The connected campus can have a number of benefits for colleges and universities, ranging from improved security to enhanced collaboration — and, of course, it can create a competitive edge in student and faculty recruitment. But to enable effective end-user solutions, institutions must first invest in the networking and data center infrastructure necessary to power them.

Colleges and universities looking to provide students and faculty with a robust connected-campus experience should explore the following infrastructure solutions and practices.

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is the fastest-growing category in data center infrastructure. The reasons for this are clear: This technology eliminates silos, simplifies management and enables scalability — three benefits that organizations need to support their digital transformation initiatives.

Data centers have changed quite a bit since pizza boxes reigned supreme. We replaced those servers with virtualization, reducing our physical footprint and utilizing more of the CPUs and memory. Next came the idea of fully tested systems in the form of converged infrastructure: making sure different components of compute, storage and networking worked well…

Often, I hear people talk about hyperconverged infrastructure as though it’s still an emerging, almost experimental solution. But the reality is that many organizations have deployed hyperconvergence — which combines storage, computing and networking into a single system — for years. As these organizations have learned, HCI can have a significant impact on their IT…

When I work with customers on data center refreshes, the most successful projects are those that include executives and line-of-business stakeholders in the planning process. This isn’t because the residents of the executive suite or the sales department know more about technology than the IT shop — far from it. Rather, when everyone comes together…

A number of us at CDW had the opportunity to attend Nutanix .NEXT 2019 in Anaheim last week. The attendance was great, the announcements were exciting, and we think it was one of the best Nutanix events yet. One of the best parts of the show was seeing our CDW engineering team members having their…