Case Study: Southeast Technical Institute achieves 8-to-1 data reduction and sub‑millisecond VDI performance with Pure Storage FlashArray FA-320

College Enables BYOD With Pure Storage

Southeast Technical Institute (STI), South Dakota’s largest post‑secondary technical school, needed a way to deliver expensive, program‑specific software to as many as 2,000 students without laboriously reimaging loaner laptops each semester or forcing students to pay high licensing fees. The IT team saw VDI as the answer but faced a major hurdle: their existing storage was too slow for the large, random I/O load of hundreds to thousands of virtual desktops, and they had to solve it within a fixed budget.

STI migrated roughly 2 TB of VMware View 5.1 virtual desktops onto a Pure Storage FlashArray FA‑320, achieving an 8:1 data reduction (from 2.1 TB to 248 GB) and consistent sub‑millisecond read/write latency under sustained load. The FlashArray handled up to 6× the IOPS of the prior disk array (which showed ~20 ms latency for 50 desktops), enabling pilot VDI deployments now and plans to scale to as many as 2,000 virtual desktops while keeping performance and cost under control.

Southeast Technical Institute

Erik VanLaecken

CIO, Southeast Technical Institute