In 1873, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt endowed millions of dollars to create a university that he envisioned would strengthen "the ties that should exist between all sections of our common country." Today the internationally recognized research university in Nashville, Tennessee carries out his vision by forging strong relationships between the university's 10 schools, neighboring institutions, and the community. Vanderbilt University is also forging strong relationships for internal efficiency by consolidating the IT infrastructures used by its colleges and distinguished medical center.

Most universities that run teaching hospitals operate separate systems for each institution, but Vanderbilt has opted for running as a single enterprise. An assessment by Mainstay Partners, an independent consulting firm, documented significant financial and strategic benefits from Vanderbilt's investment in Oracle technology, notably $1.788 million in benefits over five years. Mainstay found that consolidating the two systems onto a shared, standardized infrastructure has eliminated costs of maintaining multiple systems and disparate platforms. In addition, by moving from their old systems to Oracle Database with Real Application Clusters on Linux, Vanderbilt was able to deliver a higher quality of service for less cost. Vanderbilt's Oracle enterprise grid computing environment consolidated the data warehouse environments for the university and medical center. The solution includes Oracle Application Server and Oracle Real Application Clusters, configured on 2 HP ProLiant DL580 servers and Red Hat Linux. The solution is managed using Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control. Tim Getsay, assistant vice chancellor of management information systems at Vanderbilt University said the deployment took less time than anticipated, because "moving from Oracle9 i to 10g was a very straightforward process, and adding capacity on-demand with 10g is much easier."