Case Study: Colorado Department of Education achieves faster, more reliable IT performance and 4:1 data reduction with Pure Storage FlashStack

FlashStack Infrastructure Gets Straight A's from Colorado Dept of Education

The Colorado Department of Education supports 178 school districts statewide, serving 56,000 teachers and 2,800 administrators and handling roughly 8,500 daily user sessions. The department struggled with inadequate infrastructure—particularly storage performance—that slowed key applications (like Cognos), faced aging systems nearing end-of-life, and had previously purchased flash storage that failed to meet promised data-reduction targets.

CDE implemented a FlashStack converged infrastructure (Cisco UCS and Nexus, VMware vSphere/Horizon, and a Pure Storage FlashArray//m20), which sped VM provisioning, stabilized services, and greatly simplified management for public web servers, VDI, SQL, Exchange, and BI. The Pure array delivered a 4:1 data reduction (freeing data-center space), more capacity at lower cost than the prior vendor, non-disruptive Evergreen upgrades, unified monitoring, and reduced infrastructure management time while providing a predictable, cost-effective growth path.

Colorado Department of Education

Steve Berryman

Infrastructure Manager