"From bare metal to a fully configured system, deployment with Chef only took 15 minutes, instead of weeks or months if we were to build it by hand."
Eric G. Wolfe, Senior Linux Administrator
The Challenge
Marshall University is West Virginia's second largest public university. It employs a modest IT staff to manage all of the institution's computer services including an enterprise resource planner (ERP) system that provides resource scheduling, housing data, grades, university payroll and other services across the university. As the university continued to grow, its infrastructure became more complex with a mix of Linux and Windows machines, virtualized infrastructure, computational research, database and web server systems, the ERP system and a variety of vendor-supplied embedded appliances. Marshall needed a solution to help automate and simplify management of its systems.
The Solution
After evaluating several options, Marshall University decided to take more of a novel approach to managing its infrastructure and selected Opscode's Chef to provide it with significant infrastructure automation, configuration management, speed, IT agility and systems recovery. The deployment dramatically reduced the team's systems management time, allowing them to concentrate on innovating with confidence that its infrastructure was running smoothly.
The Results
- Ability to quickly and easily automate 200 servers.
- Accurate and repeatable configuration and automation.
- Increased agility and reliability to efficiently manage platform configuration.
- Ability to contribute to the Opscode community of developers.
About Marshall University
Marshall University is the oldest, and second largest, public institution of higher learning in West Virginia. Marshall offers 68 baccalaureate programs and 52 graduate programs to approximately 14,000 students, including 4,000 graduate and medical students. Marshall's mission is to provide innovative undergraduate and graduate education that contributes to the development of society and the individual. The university actively facilitates learning through the preservation, discovery, synthesis, and dissemination of knowledge.
Learn more about Marshall UniversityAbout Opscode
Opscode is the leader in cloud infrastructure automation. We help companies of all sizes develop fully automated server infrastructures that scale easily and predictably; can be quickly rebuilt in any environment, and save developers and systems engineers time and money.
Our team is comprised of web infrastructure experts responsible for building and operating some of the world's largest websites and cloud computing platforms. Opscode is headquartered in Seattle, Washington, USA.
