Enhanced Iowa University Cost Efficiency with All-Flash Storage for Educational Institutions

As a dynamic, mission-focused university, it must deliver a wide variety of applications to support its many course offerings. These include word processing, graphics, database, and spreadsheet systems, which faculty and students use to generate data every day. Additionally, administrators rely on managerial applications and a student information system for tracking the student body, all of which produced more data. Much of the data created on campus needs to be saved to support student work, research, and organizational and executive functions.

To meet its storage needs, this university had relied on four Dell EqualLogic PS hybrid storage systems at its on-campus data center, but they had aged over the years and were no longer as effective as they once were. The school needed a more contemporary replacement, but as a small university, its IT budget limited what it could spend on new systems.

Moreover, maintains a disaster-recovery site an hour away in the same city. There, the university relied on three Dell PS6210 arrays to store data replicated from the legacy storage systems. These solutions, which had been introduced years earlier, were also showing their age.

“We wanted to archive data for at least seven years, but the Dell PS6210 devices lacked the necessary capacity,” said the IT director. “As with our primary storage platforms in our data center, our budget was limited. We required systems that had the performance and scalability to keep pace with our data needs, but they also had to be economical to buy and own.”