Arun ShankarBuilding on an existing strategic roadmap that aligns with Bahrain’s Vision 2030, University of Bahrain announced the successful implementation of a transformational ICT project with Dell EMC. With a pivotal role to play in the country’s national transformation agenda, the university deployed Dell EMC’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, cloud and hyper converged infrastructure solutions to meet the institutional needs for efficiency, performance and scalability. By leveraging these industry solutions, the university also aims to become a technology-driven institution that fosters future-ready entrepreneurial minds to shape a sustainable economy, central to the national vision.
As a prominent higher education institution in the nation, University of Bahrain faced a number of challenges associated with a traditional and siloed infrastructure that hindered the performance of critical applications, workflows, impacted employee efficiency and lacked the flexibility or agility to meet future expansion needs. With around 30,000 students, the university was looking to establish a world class learning environment and therefore needed a truly integrated infrastructure that was capable of meeting its ambitious growth needs, securing its data and minimising the administrative and managerial challenges associated with operating separate infrastructures located at the main campus and two remote campuses.
In line with its own transformation plan, to contribute to the development of a knowledge based society in Bahrain and enable human potential through the creation of a state-of-the-art learning environment, the university needed a solution that would help realise their digital future and enable the students to chart their own path to workforce readiness.
To meet this end, the university deployed Dell EMC’s market leading VDI solution, VxRail, Dell Switches and Wyse thin client to accelerate their journey to IT and digital transformation. This set of integrated and automated transformational technology solutions have enabled the university to deploy new virtual machines that intelligently allocates available resources across the IT ecosystem to enable anytime, anywhere remote access to applications, course materials and other critical information securely. This has resulted in an increase in workflow productivity, employee efficiency, enhanced archiving and backup and storage optimisation.
Key benefits
Storage efficiency
With over 70 servers accessed by more than 3,000 internal users, deploying Dell EMC’s VxRail has helped the university optimise application storage by 40%, reduce complexities of a traditional and siloed infrastructure, decrease maintenance costs and provide round the clock availability of mission critical applications.
Increased performance
With the new HCI ecosystem, the university has successfully created a centralised IT environment that facilitates faster, better, and simplified delivery of virtual desktops, business-critical applications and remote office infrastructure.
Enhanced productivity
As collaborative learning and connectivity brings about unprecedented changes in the education sector, with VDI solutions in place, students and faculty can securely access their desktops and applications from their chosen device at all times from within the three library locations located in the UOB campuses.
Accelerated innovation
Since Dell EMC’s HCI solutions are engineered to deliver all the building blocks of IT in a single appliance, they have enabled the university to develop new capabilities, transform and increase its pace of innovation.
Agility
Leveraging a blend of cloud, VDI and HCI solutions has allowed the university to streamline and centralise the management of its IT infrastructure through consolidation and automation in order to better handle rapid data growth, which is expected to grow by 40% in the next 18 months, and improve response time for IT requests from faculty and students.
Sohaib Alabdi, Head of Information Network and Infrastructure Section at University of Bahrain: “Innovation, digitisation and entrepreneurial spirit is important in shaping a nation’s economy. To this purpose, we at University of Bahrain believe that institutional success means driving innovation at every level, embracing advanced technology and ensuring our students are future-ready. Therefore, we were looking for a trusted advisor and have partnered with Dell EMC. Through this partnership, we aim to turn UOB into a future-proof and world-class hub for transformation, enterprise and innovation and chart our path to realise one of the primary objectives of the Bahrain’s Economic Vision 2030 – the creation of a sustainable and knowledge-based economy and society.”
Wael Attiya, Director of Information Technology Center, at University of Bahrain: “Digital transformation is ushering in an era of unprecedented changes in the business landscape. On this note, it is evident that Digital Transformation is not just about technology. It is about driving human progress by empowering learning in ways never imagined before. In light of this, we wanted to invest in building a strong technology-driven learning environment to ensure workforce readiness, which is key to creating a knowledge and innovation-backed economy.”
Samer Diya, Country Manager, Oman & Bahrain at Dell EMC: “University of Bahrain was on the lookout for a solution that helps the institution increase its pace of innovation and offers its students and faculty the best levels of service. Through our industry-leading VDI and HCI solutions, the university has been able to leverage an integrated infrastructure to create a virtual computing environment that is readily flexible and scalable to meet the demands of tomorrow. We are glad to be part of their transformative journey, as they move a step closer in realising their digital future, producing the next generation of skilled professionals in Bahrain and furthering human progress.”
Key takeaways
- The University has optimised application storage by 40% and enhanced data archiving and backup by 60%.
- The University deployed Dell EMC VDI solution, VxRail, Dell Switches, Wyse to accelerate their digital transformation.
- The University has deployed new virtual machines to enable remote access to applications, course materials, critical information securely.
- Resulted in increase in workflow productivity, employee efficiency, enhanced archiving and backup and storage optimisation.
