The college, which has 49,000 students and 2,000 employees, has nearly completed the rollout of a server and storage consolidation project that will eventually replace scores of servers with a new mainframe and two blade systems.

Though not yet complete, the US$1.6 million project has already allowed the school to reallocate its 60-person IT staff and cut data backups from 24 hours to just five hours.

Late last year, the school began the effort to replace a high-end IBM H50 mainframe, 70 Dell Intel-based servers and other hardware platforms with IBM BladeCenter blades running EMC Corp.'s VMware virtualization software and a zSeries 890 server, according to Tony Parziale, CIO at the community college.

Since the project began, Parziale has cut $30,000 in monthly H50 proprietary software licensing costs. The new zSeries offering runs five Linux partitions that consolidate the college's financial, human resources and facilities management applications, as well as its entire student registration and tuition system.

Parziale has also replaced an IBM Enterprise Storage Server, or Shark, array with a midrange DS6800 TotalStorage array running IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC), which aggregates data from multiple disk systems into a 10TB data pool. Connected to the SAN, IBM BladeCenter runs Tivoli backup software to back up data in five hours.