Case Study: Santa Monica College achieves 100X enrollment throughput and eliminates login storms with SanDisk ioDrive

Santa Monica College Disperses Registration Flash Mob With Flash Memory

Santa Monica College (SMC), a two‑year public college with about 34,000 students across six campuses, was routinely crippled during registration by “flash mob” login storms: thousands of students hitting the system at once to claim newly opened seats, causing severe resource contention and outages that sometimes lasted three to four hours. With class availability reduced by budget cuts and demand spiking, SMC needed a cost‑effective, easy‑to‑implement solution that could support roughly 400–600 logins per second and tens of thousands of enrollments per hour.

SMC installed a single SanDisk Fusion ioMemory ioDrive (GB320) in the database server to cut storage latency and eliminate CPU blocking. Benchmarks and production use showed the server handled thousands of simultaneous logins, delivering roughly 100× more enrollments per minute and about an 80× improvement in simultaneous logins, with installation taking about 30 minutes and yielding an immediate ROI compared with expensive SAN or Oracle RAC alternatives.

Santa Monica College

Lee Johnston

Director of MIS and Co-Chairman of the District, Technology Planning Committee