Case Study: Southern California Institute of Architecture achieves agile, scalable IT and 80% faster backups with Dell Technologies

With an aging IT infrastructure and data storage growing 20 percent annually, Southern California Institute of Architecture needed a more flexible way to respond to university requirements

Southern California Institute of Architecture faced an aging IT environment and more than 20% annual data growth that left it unable to support new virtual machines or services. The school partnered with Dell Technologies, deploying Dell EMC VxRail along with Dell EMC Data Protection Suite, Cloud Disaster Recovery, Data Domain and VMware vSphere/vSAN to modernize its data center and meet growing storage and performance needs.

Dell Technologies implemented a four-node VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure and migrated about 40 VMs, allowing SCI-Arc to retire 90% of its physical servers, achieve 10‑second ERP reboots (down from 5 minutes), and realize roughly 80% faster backups with 90% of servers backed up in under an hour. The solution delivers non‑disruptive scaling, improved reliability and management simplicity—95% of the IT environment now runs on VxRail, enabling the institute to quickly deliver services and accommodate future growth.

Southern California Institute of Architecture

Victor Jabrassian

Chief Information Officer