Helping Students Transform Their Place in the World

A NASA Space-Grant college, New Mexico State University (NMSU) delivers world-class academic experiences to its students. Technology plays a pivotal role in those experiences, so when its legacy storage began to lag in performance, it was time to modernize. Selecting Pure Storage FlashArray//C, the university boosted performance, reduced complexity, and cut costs. The modern data storage platform powers learning labs, counseling services, and enhanced student experiences.

As a NASA Space-Grant College and home to the first Honors College in New Mexico, New Mexico State University (NMSU) is a world-class academic institution. It has also been a fixture of New Mexico’s community since 1888, now serving a multicultural student body across four campuses, a satellite learning center in Albuquerque, and 12 agricultural research and science centers.

For many students, it is a stepping stone to success. “We pride ourselves on empowering students across New Mexico to transform the world they live in,” says Director of IT Systems Administration, Allen Purcell, himself an NMSU alumnus. “My job is to choose the best technologies to support them in their journey.”

With the university’s complex legacy storage lagging in performance, operating in silos, and eating up hours of systems administrators’ time, Purcell and his team knew it was time for a change. On the advice of trusted partner Mainline Information Systems, they selected Pure Storage FlashArray//C to replace NMSU’s spinning disk storage.

“We designed our storage system with a high level of complexity, which was necessary to ensure its reliability given the limitations of the tools we had access to when we built it. Just onboarding someone to work in the environment was a Herculean task,” says Omar Valtierrez, Lead Systems Developer. “Pure replaced that complexity with the speed of flash and the user-friendliness of a platform solution.”

As NMSU’s unified storage platform, Pure Storage FlashArray™ accelerates operations in the VMware Horizon VDI environment that powers its learning labs and counseling services.

Reliable remote access was a lifesaver for students during the COVID-19 pandemic, when they couldn’t attend labs on-campus, ensuring they could access course work from anywhere.

Pure also underpins NMSU’s mission critical Ellucian Banner ERP system, which runs over 55,000 writes daily. ERP latency has since dropped 98%, from 200 milliseconds to three milliseconds.

“It used to take up to three minutes for our virtual servers to reboot, which feels like an eternity for students who need to access important materials and services,” says Valtierrez. “That’s come down to just a few seconds since our move to Pure.”

The Pure Storage Evergreen//Forever subscription model also eliminates hours of storage management tasks and cuts costs.

Instead of paying for new hardware every year, Purcell’s team can simply and non-disruptively upgrade their controllers via their Evergreen™ subscription, essentially getting a brand-new array while protecting their original investment.

Routine management tasks are also completed in a fraction of the time. For example, migrating virtual machines used to take eight hours. Now, it takes just 15 minutes. NMSU also expects to cut over 100 hours from each storage upgrade by eliminating disruptive forklift processes.

“As a non-profit institution, the fact that Pure reduced our yearly storage costs by 66% was the ultimate difference maker,” says Valtierrez. “Combine that with no more forklift upgrades and we knew we found the right solution.”

NMSU also reduced its data center footprint 14-fold—from 42U to 3U in one site—and 12-fold, from 38U to 3U in the other. In addition to reducing its costs and power consumption, these efficiency gains enable NMSU to easily relocate a secondary data center that is scheduled to be demolished.

Through a unified management pane, Pure1 makes it easy for NMSU to pinpoint and troubleshoot performance issues at the source. In parallel, NMSU created mirrored volumes of its virtual machines on FlashArray to deliver uninterrupted services to students, even during power outages.

With academic institutions under increasing threat of ransomware, Purcell and his team were adamant about protecting sensitive staff, student, and other data from attacks. To that end, NMSU enhanced its security with Pure SafeMode™ Snapshots and set itself up for rapid recovery with FlashArray snapshots.

“We continue to innovate and drive better experiences for students each day,” says Purcell. “We are better positioned to do that with the performance and peace of mind we get with Pure.”