Energizing Education

“One of the most important reasons why we stay with Dell is because of the relationship we have developed with Dell. Dell wants to know where we are going technologically so they can help us get there."

- Peter Waterman, Senior Manager of Operations Technology, Blackboard Inc., United States

Blackboard needs a highly available, scalable platform for its mission-critical learning management system offered through managed hosting from six global data centers. Ease of set-up and monitoring are of paramount importance.

The company has built a server infrastructure consisting of nearly 2,000 Dell^TM  PowerEdge^TM  blade servers with Intel^®  Xeon^®  processors networked with Dell PowerConnect^TM  switches in Dell blade enclosures.

• Get IT Faster: 8-fold faster installation of blades vs. rack-mount servers (1 hour vs. 1 day)
• Run IT Better: 99.7% availability standard offering; 99.9% availability enhanced offering with database clustering; 90% reduction in cabling compared to rack-mount servers
• Grow IT Smarter: Affordability of Blackboard’s hosted LMS service with Dell x86 servers would not be achieved with proprietary UNIX servers