In The Arena by TechArena - How Rose-Hulman Modernized Its Data Center for Student Success

Episode Date: January 27, 2026

Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology shares how Azure Local, AVD, and GPU-powered infrastructure are transforming IT operations and enabling device-agnostic access to high-performance engineering software.

Welcome to Tech Arena, featuring authentic discussions between tech's leading innovators and our host, Allison Klein. Now, let's step into the arena. Welcome in the arena. My name is Allison Klein, and this is a Data Insights episode, which means I'm here with Janice Norowski from Solidime. Welcome to the program, Janice. Hi, thank you, Allison. Thank you for having me back. So we are heading into the end of the year, but before, we close on the year, we have this fantastic interview lined up. Why don't you tell me who you brought with you and what we're talking about today? Yes, always excited. We never bring a dull moment to this

program. Today we're going to be speaking with Justin Baker. Justin is the head administrator and lead at the Rose Holman Institute. And we're excited just to learn how Rose Holman does some things a little bit differently with AI. And Justin, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. So Justin, why don't we just get started with an introduction of Rose Holman. This is the first time anyone for Rose Holman has been on the show. And a little bit about your role and how it fits in with the broader charter of the organization. Yeah. So my name is Justin Baker.

I'm the systems administrator lead here at Rose Holman. My job is essentially sort of leading a team of our system administrators for infrastructure, a lot of the software, and we manage the servers that run our, student information systems, our ERP, a lot of our license managers that cut us up. And then also we are in charge of our M365 tenant. So we're the Microsoft admins as well. And then we handle all of the server infrastructure for the MAKAS. Nice.

Nice. Justin, you know, Rose Holman has an incredible reputation for helping students and those students land meaningful careers. But from your perspective in IT, how do you? does technology and infrastructure really kind of support that mission? Yeah. So our goal really is to remove barriers essentially so that the students talk to worry about what tools, where to get these tools. We provide the infrastructure that allows them to just, this is when my class needs. I just log in, I do the things that my class needs. And I don't have to think about all these other pieces

that might possibly go wrong or might have a configuration issues and stuff like. that just to provide the platform essentially for them to get a learning done. Now, I know we're going to be talking about a new implementation that your team just delivered, but let's set context first. Before your latest upgrade, what challenges were you facing with your previous systems? A lot of it revolves around the speed at which we were able to do any sort of maintenance. If something went down, how long it would take to bring something back up. If something new were coming in, it would take older hardware was a lot slower to get back up and running or to get something new stood up. So we faced a lot of challenges

being able to meet demand of, hey, we have this new software that utilized manager stood up for. It takes a long more to get that stood up versus what we would have liked to be able to do in terms of the speed of adjusting to new systems. And as you kind of look for ways to solve those challenges, why was upgrading your infrastructure such an important piece of the solution? A lot of it relies on how well the infrastructure runs, essentially. We had older, disparate systems,

sometimes pieced together, pulled together from older things, not really the latest and greatest in terms of what the hardware can provide. And so upgrading there makes the most sets in terms of being able to get that speed and that ease of use and then also converging on certain platforms

allows us to take out some of the extra pieces of consolidating and making fewer points of failure, fewer points to look at when we're trying to improve performance. What led you to the decision to partner with data on and use solid MSSTs as part of that foundation for your new environment? A big part of our partnership with data on is the tech stack that they support, it's not just, here's the hardware we have. Good luck getting whatever you want on it.

We are primarily a Microsoft shop here that Rose. The vast majority of our servers are Windows server. That is kind of where our expertise is. So when we're looking for something, we're small enough free that we don't want to have to reinvent or re-architect what we know, how we know how to do things. We want to bring things into what we're sort of specialized in. And the data on works very closely with Microsoft and their solutions are very tight together in terms of getting something that we have some sort of experience in, but then also they bring experience to it of not only the hardware that drives through us, but also the Microsoft solution on top of that. Got it. You know, Justin, as you guys have been testing Azure local with Azure virtual desktop, often

known as AVD in conjunction with Nvidia L4GPUs, you kind of walk us through what that setup looks like and what you're hoping to really accomplish with it. Yeah, so right now we have just a small cluster for our testing purposes to try to see what we can do with it. We have Azure level running on that small cluster right now,

currently providing some of the larger, more performative apps that the students might use for their courses. And our thought behind it is it provides a way where they don't have to worry so much about what device they have, where the labs are, stuff like that. They can bring a device, connect to that application, and run it from basically anything because we're providing the infrastructure for that through Azure Local to run those pieces of software. You know, if you find you do a technology deployment like this, performance is always going to be a focus. What kind of some improvements have you seen since moving into this new setup? in terms of performance and things that come to might are things like maintenance windows,

server spin-up time and deployment speed. Can you talk about that? Yeah. The biggest improvements we've seen is in terms of our maintenance windows, and now we do that. We schedule maintenance to happen outside of class hours. So we would usually typically start 515 and we'd run until midnight, one, two in the morning, potentially depending on how long everything took.

Since upgrading our main clusters, that time is shortened to we are, typically out of here by seven, maybe eight o'clock and completely done with everything, which is a huge help. We try to be as non-disruptive as possible, even with having these maintenance windows, because we don't want these systems that they need to use to be down for long periods of time. So that shortened those maintenance windows a lot. And then also in terms of deploying new servers, there's a lot less wait time of, okay, I've kicked off our template creation.

Now I'm just sitting here waiting for. hour, two hours, and it's maybe 10, 15 minutes, and we got something new stood up. We can get things going right away. So how does that performance also translate to things in the classroom, especially for engineering tools like SolidWorks, Ancest and like other CAD software that really depends on high performance VDI solutions? It actually allows us to not only provide a better place for them to get these, but also if there is some sort of issue, standing something new up in place is sometimes a better option even than spending the 20, 30 minutes to sometimes troubleshoot something. You can restan something up, get them going, and then go back and look at

what maybe the issue was. So we have a lot less downtime in terms of, hey, the software isn't working because our license manager died. Give me five minutes. I'll have a new one set up and running licensed correctly and then we'll look at what the issue was and be able to solve it non-intrusively on the back end. Now, obviously, performance is a huge boost, but I guess a question that I have is, how else has the team changed in terms of managing this environment, from anything from software updates to supporting users day to day? Has this represented kind of an organizational shift for you? Yes, it allows us to do a lot more of maintenance or tuning during the day than we used to, we would have to wait for these windows essentially to be able to do something

at a larger scale. Whereas now with how quickly something's work is we can instead do these things without being disruptive during the day anymore. So we don't have to always wait for some sort of maintenance window to make a larger scale change that will have a bigger impact. So Rose Holman runs, you know, critical systems from student records to HR and department data. How has this new infrastructure really helped you deliver on overall reliability and reduce even downtime across campus? So it's helped because one of the biggest benefits is we're able to run more with less. So we can focus a little bit more on the types of things that allow us to add that reliability or backup or something like that to our environment versus having to front load most of the infrastructure to just be able to run. everything, you can now allocate more infrastructure to ensuring site reliability, sort of

disaster recovery stuff to make sure that we're protected if something were to go wrong. And then we've actually been very happy with the infrastructure. As I said, we're a small team. So a lot of our stuff is we like to get it stood up, let it run, and not have to think about it. And that's what we've seen a lot with while working with Tudan. Now, you've accomplished a lot with this data on solution. My question goes to what's up next for you guys and are you targeting anything else in terms of new innovation? The biggest thing that we're targeting is essentially just expanding this and looking at the way we handle providing software for our students. Because the main way they get it currently is we have them purchase a laptop when they come. It has to be a certain amount of power because they run these apps on it.

And we have used AVD in the cloud. And that works. We've got a pretty good buy-in for that. But there are limitations with that in terms of speed and performance and costs there that we can try to set load into running them on data centers in our Azure Local. So Azure Local is a big part of what we're looking at moving towards to be able to provide a better infrastructure for allowing the students to run these applications without having to worry about, do I have the right device?

Did I bring my right device? Do I have to make time to go down to this lab? to get this coursework done, stuff like that. So Justin, this has been a fantastic interview. I'm sure our listeners are eager to learn more about the solutions you've discussed today and stay up to date on Rose-Fleman's advancements and really how you're using technology to help your students thrive. Where should they go for more information and learn more about Rose Fulman?

The best place to get information on Rose-Hulman will probably just be in the main campus website, at www.rose-Holman.com. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for being on the show today. And Janice, thanks so much for another episode of Data Insights. This was really terrific. Thank you. Justin, it was a pleasure to have you, and we look forward to having you on the episode.

Once again, thank you so much. Thanks for joining Tech Arena. Subscribe and engage at our website, Techorina.aI. All content is copyright by Techorena. Thank you.