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Rowan University, HPE Partner on New Learning Initiative

  • By Matt Jones
  • 05/28/26

Key Takeaways

  • HPE, alongside SHI International, is expanding its long-standing partnership with Rowan University to modernize the university’s IT infrastructure, enabling faster research, stronger resiliency, and improved campus-wide connectivity.
  • The upgraded environment will provide students and researchers with hands-on access to enterprise-grade AI, supercomputing, storage, and networking technologies to support advanced research and workforce readiness.
  • Rowan’s new HPE-powered infrastructure—including high-performance computing, AI-ready storage, and enhanced networking—is designed to accelerate data-intensive research workflows while improving reliability and scalability across the university.

Rowan University in Glassboro, N.J., recently announced that it has expanded its partnership with enterprise technology provider HPE to improve research capabilities and hands-on learning opportunities, according to a news release. The new learning initiative was delivered in partnership with technology solution provider SHI International, and the goal is to enhance the university technology environment’s performance and resilience to enable growth.

SHI worked with Rowan’s Information Resources & Technology (IRT) team to create a colocation facility with a new data center, which will bolster resiliency in case of a disaster. The project “align[s] solutions across HPE’s networking, compute, storage, data center networking and HPC portfolios, and provid[es] warehousing and deployment services,” according to the news release, and resulted in two data centers and a high-performance computing cluster.

The upgrade will allow faculty and researchers to work more quickly with large data sets, advanced analytics, and complex models. It will give students hands-on experience will supercomputing systems, enterprise platforms, and AI tools used throughout academic work, research assistant appointments, class projects, and internships.

"Universities demand more from their IT environments than ever before, from supporting research at supercomputing scale to giving students hands-on experience with the same enterprise tools they'll use after graduation," said Denise Collison, SHI’s senior vice president of Public Sector. "We have built an environment that works as one system, not a collection of separate upgrades. Rowan's researchers and students now have a technology foundation that supports current and future needs."

Rowan’s implementation of HPE’s solution features the following components to expand its capacity and improve service levels:

  • HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000 and HPE Zerto Software, which support data availability and recovery
  • HPE ProLiant DL385 Gen11 GPU and HPE Synergy 480 Gen12, which support teaching, research, and shared services
  • HPE high-performance storage, which supports large-scale analytics and modeling
  • HPE Aruba Networking, which strengthens campus connectivity

About the Author

Matt Jones is senior editor of Spaces4Learning. He can be reached at [email protected].

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