Case Study: University of Pisa achieves 5x faster data processing with Dell Technologies

University of Pisa - Customer Case Study

The University of Pisa, a historic institution serving nearly 50,000 students and 3,000 staff across 20 departments, needed to modernize its IT to meet growing demands for remote learning, research and mission‑critical administrative services. To address latency, reliability and scalability shortfalls, the university partnered with Dell Technologies and deployed storage and virtualization solutions including Dell EMC PowerMax, PowerStore, PowerScale and VMware vSphere.

Dell Technologies delivered an end‑to‑end NVMe architecture—PowerMax arrays in active‑active SRDF/Metro pairs for mission‑critical apps, PowerStore for scientific block storage, PowerScale for all‑flash NAS and VMware vSphere for virtualization and VDI—plus support for distributed Oracle databases and AI/HPC workloads. The upgrade produced measurable gains: applications run up to 5x faster, about an 80% performance boost on key workloads (notably databases), no downtime or data loss, and scalable, reliable support for teaching, research and future data growth.

University of Pisa

Maurizio Davini

Chief Technology Officer