Case Study: Cal Poly achieves scalable, cost-effective storage and better performance with Zadara Storage

Cal Poly Replaces NetApp with Zadara, Delivers Better Storage Experience

Cal Poly (California Polytechnic State University) faced a seven-year-old NetApp array that was running into warranty expiry, I/O storms, performance and management problems, and a five-year budget lock that prevented CapEx refreshes. Wanting to offer IT as a Service (ITaaS) and self-service storage to departments, Cal Poly evaluated over 20 vendors and chose Zadara Storage’s Virtual Private Storage Array (VPSA) enterprise storage-as-a-service.

Zadara Storage deployed VPSA on-premises as a pure OpEx, storage-as-a-service solution, providing performance isolation to eliminate the “noisy neighbor” I/O issues, near-instant scalability, and self-service provisioning. As a result, Cal Poly gained predictable capacity and responsiveness, implemented departmental charge-back, removed the 3–5 year refresh cycle, stayed within OpEx budgets, and is now planning cross-site replication and expanded use of Zadara.

Cal Poly

Tim Schmidt

Director of Infrastructure & Platform Services