Case Study: University of British Columbia becomes a private cloud service provider, reclaims 2PB and cuts storage management time 75% with NetApp

University of British Columbia - Customer Case Study

The University of British Columbia (UBC), a large public research university with over 50,000 students, faced rising data growth (around 50% annually) and operational strain from a decentralized IT model—8PB of data spread across 12 independently managed storage islands—while business-critical services like Blackboard required near-continuous availability. The university needed to centralize storage and become a cloud service provider to improve efficiency, standardize operations, and meet performance and availability requirements.

UBC built a private cloud using NetApp clustered Data ONTAP integrated with VMware, consolidated storage, and virtualized workloads. The deployment enabled nondisruptive operations and QoS controls, reclaimed more than 2PB of capacity through deduplication, reduced storage management time by 75%, met performance needs with 60% less hardware, and migrated 1,000+ VMs (about 70% of workloads and 40% of data) into a reliable, centrally protected service model—freeing IT to focus on strategic initiatives.

University of British Columbia

Brent Dunington

Systems Architect