Case Study: City University of Hong Kong achieves 80% TCO savings and modernized, highly available storage with NetApp

Cost-savings and flexibility for a new era of growth at City University of Hong Kong

City University of Hong Kong (CityU), a growing research-led university with 10 schools, ~10,000 students and numerous research centers, needed to refurbish its data center to free space for new wet labs. Its legacy environment had five separate storage systems that created costly, inefficient silos, long backup windows, complex operations, and rising staffing and maintenance burdens for mission‑critical services like student systems, HR and finance.

CityU consolidated SAN/NAS workloads onto NetApp FAS hybrid‑flash systems with ONTAP and MetroCluster in an Active‑Active, two‑data‑center configuration (plus an additional FAS for real‑time backup/archiving). The new platform simplified management, enabled real‑time automated backups and nondisruptive Oracle migrations, and delivered major savings—about an 80% reduction in TCO and a 75% reduction in physical space—while providing scalable, cloud‑ready capacity for future growth.

City University of Hong Kong

Manfred Chan

Senior Manager of Computing Services Centre