Case Study: The School District of Palm Beach County achieves secure, high-performance access to 4.5PB of student data and 50% faster processing with NetApp AFF

Palm Beach Schools Get an A+ in Managing Student Data

The School District of Palm Beach County — the tenth largest U.S. district serving more than 250,000 students across 200 schools and managing about 4.5 PB of student data — needed a way to consolidate aging, multi‑vendor storage and provide fast, secure, low‑latency access to records for teachers, students, parents, and administrators while meeting backup and compliance SLAs and future‑proofing for cloud.

The district implemented a NetApp AFF cluster with NetApp Volume Encryption, consolidating data from four legacy vendors into a single platform across three data centers. The change cut batch processing time roughly in half (from ~6 hours to 3 hours), improved latency and throughput by 20–30%, ensured encrypted data‑at‑rest for compliance, met backup SLAs, and delivered faster, more reliable access to student information for staff and families.

The School District of Palm Beach County

Joe Zoda

Senior System Engineer