretch their tentacles throughout the web.
“The rapid growth of mobile applications,
cloud computing, and social networking are
all being driven by APIs,” says Lane. “These
aren’t just technology opportunities, but
massive business and market opportunities.
They’re creating new ways of partnering,
new ways of scaling, and new ways to
facilitate commerce.”
As a result, emerging markets are rising, while
others are falling. Netflix took on an entrenched
industry when it launched its streaming video
service. In moving its digital assets from a
tightly controlled data center to the cloud and
giving others access via APIs, Netflix was able
to decouple its service offerings, connect with
new distribution partners and platforms, and
scale its business globally.
Balancing enablement and risk
Despite the notable—and increasing—
benefits of exposing and sharing internal
applications and data, challenges and risks
remain. Companies that aren’t careful can
face privacy, legal, branding, payment,
and licensing issues. They can also
unintentionally cannibalize their pre-existing
business models.
“You still have to create effective APIs with
sound rules and definitions,” says Lane. “It’s
a matter of opening up your business, but
on your terms.”
“APIs should be planned and developed
carefully,” Panicker recommends. “We’ve
been successful by focusing on our
customers’ and partners’ use cases and
ease-of-consumption.”
Cramer and Lane suggest starting slowly
with APIs and learning along the way.
Establish a formal API strategy and treat
it like any other product development
program. Open up the lowest-risk data,
conduct pilot projects with trusted partners,
and then expand the use of APIs over time.
It can be scary and uncomfortable, but
organizations must be willing to give up a
measure of control.
“Help is available,” notes Cramer. “Intel
is investing in API technologies, and we
recently acquired Mashery, a pioneer
of API management. Solutions like the
Intel® Expressway API Manager, which
bundles Mashery technologies, can
help improve application management,
security, and adoption.”
“There is a balancing act between risk and
enablement, open versus controlled,” says
Lane. “Companies must be willing to give
up some control and let others play with
their stuff. They must be more transparent.
And they must be willing to experiment.”
In the new API economy, are you open for
business?
Demo and proof of concept
For more on API management,
visit: http://cloudsecurity.intel.com/
api-management. For a custom
demo or proof of concept from
Intel, contact: 1-855-229-5580 or
ASIPcustomercare@intel.com

5
Increasing demand,
growing complexity,
numerous formats,
multiple networks, and
disparate devices: why
delivering video from
the cloud just makes
sense for service
providers and the
enterprise.
Do you have a Netflix subscription? Do you
download movies to your tablet, or access
YouTube clips on your smartphone?
At first glance, these consumer video
diversions may not seem very relevant
to the world in which you work. But the
technology behind such innovations is
being rapidly adopted by the enterprise,
while becoming increasingly complex for
service providers. As a result, it is causing
disruption across the whole value chain—
from media companies to advertisers—and
is changing the global landscape for
content distribution models, in living rooms,
boardrooms, and enterprise IT shops.
Enterprise video streaming,
simplified in the cloud

Unleashing IT
6
The demand for streaming video in
multiple formats has accelerated
exponentially, thanks to the popularity
of smartphones, tablets, and gaming
consoles. In fact, the 2012 Olympics
marked the first time online viewing
surpassed traditional viewing—but it
certainly won’t be the last, says David
Parsons, a Vertical Manager in Cisco’s
Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG).
“This is one of those times where a
technology that started in the consumer
domain has worked its way into the
enterprise,” Parsons says. “There is a
whole proliferation of devices you can
access video content on. And if you are
an operator, this makes your life very
complicated.”
The need to stream to different devices is
only the tip of the iceberg, he says. “There
are massive storage requirements for
umpteen different copies of files. You have
to store versions for different speeds, and
broadband speeds can vary depending on
the load on the network.”
Compounding the problem, says Bill
Gerhardt, a Director with Cisco IBSG,
are the many new ways that enterprises
are using video. These include content
delivery networks (CDNs) for distributing
education and training modules, for
setting up log libraries, and for delivering
live content to customers. “Although
still small compared to the broader
entertainment distribution business
models, there is growing interest and
innovation in the enterprise,” he says.
This sudden increase in demand has left
companies grappling with multiple assets,
formats, and rights management issues as
they search for more efficient, cost-effective
ways to centrally manage the added
complexity. This is where cloud-based
streaming solutions start to make sense.
Staying agile and innovative
“There is a growing need in the enterprise
to deliver video in varying degrees of
quality and in varying conditions of network
availability,” Gerhardt says. “You need to
give yourself as much agility as possible so
you can innovate as fast as possible and
meet the needs that this emerging market
is going to continue to demand.”
One way that video streaming in the cloud
helps companies stay agile is by lessening
their reliance on hardware investments, he
says. Constantly trying to integrate around
hardware in such a rapidly changing
environment can be difficult, which is why
many technology providers are so excited
about software-enabled solutions (in fact,
Cisco has made a number of software
acquisitions in recent months, including
BroadHop, Cariden, and Intucell).
Speed up innovation by reusing
common assets
By streaming video in the cloud,
companies can combat scope creep,
keep costs down, and offer packaged
solutions to the enterprise in a timely way
that is device, hardware, and network
agnostic—all within a consistent, centrally
managed environment, Gerhardt says. This
is because the right cloud solution should
eliminate the need to integrate multiple
silos of similar content.
“This way, I can start to mix and match my
assets and bring in different technologies
where I need to. At the same time, I am
lowering my costs because I am reusing
the same assets over and over again.
And hopefully, I am increasing my scale
because I am reaching out to more and
more individuals who can actually consume
my content,” Gerhardt explains.
“And that, at the end of the day, is the goal
of the game—to try to get as many eyeballs
on my content as possible.”
So, are cloud-based video solutions right
for you? Whether you are an enterprise
user or a service provider, step one is
simply to understand your audience,
Gerhardt explains. “Next, you need to
know what you are trying to deliver, what
that media content looks like, and how
many different renditions of that content
will need to be provided—and under what
circumstances,” he says.
“Clearly, there are a lot of media
distribution options available in the
market. Whether they are used for
consumer entertainment or managing
the enterprise, their requirements are
rapidly changing. So decision makers
need to look at the supply of alternatives,
compare them, and understand what
they do differently,” he continues.
“But then ask yourself if there is a better
way, by migrating those common assets
into a common environment known as
the cloud, that starts to give you more
flexibility, more opportunity for service
creation, and more innovation—hopefully
at a lower cost.”
More information
For the Cisco IBSG “Streaming Under
the Clouds” white paper, visit the
Resource Center at:
“This is one of those times where a technology that started in
the consumer domain has worked its way into the enterprise.”
David Parsons, Vertical Manager, Cisco IBSG

CIO Eric Slavinsky works
with Cisco and LG&E and
KU operations personnel
to drive change
CIO Jeff Brooks (left)
works with Senior
Systems Analyst
Bryon Fowler (right)
to develop new
customer services
and promotions
7
Betting on the cloud
Muscogee (Creek) Nation
Casinos’ data center
and cloud strategies
are creating a “triangle
of resiliency” and new
customer and community
support opportunities.
Gaming revenue is the lifeblood of casinos.
When the games go down, profits fall with them.
“If all of our games were to stop working,
we would lose hundreds of thousands of
dollars every hour,” says Jeff Brooks, CIO of
Muscogee (Creek) Nation Casinos, which
runs nine casinos in eastern Oklahoma. “In
our business, downtime is a very bad thing.”
It’s also a reality when your operations are
located in “Tornado Alley.” The organization
has faced devastating twisters, extreme
flooding, and the power outages that
come with them. Such events have wiped
out the casinos’ server room batteries
and backup generators, debilitating data,
communications, and gaming systems.
Previously, Muscogee (Creek) Nation
Casinos’ business applications—from human
resources and accounting to timekeeping and
email to point-of-sale and gaming software—
were decentralized and managed by each
casino property. And yet, the casinos were
supported by a lone data center with little to
no storage capacity or backup capabilities,
creating a single point of failure.
“We needed more redundancy,” says
Brooks, “with better application and
administration flexibility.”
Muscogee (Creek) Nation Casinos have
a two-phase plan. The first phase: Unify
the casinos’ business applications while
simultaneously expanding the infrastructure
that supports them. The second phase:
Build an internal cloud that streamlines
technology administration and costs, while
creating new opportunities to drive revenue
and support the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.
Experiences

Unleashing IT
8
(From left) Senior Systems Analyst
Bryon Fowler, Network Analyst Mark
Davis, CIO Jeff Brooks, and Senior IT
Manager Kim Sanders bring resiliency
and flexibility to Muscogee (Creek)
Nation Casinos
Expanding infrastructure,
unifying applications
To keep gaming and business operations
running, Muscogee (Creek) Nation Casinos
is expanding its technology infrastructure
from one data center to three, tied together
using a sizeable metro area network (MAN).
With a FlexPod foundation—featuring
the Cisco® Unified Computing System™
(UCS), Intel® Xeon® processors, Cisco
Nexus® switches, and NetApp storage
components—the data centers will form
a “triangle of resiliency” that delivers
exceptional redundancy and fault tolerance.
“Any of the three data centers will be able
to take on 100 percent of our load at any
time,” Brooks explains. “In the unlikely event
that two of our data centers go down, we
won’t miss a beat.”
While Muscogee (Creek) Nation Casinos’
technology infrastructure is being
expanded, its business applications are
being brought together using a private
cloud. Because nearly everything is
virtualized, back office applications, gaming
software, and storage resources will no
longer be tied to a specific property. This
will ease systems administration while also
lowering licensing costs.
“Instead of paying for software licenses
for each gaming property,” says Brooks,
“we will have a single instance that is used
across all of our properties.”
Driving customer and
community support
Muscogee (Creek) Nation Casinos’
new technology infrastructure is also
delivering additional business insight and
opportunities. With application data unified
across the nine locations, casino leaders
are using business intelligence and data
analytics to better understand and serve
their customers.
“In the past, we couldn’t track our patrons’
activities across our locations and we
couldn’t determine the ROI of our marketing
activities,” Brooks explains. “We now have a
much more holistic view of our customers,
how and where they spend, and which
promotions they respond to. Not just for
games, but entertainment, point of sale,
food and beverage, everything.”
Deeper customer insights lead to better,
more timely services and promotions, he
adds, which improve customer attraction,
retention, and spending.
This will be critical for a new partnership
with Margaritaville that will expand
Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s flagship
River Spirit Casino property in Tulsa. The
expansion will include a new Margaritaville
gaming area, hotel, entertainment venue,
and restaurant. According to Brooks, the
FlexPod infrastructure will greatly ease the
development, deployment, and administration
of Margaritaville data and communications
services—and help maximize the revenue
potential of the new venture.
“We need to understand our non-gaming
patrons,” says Brooks, “so we can grow that
area of our business.”
In addition to casino expansion, Brooks is
planning to extend the Muscogee (Creek)
Nation cloud beyond its core business. He
foresees opportunities in the future to deliver a
wide range of services—spanning healthcare,
housing, welfare, and elderly assistance—to
Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s 75,000 citizens.
“The combination of Intel chips and Cisco
UCS has been a key enabler for us,” says
Brooks. “They are built for virtualization and
the cloud, which gives us a tremendous
amount of security, flexibility, and scalability,
not to mention peace of mind. We’re just
scratching the surface of what we can do
with our new infrastructure—not only for
our casino business, but for the Muscogee
(Creek) Nation.”
Complimentary data center
analysis
For a custom, comprehensive
analysis of the performance,
scalability, and reliability of your data
center, including recommendations
for improvements, visit the Resource
Center at: www.UnleashingIT.com

9
In today’s world of online, mobile, and card
payments, consumers expect payment
processing to be quick, efficient, and
secure. Delays are more than just an
annoyance–they’re unacceptable.
Along with front-end convenience,
however, comes a great deal of back-end
challenge.
“As basic processing services are
increasingly becoming commoditized,
the card processing industry is finding it
difficult to maintain bottom line growth,”
states a recent Capgemini report. “
…
Card processors have to focus on
the development of new and better
differentiated services to improve their
offerings in order to remain competitive in
the fast changing payment industry.”1
For companies like Moneris Solutions
Corp. (“Moneris”), Canada’s largest
credit and debit payments processor,
differentiation translates into a strong
focus on technology to support all aspects
of business, from secure transaction
processing to compliance to innovation.
Just as consumers have no tolerance for
point-of-sale delays, there’s no room for IT
delays either, says Joe Belinsky, Director,
Technology Services at Moneris in Toronto.
“Our mission statement for technology
is to be nimble, to be flexible, to really
enable the business to do whatever they
want without traditional IT lag in terms of
responsiveness,” says Belinsky. “Having
world-class, state-of-the-art architecture
and computing capability is a key aspect
of that. In fact, I would argue that we are a
technology company, serving the payment
side of financial services.”
Keeping pace with change
A joint venture established by Royal Bank
of Canada (RBC) and Bank of Montreal
(BMO) in 2000, Moneris serves more than
350,000 merchant locations across North
America, processing more than three
billion credit and debit transactions each
year. As one of North America’s largest
providers of payment processing solutions,
it also offers leading-edge electronic
loyalty and stored-value gift card programs
through its Ernex division.
To keep pace with industry changes, the
company has standardized on the Intel®
Xeon® processor-based Cisco® Unified
Computing System™ (UCS) as its go-
to enterprise server platform. The move
replaces legacy hardware that was near
end-of-life and goes hand-in-hand with a
consolidation and virtualization strategy to
downsize from three primary data centers
to two.
By the end of 2013, the majority of critical
server workloads will be running on Cisco
UCS™, including the Ernex production
environment, which previously ran on
a disparate set of technology. Belinsky
Moneris does business–and
technology–right
Experiences
Director of Technology
Services Joe Belinsky
helps Moneris keep pace
in a fast changing industry

Unleashing IT
10
estimates the online loyalty system alone
performs 30 to 40 percent faster in the
virtualized Intel environment at half the
cost and footprint. Overall operational
efficiency has also improved.
“Our pre-existing platforms were giving
my team a tremendous amount of
heartache–maybe even heartburn,” says
Belinsky. “To administer a patch or apply
an update we had to take the whole
chassis offline when what we really
wanted to do is cookie-cutter workloads
from server to server.”
Performing vulnerability scans and applying
patches to servers is an integral part of
demonstrating Payment Card Industry
(PCI) compliance at Moneris. As Belinsky
puts it, “non-compliance is a non-starter.”
Prior to implementing a virtualization
strategy, infrastructure management was
chassis-specific and there was no way
to obtain an enterprise view across more
than 800 servers. Business demands
for high availability and zero downtime
meant it was difficult to schedule
maintenance windows.
Fast-forward to today and compliance is
an automated process. Server templates
are used to uniformly apply changes as
needed and the concept of downtime is
removed altogether.
“We’ve cut our overhead and
management by 60 percent or more
relative to providing support and
we don’t have to fight for downtime
windows,” says Belinsky. “We can
effectively move workloads at will,
any time of day, for any purpose,
whether it’s for disaster recovery,
business continuity, maintenance, or
operational objectives.”
Good-bye menagerie, hello
nimbleness
For the applications group, the new
server environment removes “the
menagerie” of installing separate
server workloads to support separate
strategic initiatives, he adds. Instead,
the infrastructure team is equipped
to provide capacity on demand,
which speeds time to market both in
terms of transaction processing as
well as the development and delivery
of new products.
One example is a new application targeting
North American micro merchants who
require credit card processing infrequently.
The downloadable card reader works with
smart phones and other mobile devices as
needed, giving merchants an affordable
alternative to dedicated services.
Another example is an IP-based solution
that enables merchants to securely
connect to Moneris payment processing
using public or private Internet services.
“At Moneris, we have a constant strategy
afoot to manage, certify, and support a
variety of devices,” notes Belinsky. “IT
promises to deliver nimble technology to
the business and the business promises
to deliver nimble technology to our clients.
Server standardization is helping us to
keep those promises.”
1
“Global Trends in the Payment Card Industry 2012:
Processors,” Capgemini, 2012.
Complimentary data center
analysis
For a custom, comprehensive
analysis of the performance,
scalability, and reliability of your data
center, including recommendations
for improvements, visit the Resource
Belinsky’s promise:
Nimble technology that
can support a variety of
customer services and
payment processing
options

11
Trends like BYOD and the consumerization of
IT have helped. New delivery models like cloud
computing have also played a part. And yet,
IT teams are still being asked to do more with
less. Where do we go from here?
Many IT leaders are advancing their virtualization
journeys and positioning themselves as agents
of change. They are looking beyond desktop
virtualization to a new type of workspace, one
that enables collaboration, productivity, and the
creation of content and intellectual property.
It’s mobile, flexible, device agnostic, and
productive. But it’s also secure, manageable,
and reasonable to control.
According to an Independent study conducted
by Forrester, 70 percent of IT decision makers
surveyed are embarking or have plans to
embark on virtualization or Virtual Desktop
Infrastructure (VDI) projects to provide users
with applications and content from company-
owned devices. 61 percent want to enable
mobility or a multiple device strategy. 58
percent want to provide access to applications
and data from employee-owned (BYOD)
devices. And 30 percent intend to use VDI to
enable new business processes.1
But who’s doing it and how? Academia is
one industry that continues to blaze new
virtualization trails. Alan Price, Systems
Administrator at The College of Idaho, is on
the cusp of piloting VDI capabilities on student
laptops to replicate the lab experience off
campus and in the dorms (page 14). Darrell
Parker, Director of Information Systems at
Oaks Christian School, has set his sights on
VDI to address the pressures of BYOD as
well as the needs of online school faculty
and a global student body (page 13). And
Link Alander, CIO of Lone Star College, is
combining virtual desktop computing with
a private cloud to customize the computing
experience for 100,000 users (page 12).
How can you leverage VDI to enable
collaborative, mobile, and secure workspaces?
First, assess your use cases and determine
if progressive virtualization makes sense.
Second, ensure the solution can deliver an
equal or enhanced user experience. And
finally, conduct pilot projects to evaluate cost,
stakeholder satisfaction, organizational change,
and potential applications for virtualization.
1
“The Next-Generation Workspace Will Revolve Around Mobility
and Virtualization,” a commissioned study conducted by Forrester
Consulting on behalf of Cisco Systems, June 2012.
Complimentary VDI workshop
To qualify for a complimentary Cisco
Desktop Virtualization discovery, workshop,
and for more information on Cisco
solutions and services, visit the Resource
Collaborative. Mobile. Secure.
How virtualization is
progressing beyond
the desktop to
address business, IT,
and user needs.

Unleashing IT
12
“We were at a critical juncture with IT,”
recalls Link Alander, CIO of Lone Star
College System (LSCS). “To be honest,
we weren’t delivering value to the
college or our students. We were only
fixing problems.”
The fastest growing community college
in the U.S., LSCS had long struggled
with network outages, server failures,
and bandwidth issues. Alander wanted
to be more proactive with IT service
delivery, enabling LSCS faculty
and students in new ways. So he
formulated plans for application and
desktop virtualization, ERP integration,
and cloud computing.
“We are a support unit, but we were
spending more time supporting our IT
systems than our students and faculty,”
he explains. “We needed to change our
perspective and approach. And that meant
thinking less about IT, and more about
educational problems and opportunities. IT
is just a tool.”
Instead of focusing on individual tools,
Alander sought to develop a dynamic
toolbox of technology services for LSCS.
He wanted to give professors the ability
to place new applications and resources
in the toolbox to enhance their curriculum
and teaching. He wanted to give students
freedom to access the toolbox at any
time, from any location, using any device.
And he wanted the toolbox to deliver a
seamless and customized experience for
each user.
“We needed to create a foundation
for innovation,” says Alander, “so we
rebuilt everything.”
Before a private cloud could be developed,
and before applications and desktops could
be customized for students and faculty,
LSCS needed to shore up its technology
platform. Alander and his team deployed
the Cisco® Unified Computing System™
(UCS), based on Intel® Xeon® processors,
plus EMC storage and VMware software as
the “foundation for innovation” supporting
LSCS’s six main campuses and 11
outreach centers.
“With a powerful and flexible platform
in place,” Alander says, “we started
looking at ways to leverage it to
enhance student success and better
prepare them for the future.”
To make IT services more transparent,
accessible, and easy to use, Alander and
his team reached for the clouds. They
established a private cloud that delivers
computing resources to the college system
through two core data centers and to
students through a secure portal. They
also employed external cloud services for
certain applications.
“Students and faculty don’t need to know
where computing resources and services
come from, as long as they are reliable
and secure,” notes Alander. “And it’s
often less expensive to use external cloud
services versus building and managing
them on our own.”
A seamless computing experience is
one thing. A seamless experience that is
dynamic and fully customized for 100,000
users is quite another. To tailor the
computing environment for each student
and staff member, Alander and his team
not only virtualized the school system’s
applications and desktops, but also its
users. Virtual user profiles are linked with a
new ERP system and matched with course-
specific services and computing resources.
“You can’t just take a model and
instantly apply it to 100,000 users,”
Alander explains. “We’re using a phased
approach, starting with general use
cases, then personalizing the computing
experience with internal resources, and
then incorporating resources outside
our network.”
When students log in to the LSCS cloud,
their desktop environment is automatically
provisioned and dynamically customized
with the right applications—based on the
classes in which they are enrolled—and the
appropriate amount of bandwidth, memory,
and storage. As they log out, those
compute resources are reallocated to active
users to maximize utilization.
“We’re still exploring new ways to deliver
applications and services through the
cloud, and new ways to teach with
technology,” says Alander. “But we’ve
come a long way. With a unified platform
and a seamless, user-friendly computing
experience, there are countless ways
that we can spark innovation—inside and
outside the classroom.”
To qualify for a complimentary Cisco
Desktop Virtualization discovery
workshop, and for more information
on Cisco solutions and services,
visit the Resource Center at:
How Lone Star College System combined a private cloud with dynamic desktop
computing to deliver greater value to its students and faculty.
Customizing the computing
experience for 100,000 users

13
Founded in 2000 with fewer than 400 students, Oaks Christian
School’s growth has been vigorous, making IT modernization a
necessity. It was 2008 when Darrell Parker, Director of Information
Systems, started planting the seeds of virtualization. And now,
with a student population of 1500 and a burgeoning online school,
virtualization is entrenched from the server to the desktop, extending
education far beyond Oak Christian School’s campus.
“When we started the school, we bought physical servers, and
everything ran on them,” notes Parker. “But as we grew, we needed
ongoing availability for mission-critical servers and processes.
We also had aging hardware that needed to be replaced. Server
virtualization offered the insurance policy that we required, and
desktop virtualization helped us extend the life of our hardware
while broadening our services outside of the school and after
hours.”
Evolving the infrastructure foundation
As part of the overall IT evolution, Parker and Senior Systems
Engineer Ryan Aquino identified four core priorities: switch from
traditional copper Ethernet technology to fiber; reduce power
consumption; address heat in the data center; and support growing
virtualization. After a rigorous ROI analysis, the Intel® Xeon®-based
Cisco® Unified Computing System™ (UCS), complemented by a
Nimble storage solution, offered the manageability and scalability to
address their priorities.
From an IT perspective, Aquino sees the greatest value in boot time
and log in time improvements. “Multiple people trying to sign in
simultaneously or multiple devices trying to get on the system seem
to have no affect on the Cisco UCS™ platform,” he says. “We’ve
also reduced the amount of hardware in the data center and eased
our management burden by divesting ourselves of servers and
devices. Service profiles allow us to configure a brand new blade on
the fly, which saves time and money.”
VDI enables education innovation
With 1500 students, Oaks Christian School maxed out its campus
and couldn’t extend the physical infrastructure to accommodate
more students. At the same time that Parker was implementing
Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp for desktop virtualization, his
business peers were building and launching Oak Christian’s online
school. It was a serendipitous fusing of business and IT strategy.
Now, most of the online school faculty work remotely, and use VDI
every day. “For our online school faculty, VDI is mission critical. It’s
how they’re on our network,” Parker says. “We have students using
VDI globally as well. We’ve had students in China and Germany
using devices that don’t support flash-based courses or text books,
so VDI becomes their only access to these critical resources.”
Parker is also encouraged by the school’s readiness for BYOD.
Students are opting for their own devices rather than using local
computers on campus, which means adding more VDIs as demand
grows. Parker already has plans to grow from 300 to 500 VDIs, and
is confident the scalability inherent in Cisco UCS will allow his small
IT team to keep up.
“We’ve always looked at VDI as being a great solution for BYOD,”
he says. “It’s a new delineation of responsibility. It’s our job to
make sure there is a working virtual desktop for every log in, but
it’s up to parents and students to have and maintain the device. By
standardizing the platform from the server to the desktop, we can
extend our services and enable our students, faculty, and staff to
pursue quality work wherever they are.”
To qualify for a complimentary Cisco Desktop Virtualization
discovery workshop, and for more information on Cisco solutions
and services, visit the Resource Center at: www.UnleashingIT.com
Oaks Christian School leverages VDI to enable student flexibility, faculty productivity, and
global reach with a growing online school.
Extending education
outside beyond
the campus

Unleashing IT
14
As a student who spent a lot of time in
The College of Idaho’s IT department,
Alan Price knew the network and
infrastructure quite well. But becoming
Systems Administrator at the college was
an eye-opening experience. Performance
was even slower than he had anticipated.
In a position to affect change, Price
prioritized storage, performance, and
capacity to modernize the infrastructure
and position IT as a true enabler and
partner of the faculty.
“We’re a small, four-year liberal arts
college with budget and resource
constraints,” comments Price. “But we still
need to pay attention to industry trends
and how students consume content.
It’s my job to figure out how to deliver a
modern education experience in a budget
conscious way. My vision is to modernize—
deliver more performance and a different
way of doing things.”
A need for flexibility and scale
While Price, who has a background in
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), was
under no illusion that the college required
the infrastructure investments of a large
corporation, he did want to figure out a way
to apply enterprise fluidity and flexibility on
a smaller scale.
Spinning up new services to enhance
business application delivery or student
experience is an excellent example. Prior
to the infrastructure modernization, the first
question Price asked when considering a
new service was, “can we do this without
slowing down our other applications?” He
wanted cloud-like expandability without the
on-demand capabilities. In Price’s mind,
the status quo may have worked, but with
newer faculty coming on board, there was an
expectation of a certain baseline of services,
and he was determined to provide it.
The College of Idaho is using VDI to enhance the student experience.
Modernizing education IT
Systems Administrator
Alan Price is
modernizing The College
of Idaho’s IT capabilities

15
That determination led Price to choose
an infrastructure solution from Cisco and
a storage solution from Nimble Storage.
Implementing the Intel® Xeon® processor-
based Cisco® Unified Computing System™
(UCS) gave Price the capacity, power,
and performance to look toward future
application innovation confidently. He
also gained an efficient storage solution
that offers high performance and speed,
which meets the “click and it’s there”
expectations of both faculty and students.
Less IT, more innovation
Price had several goals associated with
modernization. First, he wanted to tackle
the business necessities—upgrading a
file server that was more than 10 years
old with virtual drives to expand space,
upgrading Exchange server to deploy
2013, upgrading Windows from 2003 to
2012, upgrades to the Moodle course
management system, and upgrades to the
ERP system and student portal.
“With more storage and compute capability,
people won’t have to involve me as much in
the process of IT, and business applications
will start working as expected because
they won’t have to fight for resources,”
says Price. “Our IT team is only seven
professionals, and on the network and
infrastructure side, I’m the only one. By
using virtual resources the way they were
meant to be used, we have faster, more
responsive IT with fewer issues. So now,
IT is about anticipating needs and trying
to stay ahead of them instead of just
responding to them after the fact.”
The Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)
phenomenon is exploding on campus, mostly
in the form of students bringing laptops and
faculty starting to leverage tablets in a more
sophisticated way. As a result, professors
are asking for an IT-enabled way to support
students in doing their work wherever they
have access to a computer or mobile device.
In response, Price is exploring how to deliver
VDI capabilities to laptops so students can
have the lab experience off campus or in
their dorm rooms.
In addition to the remote lab experience,
Price also wants to foster experimentation
and innovation among faculty members.
“We needed to align the support function
of IT more closely with the frontlines of
student education,” says Price. “With
infrastructure and storage modernization,
IT can mesh its subject matter expertise
and enablement to create a culture
where faculty can strategize and IT can
implement. Our face forward now is, ‘how
can I help you,’ instead of, ‘we need to
focus on our stuff to make this happen, so
you have to wait.’ There is a new spirit of
collaboration between faculty and IT that’s
serving to advance the college’s mission
and student learning.”
Cisco UCS and Nimble Storage solutions
Leverage pre-validated and efficient
VDI reference architectures with
Cisco UCS and Nimble Storage
CS-Series. For more, visit: http://
nimblestorage.com/solutions/vdi.php.
To qualify for a complimentary VDI
workshop, visit the Resource Center
at: www.UnleashingIT.com
(From left) Price discusses
infrastructure upgrades with
IT Support Specialist Sergio
Arianguiz

Servers based on the Intel® Xeon®
processor E5-2600 product family
At the Heart of Your
Flexible, Highly
Efﬁcient Datacenter
Designed to combine performance, built-in
capabilities, and cost-effectiveness, servers
based on the Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600
product family are at the heart of today’s
evolving data center.
Brilliantly versatile
Designed to sit at the heart of diverse IT environments:
• Enterprise infrastructure
• Public & private cloud installations
• Storage systems
• Research and High-Performance Computing (HPC)
• Embedded devices
• Workstations
Copyright © 2012 Intel Corporation. All rights reserved. Intel, the Intel logo, Xeon, and Xeon inside are trademarks
of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and other countries.

Unleashing IT Magazine, Summer 2013

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