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IT staff improves operational efficiency so students get real-time data on mobile devices, administrators benefit from paperless systems, and campus becomes greener

SUNNYVALE, Calif. — May 04, 2017 — “With students demanding faster, real-time access to campus resources from mobile devices, we needed a data management solution that would keep pace, speed university operations, and stay within the state budget,” said Ray Quinto, associate director of Computing and Communications Services (CCSV) at California State University, Chico. “After implementing the NetApp all-flash system, we saw a significant increase in operational efficiency, which resulted in happier students and employees, as well as a greener campus.”

California State University, Chico, has come a long way since its inception in 1887 and opening its doors to 90 students as the Chico Normal School in 1889. Today, the university commonly called “Chico State” offers nearly 17,000 students more than 100 undergraduate majors and options. To accelerate operations, as well as keep pace with their student’s burgeoning demand for social media, mobile devices and campus services — while remaining within budget constraints — Chico State implemented NetApp® (NASDAQ: NTAP) All Flash FAS.

The university switched 80% of its servers to the NetApp all-flash array in less than one week. As a result, Chico State accelerated its admissions processing of 35,000 multi-page application documents by 14 to 15 seconds per page, saving as much as 200 business days every year. The administrators also found that they could easily handle the influx of student housing requests during “Black Friday,” processing all 2,000 applications without downtime. Students, meanwhile, can easily access campus resources and collaborate on assignments from any location by using their mobile devices.

With the modernized infrastructure, Chico State IT team members have significantly reduced the time that they spend in test environments. Performance issues caused by the university’s write-intensive workloads have disappeared. The university has also benefited from NetApp support of its Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) environment and has received large electric company rebates for power savings in its virtualized data center.

With its new solution, Chico State can:

• Save up to 200 business days per year of administrator time with faster document processing
• Double the speed of application and transcript request processing by admissions staff
• Patch and reboot servers in seconds instead of minutes