Case Study: Western Oregon University achieves high-performance, scalable online learning and near-real-time reporting with NetApp EF-Series flash storage

Western Oregon University - Customer Case Study

Western Oregon University (WOU), a public university serving about 6,000 students, faced growing performance problems as faculty adopted video-rich courses, Moodle, and virtual desktops. Large streaming files and heavy concurrent access strained storage, causing slow logins, delayed virtual desktops (up to a minute), limited concurrent users, and business intelligence reports that could take hours to run.

WOU migrated its high I/O workloads — including Moodle, MySQL and Oracle databases, IBM Cognos BI, and VMware virtual desktops — to a NetApp EF550 flash array deployed with Mountain States Networking. The result: dramatically faster, more reliable service (supporting more than 1,200 concurrent users, a fivefold increase), virtual desktops loading at least twice as fast, BI reports reduced from six hours to about 20 seconds, backups cut to nine minutes, and sustained zero downtime.

Western Oregon University

Bill Kernan

CIO