Northern Arizona University Customer of Nexenta

Nexenta Systems, Inc. announced the deployment and case study for Northern Arizona University (NAU).

With a main campus in Flagstaff, NAU accommodates more than 20,000 students, with an additional 7,000 students enrolled in NAU’s 36 extended campuses throughout the state of Arizona. Originally founded in 1899, NAU offers 87 bachelor degree programs, 48 master’s degree programs and 10 doctoral degree programs, along with 38 undergraduate and 26 graduate certificates.

Duane Booher, software systems engineer senior, and Tobias Kreidl, academic team lead are part of NAU’s centralized IT Services (ITS) department. As NAU’s academic computing virtualization needs grew, the strain on storage capacity began to manifest itself campus-wide in a variety of ways; one issue was slow user response times due to high I/O latency. The NAU ITS team had already exhausted various tuning options, with little improvement. They also experienced high IO/s during usage spikes that saturated the capabilities of the existing storage array. Furthermore, disk storage capacity was running out; hence the desire to look for a solution that also supported thin provisioning. NexentaStor provided that means, especially when NAU became convinced via testing that NFS performance could equal that of iSCSI in their environment.

“It was a vicious cycle,” said Booher. “We kept adding more storage at more cost where the controllers were already having a hard time keeping up, but it felt more like triage than a real solution. We needed to change the way we thought about storage in order to break out of this cycle.“

Beginning with performance, NAU students and staff no longer have to worry about unacceptably slow computers. Thin clients, thick clients and VMs now have faster performance because of the new storage infrastructure.

According to Kreidl, “We now have better than a 93% cache read rate, we very rarely see latency above 10ms – a speed that’s practically unprecedented here, and this type of performance is consistent even as usage spikes throughout the academic calendar. Our team used to sweat out the traffic spikes around class registration, but that issue is now behind us.“

“We are very excited to be able to work with Northern AZ University and help them transition from a legacy storage implementation to an SDS solution that provides them with better performance for students, faculty and school administrators,” according to Tarkan Maner, chairman and CEO, Nexenta. “The scalability of their technology infrastructure is now far more flexible and modular, with the ability to dynamically allocate and re-allocate assets without worrying about performance or storage implications.“

Case study