Western Oregon University Improves Student, Faculty Experience

Western Oregon University (WOU), founded in 1856, provides effective, technology-powered learning opportunities.

It was an early adopter of VDI, providing close to 5,000 undergraduate and more than 600 graduate students with easy access to applications from multiple campus computer labs.

“When it comes to technology, leading universities must deliver unsurpassed learning capabilities, such as engaging video lectures and online courses that extend beyond the classroom,” said Bill Kernan, CIO, WOU. “For IT, that means we constantly strive to raise the bar to meet technology requirements. NetApp flash storage has allowed us to reach a capacity of more than 1,200 concurrent users while providing exceptional system performance campus-wide. People think of storage as being totally behind the scenes, but at WOU, it’s front and center in defining the user experience.“

One of the more popular applications, e-learning system Moodle, allows professors to enhance classwork with an online capability that incorporates video, quizzes, and other content into their courses. Hundreds of students sought to log on to Moodle every week, and performance sagged. The university knew it needed a solution to address storage capacity, speed and downtime issues.

Teaming with NetApp, Inc. and partner Mountain States Networking, WOU moved its high-input/output applications and databases to a NetApp EF-Series flash array. The array maximizes up-time with redundancy and automated failover. With flash storage, WOU benefits from the performance, reliability and availability needed to drive greater speed and responsiveness.

With its new solution, WOU can:

• Handle 10 times the number of concurrent users of its media-rich applications, in 95% less processing time, to deliver user experience that helps the university remain competitive.
• Run business intelligence reports for its administrative staff in 20 seconds, instead of six hours, delivering insights in near real time into the state of its operations.
• Reduce backup time from over an hour to just nine minutes – with no downtime – providing the assurance for students and staff that their key content is safeguarded.