How does a large university handle the digital transformation? The University of Arkansas boasts about 27,000 students and 5,000 faculty, and it has been embracing the digital transformation over the past few years, tackling challenges like educational virtual desktop infrastructure deployment and diverse student backgrounds and technology capabilities head on.

“Like any [information technology] organization, it’s a challenge to do more with less,” said Stephen Herzig (pictured, left), director of enterprise systems at the University of Arkansas. “We’re constantly being required to support more systems, more technology — and technology is becoming more and more an integral part of the educational process.”

Herzig and Andrew McDaniel (pictured, right), chief technology officer and senior director of enterprise solutions at Dell EMC, spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host John Troyer (@jtroyer), chief reckoner at TechReckoning, at the Dell Technologies World event in Las Vegas. They discussed the challenges University of Arkansas has faced and the technological innovations it has discovered. (* Disclosure below.)

Making VDI deployment easier than ever

A huge challenge for the University was to adapt VDI to a variety of students with differing technology capabilities. “We’re a very small IT team, and as those things grew, we knew we had to find a way to reduce the number of resources that were supporting all the end points,” Herzig said. “All the machines in the labs, all the machines on faculty and staff desks, and … the students bring their own devices, which we had to support as well.”

The University of Arkansas had to find a good solution, and it chose to partner with Dell EMC — specifically Ready Solutions at Dell EMC, which works with partners to put together solutions for VDI. “From a hardware perspective … one of the challenges we frequently had in VDI was poor user experience,” McDaniel said. “And as you know, if you can’t deliver a good user experience, the project is dead before it even starts.”

Ready Solutions at Dell EMC created a bundle called VDI Complete, which combines everything someone needs for VDI employment. “What that basically does is, it gives the customer confidence that everything that has been tested can be owned, from a support perspective, by Dell Technologies,” McDaniel said. “So if you’ve got a problem, we’re not going to hand you off to another company to go solve that issue … or lay blame with somebody else. It’s fully our stack, and as a result, we take full responsibility for it.”

This was incredibly important to the University of Arkansas, according to Herzig. “As we look to the future, and we want to expand and grow our environment, VDI Complete will be a huge help,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Technologies World 2018 event. (* Disclosure: Dell EMC sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell EMC nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE