Smart Business at The Wharton School

Did you know that The Wharton School at the Univ of Pennsylvania was the world's first collegiate business school – founded in 1881? I didn't – not the first time that's happened.

They've just opened a new data center – replacing IBM BladeCenter gear with PowerEdge M600 blades and Dell EqualLogic PS5000X storage arrays.

Their goals were to run a Linux cluster (for research) with the blades and expand mailbox quotas for students and faculty – from 300MB to 1GB.

Interesting notes:

  • Wharton Computing IT professionals were able to unload and set up one of the Dell M1000e blade enclosures in four hours, compared with a 24-hour process using the previous hardware. Wharton's Joe Cruz blogged about it.  "the new hotness" – love that.
  • The Dell enclosure was delivered in one box, replacing technology that previously arrived in about 60 boxes, a reduction of approximately 45 cubic feet of packaging material. With that in mind – check out this video.
  • They've also implemented PowerEdge R900 servers that are providing a small hardware footprint and intended to deliver stronger performance than the previous generation of servers, with the goal of quintupling the computing power per node in Wharton’s Microsoft® Exchange 2007 environment.

According to Dan Alig, senior IT director of Wharton Computing. “Dell blade servers and Dell EqualLogic storage will allow us to do more with less and manage our budget as effectively as we manage our technology resources.”

That's good business. And I don't even have an MBA – yet…

About the Author: David Graves