Chapman Unversity Improved Student Access to App and Data

Chapman University, a private, not-for-profit university located in the heart of Orange County, CA, is transforming its distinctive academic and student experience with Pure Storage, Inc.

Since installing all-flash arrays from Pure Storage, students, faculty and staff have faster access to the data and applications they use regularly, software development teams complete their work more quickly, and database administrators spend less time on storage management.

Chapman requires next-generation storage to optimize performance and value. The university decided to upgrade its tier-1 storage, which supports Oracle’s PeopleSoft ERP applications and a BlackBoard Analytics data-warehouse, as well as Microsoft and Oracle databases. The legacy environment presented several challenges – primarily labor-intensive management and a cumbersome process for the creation of cloned databases and delivery to development teams.

Chapman University’s IT team installed and set up the Pure Storage arrays in an hour, a sharp contrast to the days or sometimes even weeks required for legacy systems. In addition, Pure’s Evergreen storage model ensures continued value and convenience with automatic, non-disruptive upgrades.

“The promise of the Evergreen program is that there is no disruption and zero dollars wasted on every-three-year ‘forklift’ upgrades. The fact that seamless upgrades are built in as part of Evergreen is a big benefit,” said James Kelly, SAN administrator and Oracle database administrator (DBA), Chapman University.

With Pure Storage, Chapman expects to cut the time needed for routine storage functions by up to 95%, and in the early stages, has seen maintenance time reduction in existing database and storage operations. The solution’s data reduction rates allow automated and unlimited cloning of databases with virtually no impact on storage capacity. The university can clone a database in a few hours rather than a full business day or more, and expects to reduce host cloning time to 30 minutes or less once it completes its automation project.

“FlashArray delivers several important benefits to our University. FlashArray is a powerful and resilient solution that has accelerated our ability to deliver new and better services to our constantly-changing campus community. The solution holds out the promise of scale, as needed, without disruption, and lets us count on the speed and reliability of flash for our diverse, critical workloads. And, the purchase and implementation processes were transparent and seamless,” said Kelly.

Automation Fast Forward
Chapman has accelerated virtualization of its production database servers thanks to the performance of Pure Storage. Virtualization, in turn, is moving the universiity toward another important goal – automation that reduces software development time and improves team productivity.

The APIs between Pure and other environments – such as VMware and Cisco UCS servers – simplify system management and advance the automation process. Chapman is also benefiting from the Pure arrays de-duplication and compression features.

“At the beginning, we weren’t certain we could put all of our production databases on the Pure arrays,” Kelly said. “But we just kept adding more and more data until we reached the point that everything we had was on Pure – and it was still only at one-third of capacity. We have an overall data-reduction ratio of 5.2:1, even better than promised. Pure’s deduplication functions are ideal for our database environment.“