Dell Higher Education Solutions: ERP/SunGard Higher Education

As higher education evolves, the challenges it faces evolve as well. Equipping colleges and universities to overcome these challenges is a matter of delivering solutions that offer better access to services, align technology resources with the institutional missions, and maximize the value of institutional data.

SunGard Higher Education provides solutions, strategic consulting, and technology management services to help colleges and universities build, unify, and manage the digital campuses that address these challenges. The Banner^®  Unified Digital Campus, a suite of enterprise-wide administrative applications from SunGard Higher Education, works seamlessly with portal, content management, performance management, and other solutions so that institutions can build their unique vision of a unified digital campus.

A unified digital campus is a combination of applications that create an integrated technology environment to help provide exceptional service to campus constituents and strengthen institutional performance. It facilitates system-wide coordination of an institution’s choice of applications, including SunGard Higher Education solutions, third-party solutions, and homegrown solutions, that are customized to meet the needs of the institution.

As part of Dell’s ongoing efforts to simplify IT for higher education, Dell partnered with SunGard Higher Education to create the Unified Digital Campus Test Center.The UDC Test Center will help accelerate product development and can lower total cost of ownership for colleges and universities. The Dell | SunGard Higher Education partnership in the UDC Test Center was created to offer customers:

Interoperability testing between SunGard Higher Education applications and Dell hardware configurations based on Dell PowerEdgeTM  x86 servers Hardware performance testing on servers for Linux and Windows operating system environments Tested and validated reference architecture configurations upon which to build or expand a unified digital campus Technical artifacts demonstrating performance and sizing in simulated solution environments Tools to evaluate software-hardware solutions before purchase decisions are made

The UDC Test Center moves beyond existing product and performance testing to assess full-scale configurations designed to reflect current IT environments and interoperability challenges facing higher education today.

Dell and SunGard Higher Education are working together to help institutions face these challenges, make smart technology investments, provide the best education experience possible, and lower their total cost of ownership.Download the Dell|SunGard Higher Education brochure to learn more about how this partnership can benefit your college or university. Read the brochure.

Dell|SUNY Banner Proof Of Concept White Paper

The State University of New York (SUNY) Information Technology Exchange Center (ITEC) wanted to demonstrate the power of running SunGard Higher Education’s Banner^®  Unified Digital Campus enterprise resource planning software on Dell servers and storage. To achieve this goal they collaborated with Dell Inc.’s Reference Architecture team in a proof of concept test. Using a database taken from a previous university study, the POC showed that Banner running on Dell^TM  PowerEdge^TM servers and Dell/EMC^®  storage could scale to handle 6.25 Texas Tech-sized databases or a total of 175,000 students. In the largest simulation over 11,000 students simultaneously registered for courses and performed other tasks, with nearly 70,000 courses selected in an hour, 37 times the actual number seen at a SUNY school of 11,000 students. Read the whitepaper.

Dell|SUNY SunGard Summit Presentation

Following the success of last year’s proof of concept, demonstrating the power of Oracle RAC running on Dell servers and storage to handle many large Banner databases, this year SUNY and Dell decided to team up again to explore another Oracle technology: Oracle Virtual Machines. To see how Banner would perform in an Oracle VM environment, Dell and SUNY built out a large Banner implementation (10 database servers and 10 application servers) on Oracle VMs. This SunGard Summit presentation describes the work in progress toward the test of Banner on Oracle VMs.View the full presentation.

Case Study: Texas Tech University System

Dell helps Texas Tech move from independent applications on an inefficient mainframe to integrated SunGard Higher Education Banner Unified Digital Campus. Read the full case study

Dell|Temple University SunGard Summit Presentation

Temple University, in Philadelphia, is in the middle of a large Banner/Luminis rollout for its 35,000 students, 3000 faculty members, and 7000 staff members. When complete the installation will include Financials, HR, Advancement, Financial Aid and Student Registration. For its platform, Temple chose the scalable and cost effective Oracle RAC on Red Hat Linux on Dell servers and storage. This presentation covers the background behind the project, why Temple chose this platform, implementation details, and information on Banner on Dell.View the full presentation. ( 984KB)

Read the UDC Test Center press release from SunGard Higher Education.

SunGard Higher Education Announces New Unified Digital Campus Test Center Using Dell and Sun Microsystems Technologies to Help Accelerate Product Development and Lower Total Cost of Ownership

SunGard Higher Education provides solutions, strategic consulting, and technology management services to help institutions measurably improve performance. Bringing together people, processes, and technology, we work with colleges and universities to help them strengthen performance through improved constituent services, increased accountability, and better educational experiences. More than 1,600 institutions worldwide rely on our broad portfolio of products and services to help them achieve their institutional missions. Visit us at View the full presentation.