Modestly peopled information technology teams are facing growing demands from their organizations for advanced performance. How do they deliver modern applications and all-around excellence with hands-on deck steadily disappearing? One way might be through hyperconverged infrastructure that takes up less space physically and requires less manual tinkering.

“We basically have to do more with less every year like most IT departments,” said Jason O’Brien (pictured, right), director of information technology at Boston Architectural College.

O’Brien and Carl Jaspersohn (pictured, left), systems administrator at Boston Architectural College, spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the WTG Transform event in Boston, Massachusetts. They discussed virtualization, all-flash storage, and IT consolidation. (* Disclosure below.)

Dedupe makes all-flash doable

Boston Architectural College teaches interior and traditional architecture, as well as landscape. Various technologies the school offers students — such as 3D printing — started as experiments; once students got hooked, they started demanding them as full-time tools. This put a strain on the IT department to deliver all that students and faculty desired to facilitate learning without busting its budget.

The team decided to clear out its server room, move to a collocation facility, and shift its data and workloads to Dell EMC’s VxRail HCI appliances. It chose VxRail over competitors for its consolidation, management and price benefits, according to O’Brien.

Originally, an all-flash hyperconverged system seemed beyond the college’s means. When investigation revealed that VxRail’s all-flash storage featured in-line deduplication and compression, it began to look feasible, according to O’Brien. The college has actually seen a slight reduction in raw storage since moving to VxRail, but the percentage it consumes is far less than before.

Managing resources has become much easier since making the move. “VxRail Manager — it’s kind of a stupid easy interface,” Jaspersohn said. HCI gives the team greater flexibility to expand and add new nodes as needed, he added.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the WTG Transform event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for WTG Transform. Neither Winslow Technology Group LLC, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE