Case Study: University of New Mexico achieves instant VM availability and improved performance with NetApp SolidFire Element Software

University of New Mexico Computer Sciences Gives NetApp SolidFire an A+ in Helping Students

The University of New Mexico, a flagship research institution serving nearly 30,000 students with about 1,500 in the computer science program, was struggling with an IT infrastructure that couldn’t keep up with frequent course refreshes and heavy research workloads. The Computer Science department needed secure, isolated, and highly scalable storage to give students and faculty fast, reliable access to coursework and to support mass virtual machine provisioning for classes and projects.

After a one-week deployment of NetApp SolidFire Element Software (with refreshed NetApp ONTAP on FAS systems), the department achieved immediate VM availability—spinning up hundreds (up to 700) of VMs at once—about 90% deduplication, improved performance and efficiency, and significant space savings. The solution has run without incident, simplified management through an intuitive UI, and enabled rapid, on-demand storage and cluster provisioning for research and teaching.

University of New Mexico

Rudy Martinez

Senior System Support Analyst