Case Study: Florida Atlantic University achieves 4x lower latency and seamless student registration with NetApp AFF

Using Technology to Improve Registration, Recruiting, and Research

Florida Atlantic University (FAU), a public research university serving 30,000 students, faced performance and availability challenges as demand for video lectures, analytics, and seasonal registration spikes strained its systems. During peak registration weeks the student information system suffered bottlenecks that forced resource reallocation, throttled processes, and degraded the user experience—risking FAU’s ability to recruit top students and faculty and to support research workloads.

FAU modernized its storage with NetApp All Flash FAS and ONTAP, migrating critical VMs and data to SSD/flash with NetApp Professional Services. The upgrade cut average latency from 20 ms to 5 ms and delivered 11,000 IOPS, enabling smooth HD lecture streaming, registration without throttling or suspended analytics, stronger research analytics, and easier cloud data mobility—improving user experience and institutional competitiveness.

Florida Atlantic University

Mehran Basiratmand

Chief Technology Officer