Baldwin-Wallace College to Achieve 194% ROI with NetApp

College Maximizes Resources and Enhances Education Experience with NetApp Storage Foundation

SUNNYVALE, Calif.— —Students, faculty, and staff are more tech savvy today than ever before. They expect to have the latest messaging and collaboration tools and ubiquitous wireless available to them 24/7. Despite the critical importance of information systems to higher education, many colleges and universities such as Baldwin-Wallace College constantly face tighter budgets, forcing administrators to find ways to do more with limited resources. Focused on providing high-quality, personalized education, Baldwin-Wallace College turned to NetApp to transform the college’s IT infrastructure and gain greater flexibility and efficiency within the school’s limited budget. According to an assessment by Mainstay Partners, an independent consulting firm, Baldwin-Wallace is on track to realize total benefits of approximately $814,000 over three years—a 194% ROI over that period.

Baldwin-Wallace College, a private liberal arts college near Cleveland, Ohio, has 600 full-time employees and an enrollment of approximately 4,300 undergraduate and graduate students. In the college’s IT department, a staff of four is responsible for managing all aspects of the school’s growing IT operations. However, with limited budget and staffing resources, the IT team was constantly challenged with accommodating the growing demand for IT services, enabling disaster recovery, reducing costs, and maximizing data center resources.

Baldwin-Wallace worked with NetApp reseller the Forquer Group to virtualize and consolidate its sprawling computing and storage infrastructure. The college built its new, efficient infrastructure with NetApp® and VMware virtualization and cloud infrastructure technology and has virtualized over 92% of its infrastructure. By buying up front only the amount of storage they currently need, they were able to improve IT and cost efficiencies while gaining the necessary flexibility to meet their evolving needs.

“It’s a common mantra these days, but we genuinely have to do more with less in IT,” said Greg Flanik, chief information officer for Baldwin-Wallace College. “With NetApp, we are able to achieve new levels of reliability, flexibility, and scalability, which are on track for a one-year payback and 194% return on investment over the next three years.”

News Highlights

*By choosing NetApp as its storage foundation, Baldwin-Wallace has achieved substatial cost savings, including $50,000 in data center expansion costs, $45,000 in power and cooling costs, and $42,000 in annual server and storage costs.
*VMware virtualization has increased application availability to 99.95% and has also created a centrally managed environment that makes it easier for staff to provision servers and storage.
*The college gained more than 3.5TB of additional storage capacity from deduplication, saving an estimated $20,000 per year.
*Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 is the college’s largest application, supporting more than 1,300 faculty and staff e-mail boxes. With NetApp technologies, the college gained efficiencies in e-mail recovery cycles, reducing the time to restore a single user’s mailbox in Exchange Server from hours to less than 15 minutes.
*The college designed a system that allows users to recover copies of earlier documents and e-mails by using NetApp technologies. This self-service tool has enabled productivity savings of nearly $70,000 annually and reduced help desk inquires by 15 to 20 calls per week.

Supporting Quotes

*Regina Kunkle, vice president of State and Local Government and Higher Education (SLED), NetApp:
“Providing high-quality, personalized education is Baldwin-Wallace’s mission, and key to making this happen is their ability to meet growing student, faculty, and staff requirements for the latest in technology tools, despite IT budget constraints. With a storage foundation that’s built on NetApp, they are now able to achieve greater IT and cost efficiencies through a shared IT infrastructure and to gain the flexibility needed to respond to their evolving IT demands, allowing them to focus less on technology and more on their business of delivering high-quality education.”
*Bill Reniff, chief financial officer and vice president, Baldwin-Wallace College:
“With NetApp, we have realized major cost savings on our storage and server infrastructure investments by implementing a more scalable and reliable infrastructure. This has allowed us to free up budget to invest in technologies that will keep the college competitive in the years ahead. As we continue to expand our educational programs, our investment in NetApp technologies will be instrumental in helping us continue to grow.”


About NetApp
NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions that accelerate business breakthroughs and deliver outstanding cost efficiency. Discover NetApp’s passion for helping companies around the world go further, faster at www.netapp.com.