OnRamp Customer Case Study featuring Compass Learning. Written and created by Joshua Berman.

1. Founded: 1969
Headquarters: Austin, TX
Industry: Education Services
Service Type:
Colocation | Managed Hosting
Private Clouds | Hybrid Hosting
Website: compasslearning.com
BUSINESS OVERVIEW
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SECURE | HYBRID | COMPUTING | WWW.ONR.COM | 800.680.1408 | AUSTIN | RALEIGH
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ABOUT ONRAMP
OnRamp provides computing infrastructure
for companies that require high levels of
security and availability. As an SSAE 16 /
AICPA SOC 2 certified, PCI DSS certified,
and HIPAA compliant company, OnRamp
operates multiple enterprise class data
centers where we deploy hybrid solutions
built on cloud-delivered computing capacity,
managed hosting, and colocation services.
We specialize in working with companies to
ensure compliance in the healthcare,
financial services, and other industries with
high security needs.
Building a right-sized IT environment with OnRamp’s Hybrid
Hosting solutions.
Compass Learning is a leading provider of
personalized education technology
solutions for grades K-12, which helps
students achieve success through
differentiated instruction, formative
assessment and response to intervention.
Analyzing learning patterns from insights
built across millions of records, Compass
Learning’s software solutions provide a
customized learning path for students to
navigate. This forms an optimal learning
experience, where a student’s education
is enhanced by strengthening weaknesses
with highly attuned curriculum.
Partnering with educators from over
10,000 schools across the United States,
Compass Learning ensures that students
achieve record academic results with
learning acceleration software which
combines a rigorous instructional
approach and actionable data with
engaging digital content.
Data gathering and analytics is at the root
of Compass Learning’s ability to provide
their customized learning acceleration
software. However, as the company
expanded their suite of software and
service solutions and their user base
soared, their ability to perform these tasks
became hindered. Compass Learning had
outgrown its colocation environment, both
in terms of physical equipment and
bandwidth allocations, and sought the
help of a data center provider to support
their business for new phases of growth.
With heavily animated, graphics-based
interfaces, Compass Learning was in
search of a provider that could deliver the
high levels of bandwidth needed to
support its applications, but went beyond
just power, ping and environment. The
company was in search of a partner with
expertise in offering a variety of data
center services, and one that would back
them with around-the-clock, hands-on
support. Although Compass Learning
employed an in-house staff of IT...
“Before working with OnRamp, our IT
environment could only accommodate
5,000 student-users. Today, we are
able to routinely serve 65,000
concurrent users with reliable access
to our suite of services.These
untethered performance capabilities
have enabled our business to make
greater strides in the education sector
while furthering our growth and
success as a business.
”
IT CHALLENGE
- Joe Hayden, Director of IT
OnRamp Customer Case Study
Compass Learning

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- Joe Hayden, Director of IT
Learn more about Compass Learning’s
relationship with OnRamp. Click here
to watch the testimonial video!
“The technical expertise and capabilities of OnRamp’s engineers
played perfectly to the strengths of my team.”
Compass Learning required greater
agility as they continued their rapid
growth trajectory. The decision to house
their IT infrastructure with OnRamp, was
largely due to the data center provider’s
ability to blend colocation with cloud
delivered services as part of a hybrid
hosting solution backed by Full7Layer
Support from OnRamp’s onsite team of
engineers.
Deployed from the redundant, reliable
and secure infrastructure of OnRamp’s
enterprise-class data center facilities,
OnRamp’s hybrid hosting solutions
combine colocation, secure private
clouds and cloud-delivered services
which include managed backups,
managed devices, managed storage and
managed security services. The ability to
mix and match multiple data center
services offers a level of customization
that is unlike any other provider. And,
with around-the-clock, Full7Layer
Support from onsite engineers, capable
of assisting customers all the way
through the application layer, OnRamp
helps customers build, deploy and
maintain their IT infrastructure both in
and outside the rack.
Compass Learning initially sought the
help of OnRamp’s technical team to
right-size their existing colocation
environment leveraging virtualization and
EMC SAN storage to create a hybrid
computing solution. OnRamp has also
served as an extension of Compass
Learning’s in-house IT staff by providing
hands-on support as well as advanced
intelligence and monitoring solutions to
help Compass Learning strategically and
flexibly scale their hosted environment in
response to the company’s growth.
“The technical expertise and capabilities
of OnRamp’s engineers played perfectly
to the strengths of my team,” stated
Compass Learning’s Director of IT Joe
Hayden. “It was clear, early on, that
OnRamp understood performance, not
just in terms of capacity, but also in
regard to inputs and outputs while
providing their technical
recommendations. Where my team was
limited in experience with load balancing
and high-speed data storage, OnRamp
excelled. Through their guidance they
were able to help us build a fully
redundant, dedicated environment to
maintain our customer-facing servers –
which are the lifeblood of our
organization.”
Hayden went on to state that, “before
working with OnRamp, our IT
environment could only accommodate
5,000 student-users. Today, we are able
to routinely serve 65,000 concurrent
users with reliable access to our suite of
services. These untethered performance
capabilities have enabled our business to
make greater strides in the education
sector while furthering our growth and
success as a business.”
Compass Learning's hybrid hosting
environment, housed within OnRamp's
state-of-the-art data center facilities,
provides greater control over the growth of
their IT operations to support the
functionality of their software solutions.
Integrating OnRamp's private cloud and
cloud delivered services with Compass
Learning's existing colocation environment
has allowed the company to leverage the
economic and scalability benefits of
virtualization and cloud computing while
enhancing their environment to improve
performance and prepare for future
success.
"Hybrid hosting empowers businesses with
the ability to weigh the importance of
scalability, security and cost, to choose
the appropriate technology to meet their IT
needs," stated OnRamp Founder Chad
Kissinger. "The ability to build upon a
business' legacy IT equipment alleviates
the requirement of being bound by prior IT
decisions and opens the doors to an
enhanced computing environment capable
of supporting a business’ data center
mission."
SOLUTION
BENEFITS
professionals, the company needed
guidance on a number of topics related to
virtualization, improved data storage
methodologies and load balancing for
their production environments.