Case Study: Desire2Learn achieves 10x scalability and up to 60% storage savings with NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP (NetApp)

New Lesson Plan for Online Learning Gets High Marks

D2L, a K–12, higher-education, and corporate learning-technology company founded in 1999, faced growing pressure to deliver always-available, engaging online courses as its platform expanded to millions of users and multiple petabytes of data. Running its own colocation facilities strained staff and infrastructure, limiting innovation and creating significant risk around scalability, availability, and data migration.

D2L moved its platform to AWS and adopted NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP to simplify management, improve protection, and increase storage efficiency. Built-in Snapshot, replication, and deduplication cut data-migration time and yielded roughly 20–60% space savings, enabled rapid rollback and disaster recovery without a costly secondary site, and let D2L scale its business up to tenfold while keeping headcount relatively flat so teams can focus on product innovation.

Desire2Learn

Mike Maloney

Vice President of SaaS, Security, and IT