Finding Value in Service to Students and Communities

When DePaul University’s storage platform reached end-of-life, the IT team saw an opportunity to evaluate the market. The Pure Storage platform supports all university activities, from administration and research to classroom activities, helping nurture students into well-rounded members of the community.

Service is the guiding value behind DePaul University’s mission. As the largest Catholic university in the United States, DePaul aims to produce graduates who are known for both their academic accomplishments and for how they contribute to their communities. 

Technology plays a role in everything that happens at the university, from everyday administration to cutting-edge research. With a solid infrastructure, the IT team can have a big impact on how the university achieves its mission.

So when the legacy storage platform reached end-of-life, the IT team took the opportunity to evaluate the data storage and management market. They were not afraid of changing the status quo if a better option was available.

“We wanted an all-flash environment from Pure Storage but thought it might be out of our budget,” says Ryan Johnston, Associate Director of Infrastructure at DePaul University. “The Pure Storage platform had options that balanced performance and cost-efficiency, giving us the best of both worlds.”

Johnston and his team migrated from 66U of legacy storage to just 3U of Pure Storage FlashArray//C, a 95% reduction in rack space. The smaller footprint dramatically lowers power consumption and cooling costs while still achieving higher performance. The legacy storage environment frequently clocked in at read times of 20 milliseconds. After migrating to the Pure Storage platform, those times were more than four times faster, no matter what demanding backups or ETL jobs were running in the background.

Almost all university systems and services run on the nearly 1,000 virtual machines that use the Pure Storage platform. That includes the student information system, AI research, teaching simulations, Oracle and SQL servers, VMware, Microsoft Exchange, and PeopleSoft. It also supports two Elasticsearch instances running in VMware, one for the student information system and PeopleSoft, and the other for long-term retention of CrowdStrike data for analysis and investigation.

“We were amazed by how much power we could get from Pure Storage, in such a small footprint,” says Adnan Wali, Lead Windows and Virtualization Engineer. “It allows us to support high-demand applications that our researchers, faculty, staff, or students need.”

The Pure Storage platform also brings greater value through its ease of maintenance. The Evergreen® storage architecture and subscription model eliminates the need for forklift upgrades, as well as the cost, effort, and system disruptions needed to pull them off. 

“We save about three hours of planning for all software and firmware upgrades, which is time that our small team can put back into improving our services,” says Johnston.

Pure1 simplifies management with a streamlined interface that provides a clear view of the entire environment. Managers can even check performance while at meetings or walking around campus using the mobile app.

“Pure Storage VM Analytics allows us to optimize our VM environment in real-time—we can drill down to the VM level to find and diagnose latency or any other issues before they start to affect users,” says Wali.

Security is paramount for DePaul University. The university uses the Pure Storage platform in two data centers, with data replicated across both environments and backups saved in a third offsite location for robust disaster recovery. The DePaul IT team reduced recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) from six hours to just one hour by taking advantage of fast snapshots. SafeMode™ Snapshots add another layer of protection from ransomware. 

“Having immutable and indelible snapshots built into Pure Storage was a big plus for us,” says Johnston. “There’s even less worry about downtime and data loss, which is critical for our researchers.”

By migrating to the Pure Storage platform, Johnston, Wali, and their team at DePaul University now have a stable platform ready for everything the university does to serve its students, faculty, and communities around the world, now and in the future.

“Working with the Pure Storage platform allows us to guarantee critical university workloads,” says Johnston. “It ensures our infrastructure is ready for innovation and improves how we serve the university and our communities.”