Continuing Partnership
ICCU gifts ISU College of Technology $450,000 worth of tech equipment
The holidays came early for the Idaho State University College of Technology in the form of information technology equipment valued at about $450,000 that was given to ISU Information Technology Systems program by Idaho Central Credit Union (ICCU) in mid-November.
“This equipment will benefit multitudes of students for many years to come,” said Scott Rasmussen, dean of the ISU College of Technology. “Donations like this allow us to train students on state-of-the-art equipment that will prepare them to go to work on like equipment when they graduate. This is of great benefit to industry as well as students.”
The gift includes all the equipment from two ICCU data centers including CISCO network equipment, switches, routers, and firewalls. It also includes a massive amount of network disk storage and Dell servers.
The network disk storage and Dell servers will be purposed by the ISU ITS program to host virtualized environments for the current Linux and Windows desktop and server classes, said John Baker, instructor in ISU information technology programs. In addition, next fall, ISU will be adding new VMware virtualization classes and these too will benefit from the new hardware.
“All of the equipment that we’ve donated, all of it was being used to run Idaho Central 100 percent six months ago,” said Mark Willden, ICCU chief information officer. “With over 380,000 members and 1,300 employees we were dependent upon that equipment and it did a nice job for us. We just had an opportunity to go to this brand-new data center and we wanted the latest technology.”
ICCU could have sold the equipment, but wanted to strengthen its relationship with ISU.
“We love ISU,” Willden said. “A lot of our employees have graduated from ISU, and we have a number of employees going to ISU right now. It is our desire and our wish to see Idaho Central be a great partner with ISU and we want to see ISU be very successful.”
“The other part of it is,” he continued, “we want to take ISU graduates and make them part of the Idaho Central family and use them for jobs in IT.”
Emily Frandsen
