Case Study: Northern Arizona University achieves high-performance, scalable storage and reduced costs with Nexenta (NexentaStor)

Nexenta Delivers Software-Defined Storage Benefits to Support Growth at Northern Arizona University

Northern Arizona University, a public institution serving more than 27,000 students across a Flagstaff main campus and 36 extended sites, was struggling with strained disk capacity and high I/O latency that caused slow user response times during usage spikes. After exhausting tuning options, the IT team found itself repeatedly adding hardware and controllers without fixing performance or scalability.

NAU implemented NexentaStor software-defined storage on its existing Dell infrastructure, using thin provisioning and integration with XenDesktop/XenServer; this avoided a rip-and-replace and enabled dynamic allocation. Results included a better than 93% cache read rate, latency rarely above 10 ms, IOPS spike reductions from ~20,000 to 2–3,000, a 20:1–50:1 reduction in effective storage capacity, improved scalability and reliability, and lower total cost of ownership.

Northern Arizona University

Duane Booher

Software Systems Engineer Senior at NAU.