McNeese State University Achieves Three Times Faster Performance Using NetApp Flash

NetApp All Flash FAS powers all the university’s operations, applications, databases, on-campus teaching, research, and online courses.

 “Some people might say that moving everything to flash storage is overkill, but we don’t see it that way,” said Chad Thibodeaux, CIO at McNeese State University. “We view NetApp All Flash FAS as service delivery insurance. We know the reliability and performance are going to be there for anything we want to deploy.”

 Based in Louisiana, McNeese State University was one of the first schools in the nation to offer a concentration in preparedness and national security. The school delivers innovative, always-on services designed to help students succeed in the 21st-century global economy. McNeese’s use of technology in classrooms and online presence both were growing rapidly and needed a high-performance IT infrastructure to support its new technology initiatives.

McNeese’s critical applications, Ellucian Banner ERP and Document Management and the Moodle online course management system, support not only on-campus teaching, research, and university operations, but also a growing number of online classes. McNeese turned to Transformyx and NetApp® (NASDAQ: NTAP) to move these applications to NetApp® All Flash FAS (AFF).

As a result, McNeese achieved a dramatic performance boost. Productivity and learning applications, as well as, course registration systems can now return nearly instantaneous responses, even during times of heavy usage.

In addition, McNeese has been able to:

• Improve productivity and learning by accelerating performance for critical applications with up to eight times faster backups and up to three times faster performance;
• Support distance-learning initiatives with high-performance online courses;
• Enhance campus safety by providing ample headroom for new I/O-intensive applications, as well as IP video cameras.