Case Study: City University London achieves high-performance, scalable storage for growth with NetApp

City University London - Customer Case Study

City University London, a 160‑year‑old institution with about 17,000 students, needed a modern storage platform to support a five‑year £200M growth plan focused on research, campus expansion and higher rankings. Facing capacity limits, the university required scalable, highly available storage across two sites to underpin its VMware virtualisation, improve disaster recovery, and avoid disruptive, costly upgrades.

City University replaced its legacy arrays with a NetApp FAS8040 clustered Data ONTAP solution delivered by Daisy, using SnapMirror for replication, VMware vCenter integration, and Flash Pool hybrid SSD/SAS tiering. The storage‑as‑a‑service model and NetApp efficiencies delivered predictable opex, nondisruptive scalability, significant performance gains (including faster user logins), and reduced effective capacity needs (about 25% overall savings, up to 50% for virtualised OS), positioning the university to expand research and services reliably.

City University London

Russell Best

Infrastructure Operations Manager