Rowan University and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) have announced a major expansion of their 25-year partnership to supercharge the university’s research capabilities, integrate advanced AI tools into the curriculum, and radically upgrade campus connectivity.
Delivered in collaboration with IT solution provider SHI International, the full-stack infrastructure overhaul establishes a highly resilient technology environment designed to handle massive data sets, complex modeling, and AI-driven workflows.
Ranked among the nation’s top 100 public research institutions, Rowan University has rapidly expanded its research footprint in engineering, healthcare, biomedical sciences, and advanced manufacturing. This growth created an immediate need for scalable compute power and flawless network infrastructure across classrooms, laboratories, and student housing.
Rather than deploying isolated upgrades, SHI worked alongside Rowan’s Information Resources & Technology (IRT) team to align technologies across HPE’s storage, computing, and networking portfolios. The collaboration successfully launched a new colocation data center facility to maximize institutional disaster recovery, while deploying a centralized high-performance computing (HPC) cluster.
The new framework is engineered to eliminate performance bottlenecks for faculty researchers, shortening the timeline from hypothesis to actionable results. Simultaneously, it allows students to gain critical, real-world experience using enterprise-grade supercomputing platforms.
“Rowan University is deeply grateful to HPE and SHI for this extraordinary partnership,” said Rowan University President Ali A. Houshmand. “This initiative will accelerate innovation across disciplines and expand hands-on learning opportunities that help prepare our students to lead in an AI-driven world.”
As part of the modernization effort, Rowan is migrating its entire campus network platform to HPE Aruba Networking. The shift introduces AI-enhanced network operations to improve overall reliability and support seamless connection speeds for students and faculty alike.
“This deployment helps Rowan move faster from ideas to results, giving researchers and students the dependable performance they need for data-intensive work,” Patrick Osborne, senior vice president of Technology Acceleration for Hybrid Cloud at HPE, said. “By bringing together the right mix of infrastructure capabilities, Rowan can support more teams, more projects, and more experiential learning at scale.”
By interacting with the exact same architecture utilized by major tech enterprises globally, Rowan students will be positioned at a distinct advantage in the labor market upon graduation.
“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,” Denise Collison, senior vice president of Public Sector at SHI, said. “Rowan’s researchers and students now have a technology foundation that supports current and future needs.”
