University of Minnesota

Passing the test for infrastructure consistency is easy when you have the Cliff Notes.
The University of Minnesota supports the tech needs of 20,000 students with five IT admins. Hosted Chef helps ensure configuration management isn't on their to-do list.

The Challenge

The College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota encompasses hundreds of faculty, thousands of staff and over 15,000 students. The IT staff supports more than 300 servers and 200TB of storage powering sophisticated web-based research applications, mission-critical student tools, compute clusters, and more - with only five system administrators who need to ensure that servers are continually configured, monitored and managed. This monumental task could only be accomplished with an intelligent automation solution capable of streamlining configuration management and creating a scalable model for continued growth.

The Solution

The University of Minnesota's College of Liberal Arts deployed Hosted Chef™ across its VMware-based virtualized infrastructure to automate configuration and environment management and ensure resource consistency for student-facing applications. With Hosted Chef, the university now has a robust infrastructure automation engine that makes it easy for the College's IT team to easily configure, replicate and provision servers or even entire environments. By deploying Hosted Chef, the College can now manage its infrastructure with a few simple lines of code, eliminating the risk of human error and enabling scale to more than 400 servers by the end of the year.

The Results

  • Enable model of reuse for continued growth, including an additional 100 servers in 2012.
  • Eliminate risk of human error in resource configuration management, ensuring a highly consistent and reliable infrastructure for student-facing applications.
  • Improve team communication, planning and strategy with accurate resource monitoring and usage data.
"Hosted Chef has made it easy to configure once, then replicate many times over, saving us significant amounts of time." Kemal Badur, Research Computing and Engineering Coordinator, College of Liberal Arts, University if Minnesota

One of the nation's largest schools, the University of Minnesota offers baccalaureate, master's, and doctoral degrees in virtually every field - from medicine to business, law to liberal arts, and science and engineering to architecture.

Learn more about University of Minnesota

About Opscode

Opscode is the provider of Chef, the automation platform for the coded business. Opscode Chef provides the speed, flexibility, and efficiency to compete in the digital economy. By modeling IT infrastructure and application delivery as code, Chef empowers businesses of all sizes to easily scale to meet demand, eliminate down time, manage complexity, and accelerate time to market.