Case Study: Northern Arizona University achieves 10× performance boost and eliminates login bottlenecks with SanDisk Optimus Ultra SSDs

Sandisk And Nexenta®: Elevating Academic Success At Northern Arizona University

Northern Arizona University (NAU), a public university serving ~28,000 students across 13 locations, was struggling with poor performance in its virtualized student labs: HDD arrays couldn’t handle peak I/O (20k–30k IOPS), causing login/application times to spike from ~5 seconds to 30–40 seconds and generating frequent student complaints. ITS needed a cost‑effective, high‑performance storage approach to eliminate bottlenecks and restore productivity.

NAU deployed NexentaStor software‑defined storage with SanDisk Optimus Ultra SAS SSDs (used for ZIL/write‑ahead logging and cache) on two clustered Dell servers and moved lab images to thin‑provisioned NFS. The change delivered dramatic improvements — roughly 10x better IOPS and latency, read cache hit rates near 90%, HDD I/O reduced to a few thousand IOPS, login times returned to normal, user complaints dropped to essentially zero, and significant storage consolidation (up to 20:1 in some workflows, ~1.7:1 for Windows images) with reliable production operation.

Northern Arizona University

Duane Booher

Software Systems Engineer Senior at NAU.