Case Study: Colorado College achieves reliable, high-performance storage and simplified management with Pure Storage

Colorado College’s Commitment to Imagination Extends to Modern Storage from Pure Storage

Colorado College, a small liberal arts school that runs nearly all campus functions on Ellucian Banner and about 300 VMware virtual servers, faced repeated SAN drive failures that regularly crashed its virtual infrastructure and disrupted critical services. The legacy storage also required constant hands-on management, creating unacceptable downtime for a college that uses an intensive Block Plan and has little tolerance for outages.

After testing vendors, the college deployed a Pure Storage all‑flash array, migrating workloads with vMotion and taking advantage of straightforward management, nondisruptive Evergreen upgrades and Pure1 mobile monitoring. The result: rock‑solid reliability with no more infrastructure‑wide crashes, much faster performance (nightly data‑warehouse refreshes cut from over 12 hours to under six), near‑instant database clones for developers, average data reduction of about 7:1 (up to 10:1 for VDI), and dramatically reduced storage management so IT can focus on higher‑priority initiatives.

Colorado College

Andrew Watson

Senior Systems Administrator