West Virginia Network Provides Superior IT Support to Colleges and Universities Despite Small Staff, High-Volume Workload
 
 

West Virginia Network Provides Superior IT Support to Colleges and Universities Despite Small Staff, High-Volume Workload

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West Virginia Network (WVNET) is a dynamic service organization providing telecommunications and computing services within West Virginia. WVNET was created in 1975 to provide central computing facilities and wide-area network communications linking its “central site” computing resources in Morgantown with the campus computing systems at most of the colleges and universities throughout the state. The organization has since grown to provide services for K-12 schools, government, and nonprofit agencies.

WVNET provides application and database support for many of the states’ public colleges, universities, and technical colleges. The organization hosts 11 of the schools’ databases―encompassing test, preproduction, and production environments―and supports eight other schools remotely. In addition, it supports databases for the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources (DHHR) and operates its own in-house databases. Two years ago, the state’s two-year technical schools separated from the four-year schools with which they were previously associated—adding to the number of technology systems requiring support. At the same time, WVNET’s staff had shrunk, from about 75 to 46 employees. WVNET needed excellent support to ensure it could continue to provide superior service to its constituent organizations. The organization relies on Oracle Premier Support to help monitor systems, apply critical patches, and accelerate issue resolution—keeping key systems up and running for students, faculty, and staff statewide.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from West Virginia Network

  • “Oracle Support gives us the definitive answers we require to provide our schools with the IT support they need to more effectively serve their students, faculty, and staff. We could not operate at the rate we have, with our heavy workload and small staff, without Oracle Premier Support.” – Denise Gwinn, Lead Database Administrator, West Virginia Network

  • Deploy a centralized monitoring tool tied to all databases that enables the organization to more easily monitor all internal databases, as well as those it runs for West Virginia colleges and universities, and the DHHR
  • Ease migration of Oracle systems from OpenVMS to AIX/Linux
  • Rectify system performance or availability issues more quickly to ensure that critical education systems stay up and running at all times

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Relied on Oracle Premier Support to work through challenges experienced when moving Oracle Databases—for numerous admissions, registration, financial aid, administrative, and learning management systems, including Blackboard—from OpenVMS to AIX/Linux operating systems
  • Used Oracle Configuration Manager across 33 hosted database instances and approximately 20 remote databases, attaching configuration data to all service requests and reducing the time needed to submit service requests by half
  • Identified critical patches and automated patch downloads
  • Used Oracle Premier Support to help absorb decreases in headcount, enabling WVNET to maintain its pace with just 46 employees
  • Learned about new product capabilities through Oracle Support and shared best practices among supported schools
  • Worked with Oracle Support in the case of a system failure to get critical systems back up and running within an hour, enabling students, faculty, and staff statewide to access the information they need at any time