Case Study: University at Albany – SUNY achieves faster, more resilient private cloud and improved application performance with NetApp

A New Foundation for Enriched Learning Experiences

The University at Albany (SUNY), a major research and education institution serving more than 17,000 students, needed to improve IT agility and efficiency under budget constraints. Campus leaders sought higher availability and better performance for mission‑critical systems—Blackboard Learn, Oracle PeopleSoft, business‑intelligence and big‑data initiatives, document imaging, and campus video—so they could support more online classes and growing research needs.

UAlbany built a LEED Silver data center and private cloud on a FlexPod architecture (NetApp and Cisco) with full redundancy, Flash Cache, and NetApp SnapMirror/SnapVault disaster recovery. The move cut PeopleSoft response times from several seconds (and occasional 40‑second outliers) to about 1 second, halved provisioning times for services, delivered fast VM/data recovery (RPO ~10 minutes), expanded capacity for online courses and big‑data work, and positioned the university to provide cloud services to other SUNY campuses for the next 10–15 years.

University at Albany-SUNY

Jeanne Weber

Director of Enterprise Infrastructure Services