Case Study: California State University, Chico achieves instant student services and rapid server provisioning with NetApp All Flash FAS

Serving Students Faster with All Flash FAS

California State University, Chico — a campus of about 17,000 students — faced growing demands for instant, reliable access to campus services amid tight state budgets. Peak events like April housing registration, slow spinning-disk storage, long server-provisioning times, and minute-plus login response lags were causing dropped connections, slow admissions processing, and heavy staff workload.

By deploying the NetApp All Flash FAS (AFF8060) and consolidating virtualization, Chico State cut response times from about 1–1.5 minutes to seconds, handled all 2,000 housing registrations with no drops, and reduced server provisioning from weeks to roughly one day. The switch doubled admissions processing speed, saved an estimated 100–200 business days per year, enabled seconds‑long patch/reboots, migrated 80% of servers in under a week, and produced notable power‑usage rebates.

California State University, Chico

Ray Quinto

Associate Director of Computing and Communications Services