The Federal University of Viçosa (UFV) is one of the oldest and most prestigious higher education institutions in Brazil. Inaugurated in 1926 as the Higher School of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine (Esav), the institution was federalized, as UFV, in 1969. In addition to its campus located in the city of Viçosa, the University has, since 2006, the UFV-Florestal and UFV- Rio Paranaíba, located in Florestal and Rio Paranaíba, respectively. Operating in three municipalities in the state of Minas Gerais and with more than 20 thousand students enrolled, the UFV ecosystem demands an agile, scalable IT architecture integrated with the latest market applications.
The challenge
The University implemented a data center solution a few years ago. However, the technology deployed began to prove obsolete and ceased to meet the needs of the new digital reality. This scenario overloaded the legacy demands and caused certain performance challenges for UFV's core business, including the application of enrollments and re-enrollments in critical periods such as the beginning of the semester, generating great dissatisfaction on the part of students. In this way, the institution started looking for partners to increase the capacity of its IT architecture.
The solution
After careful studies and measurement of the University's needs, it was proposed to develop a project based on three pillars (Scalability, Performance and Availability) that was easily implemented and allowed for future evolutions. To find the most suitable technology partner, UFV held an electronic auction, from which IT-ONE — one of the largest suppliers and integrators of IT solutions in Brazil and present in the national market since 2002 — emerged victorious and assumed responsibility for the project. . When submitting a proposal with the VMware Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) solution with UPS, IT-ONE was more in line with the institution's expectations, in addition to demonstrating broad capacity for horizontal growth. The implementation of the system also included training and a portfolio of professional services by the integrator.
Customer acquisition benefits
Since the project was implemented, the customer reports that the gains have been extremely positive due to the high availability of the new hardware. Enrollments perform satisfactorily and without friction to the users' journey due to the improvements in its architecture. Another significant advantage is the availability of systems that, even in periods with a high workload and an increase in the number of accesses, such as during the migration to remote teaching due to the COVID-19 pandemic, continued 100% operational, working without interruptions, as well as being faster.
Next steps
The project was developed to meet not only the current architecture, but also a possible growth and scalability for the next 5 years. The high performance and availability of the infrastructure during remote teaching proved to be a positive surprise given that, even with the introduction of new solutions at HCI, support for the digital environment continued.
