Case Study: Drexel University achieves sub-millisecond performance and simplified storage management with Pure Storage

Drexel University Gives Top Honors to High-Performance Solutions from Pure Storage

Drexel University — supporting more than 60,000 end-users across central IT and the College of Medicine with ~1,300 virtualized servers and 3 PB of data — faced aging, underperforming storage that caused VDI latency, routine disk alerts, and the prospect of disruptive “forklift” upgrades, all while small IT teams were already stretched thin.

After a joint evaluation, Drexel deployed Pure Storage FlashArray systems (//m70 and //m50) and adopted the Evergreen Storage model. A PoC and phased vMotion migration produced consistent sub-millisecond latencies (typically 0.3–0.5 ms), eliminated VDI and database performance complaints, provided encryption and global dedupe/compression, enabled nondisruptive upgrades and fast recovery, and greatly simplified storage management for the IT staff.

Drexel University

Paul Keenan

Executive Director of Systems and Security