Case Study: McNeese State University achieves rapid disaster recovery and improved preparedness with NetApp

McNeese State University Boosts Disaster Preparedness with NetApp and VMware

McNeese State University, a public institution in Lake Charles with about 9,000 students, faced severe disruption after Hurricane Rita damaged campus facilities and knocked out power for weeks. Lacking an offsite disaster-recovery site and still dependent on tape backups and many physical servers, the university needed a more resilient, cost-effective way to protect its mission-critical systems and ensure continuity during future hurricanes.

McNeese partnered with CDW and NetApp to deploy NetApp FAS3210 and FAS2040 storage with Data ONTAP, SnapMirror replication to an offsite Louisiana Tech data center, and tight integration with VMware for server virtualization and automated recovery. The solution established daily offsite replication, reduced physical servers from 30 to 5, cut recovery times from hours to minutes, lowered RPOs and backup costs, and gave the IT team a tested, scalable disaster-recovery capability to keep university operations running during disasters.

McNeese State University

Chad Thibodeaux

Chief Information Officer