Innovating the Educational Experience

When IT leaders at Perdoceo Education made the decision to adopt a cloud-first strategy, they didn’t hesitate to involve Pure Storage, a trusted partner since 2015. The Pure Storage platform powers highly reliable and performant systems that enable students to access classes and other services to help them prepare for academic success.

From undergraduate and graduate degree programs to coding bootcamps, and continuing medical instruction, Perdoceo Education Corporation’s accredited academic institutions deliver quality education to more than 40,000 learners—primarily online.

Perdoceo’s learning management system (LMS), Virtual Campus, serves as the foundation for its faculty and student experience. But it’s just one of the many digital touchpoints that extend across the student lifecycle. A Unified Enrollment System (UES) enables students to register for classes, while the Campus Vue application helps them manage their schedules, monitor the status of their financial aid, and check their grades.  

“The quality of education we provide rests literally on the backbone of our technology,” says Dalbir Singh, Director of IT Infrastructure Services at Perdoceo. “Our IT systems must perform well at all times. There simply is no other option.”

To achieve this, Perdoceo relies on modern data technologies, including the latest cloud capabilities. To eliminate the resource demands and expense of managing three physical data centers, Perdoceo moved its disaster recovery capabilities to Microsoft Azure with Pure Storage Cloud Block Store as a step in its strategy to migrate fully to the cloud by the end of 2026. 

“Cloud Block Store gives us the best of both worlds: a modern, flexible, and affordable storage solution that brings the best of Pure Storage expertise to the Azure cloud,” says Singh.  

Following a three-month proof of concept, Perdoceo deployed Cloud Block Store, delivered via a cost-effective subscription model, to asynchronously replicate data from its production environment to the cloud. 

Efficiency is a significant benefit of the solution. For example, to test code updates for bug fixes, developers need access to the latest production data. “Prior to Pure Storage, restoring databases used to take eight hours,” says Kuok Woo Bago, Lead Database Administrator at Perdoceo. “Now, it takes five minutes.” This is 99% faster than before and means developers can push fixes straight into production without burdening the infrastructure team.   

A data reduction rate of up to 12:1 and the elimination of one physical data centre for disaster recovery adds to overall efficiencies, saving Perdoceo approximately 40% in total cost of ownership. Cloud Block Store also delivers the same strong security features available in Perdoceo's on-premises Pure Storage arrays, including built-in SOC compliance encryption to secure sensitive personally identifiable information (PII).

The initial decision to invest in Pure Storage FlashArray™ paved the way for the adoption of Cloud Block Store. By replacing legacy disk storage with all-flash arrays, Perdoceo boosted the overall performance of mission-critical systems and applications such as the LMS, UES, and Campus Vue, even as it grows.

Today, the Pure Storage platform supports the entire organisation. A VMware virtualised environment and all Microsoft SQL Servers run on Pure Storage FlashArray//X. This data, ranging from student records to back-end office information, is replicated to the cloud for disaster recovery via Cloud Block Store.

“More students means more data,” says Steve Stover, Infrastructure Solutions Architect at Perdoceo. “Instead of being a bottleneck, our systems run faster than ever on the Pure Storage platform.”

Indeed, FlashArray drives sub millisecond performance for a stellar student experience, which includes everything from smooth enrollment to accessing classes to uploading assignments without delay. It also powers more than 69 million database queries daily. Developers can provision a database in seconds. Applications load five times faster than before. And data loaded into the data warehouse is now available 50% faster, helping to drive business intelligence around the student lifecycle.

The Pure1 interface gives Perdoceo visibility and a common, intuitive interface into the entire hybrid cloud environment. With the ease of migrating to the cloud with Cloud Block Store and non-disruptive upgrades of on-premises arrays with Pure Storage Evergreen//Forever, Perdoceo simplified storage management significantly.

As Perdoceo continues to execute against its cloud strategy, the next step is to augment the use of Cloud Block Store as it continues to move more of its mission critical applications to Azure.

“Pure enabled us to up our game while expanding our business,” says Singh. “We are confident that we have the right technology in place to support student success.”