New Mexico State University Leverages Pure Storage

Pure Storage, Inc. announced that New Mexico State University (NMSU), New Mexico’s land-grant institution and a research university, is leveraging its platform to drive learning and teaching experiences for its 25,000+ student, faculty, and staff member population.

Customer Challenge
NMSU, a renowned academic institution serving as a NASA Space-Grant College and home to the first Honors College in New Mexico, serves a diverse student body across 4 campuses, a satellite learning center in Albuquerque, NM, and 12 agricultural research and science centers. The university has quickly become a vital stepping stone to success for countless students.

To further its commitment to delivering student services, NMSU recognized the need to modernize its IT environment due to lagging performance, siloed operations, and excessive administrative hours consumed by its complex legacy storage. By replacing its outdated spinning disk storage with Pure Storage’s all-flash portfolio, it can shift its focus to ushering in a new era of efficiency and performance for its community.

Customer Impact:
Adopting Pure Storage’s portfolio, it gained a powerful and secure enterprise storage platform that underpins services for every student, faculty, and staff member.

 Benefits experienced with Pure Storage include: 

• Streamlined Storage Management with Non-Disruptive Upgrades: With a Pure Storage Evergreen//Forever subscription, university can perform non-disruptive upgrades without buying new hardware each year, reducing annual costs by 66%. Tasks like VM migration, once taking 8h, only require 15mn. Anticipating over 100 hours saved per storage upgrade, disruptive forklift processes are completely eliminated.
• Improved Data Center Footprint: End user reduced its data center footprint 14-fold (from 42U to 3U) in one data center site and 12-fold (from 38U to 3U) in the other. In addition to reducing its costs and power consumption, these efficiency gains enable universoty to relocate a secondary data center that is scheduled to be demolished.
• Reliable Storage Platform: Pure Storage’s platform powers NMSU’s VDI, ensuring reliable and efficient operations for learning labs and counseling services (particularly for remote learning amid Covid-19). Additionally, Pure Storage supports NMSU’s mission-critical ERP system, reducing latency by 98% to 3ms with over 55,000 daily writes.
• Enhanced Ransomware Protection: In response to the rising menace of ransomware targeting academic institutions, university prioritized safeguarding sensitive data. To fortify security measures, the orgnization implemented SafeMode Snapshots, ensuring enhanced protection and positioning the institution for swift recovery in the event of an attack.

“As a non-profit institution, Pure Storage’s ability to reduce our annual storage costs was the ultimate differentiator for the storage platforms we were evaluating. Combined with non-disruptive upgrades, secure, reliable infrastructure, and an improved data center footprint, we knew we found the right solution. At NMSU, we continue to innovate and drive better experiences for students each day, and we are better positioned to do so with the performance and peace of mind we get with Pure,” said Omar Valtierrez, lead systems developer, NMSU.

Case Study: Helping Students Transform Their Place in the World.