Skip to Content

Mississippi Community College Board Adopts FlashStack Solution For Critical Enrollment Applications

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. ā€” September 21, 2017 ā€” Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG), the leading independent all-flash data platform vendor for the cloud era, today announced the Mississippi Community College Board (MCCB) has adopted a FlashStackā„¢ solution, joint offering from Cisco Systems and Pure Storage, to host its most critical enrollment applications.

ā€œOur mission is to promote the future of Mississippi by providing a skilled workforce, and to do that we need a solid foundation of technology,ā€ said Dr. Andrea Mayfield, Executive Director, MCCB. ā€œWith Cisco and Pure Storage as valuable partners and FlashStack at the core of operations, we have significantly enhanced our data-centre infrastructure, reduced cost and drastically improved the enrollment experience for more than 70,000 students.ā€

The MCCB provides centralized IT services for its 15 community colleges and acts as an Internet service provider for those campuses. The IT team develops and deploys key applications such as student enrollment, and collects data across the system in response to legislative requests. FlashStack combines the latest in compute, network and storage into a single, integrated architecture. Based on Cisco Validated Designs and joint reference architectures, these pre-tested configurations speed time to deployment, lower overall IT costs and reduce deployment risk.

The impact has been seen most notably in the process of registering students for classes, using the online Enrollment Tool. ā€œThe first week of registration is when the system runs its hardest,ā€ said Ray Smith, Assistant Executive Director for Technology with MCCB. ā€œWe historically would always have points where the system was running so slow that students and administrators couldnā€™t access it. So, one of our prime objectives was to improve the speed of this application.ā€

After migrating the Enrollment Tool to the FlashStack infrastructure, Smith observed, ā€œWe have seen much faster performance, which is a benefit to the students and a big relief to us.ā€

ā€œPure Storage is focused on delivering simplicity, efficiency and performance to MCCB, so they can exceed their studentsā€™ expectations and ensure that their education is not disrupted by slow applications or downtime,ā€ said Gary Newgaard, VP of Public Sector, Pure Storage. ā€œPure is ideal for organisations that want the flexibility to scale over time while also reducing the cost of power, cooling and space.ā€

The new IT infrastructure also has allowed the MCCB to implement the Mississippi Virtual Community College (MSVCC), whereby students can enroll in a class from any of the 15 colleges. Previously, students could only take classes at colleges designated to the district in which they resided. Smithā€™s office took advantage of the added processing power and storage resources afforded by FlashStack to develop an application that allows cross-district enrollment.

 

The MCCB made the decision to deploy their FlashStack infrastructure upon the recommendation of its system-integration partner, Venture Technologies, and purchased two FlashStack configurations ā€“ an all-new one for its main data centre, and another for its disaster recovery (DR) site.

ā€œWith FlashStack, we saw the opportunity to reduce the footprint in our data centers, and to adopt a converged infrastructure that greatly reduces cost and complexity,ā€ said Smith. ā€œWe found that for less than the cost of the hardware maintenance on our legacy system, we could buy a FlashStack implementation and three years of maintenance. It was an easy decision for us.ā€

Installation of the FlashStack configuration was also a lesson in simplicity, Smith noted. ā€œWith our previous system, the vendor had a team of seven people working over a series of months to get the system up and running. With FlashStack, we had one person who worked on the conversion, which he completed in less than a week. Installation of the FlashArray itself took about an hour.ā€

The conversion to the new FlashStack infrastructure ā€œwas accomplished without an interruption to our production applications or to the user experience, which is just unimaginable compared to what we had before,ā€ Smith added. ā€œIn all my years, this was the most efficient install of something so sophisticated.ā€

He also has high praise for the management features of the Pure Storage FlashArray.  ā€œWithin an hour and a half of installing the first array, I had the Pure1ā„¢ application on my cellphone where I could see everything that was going on with the array. It was like nothing I had even seen before.ā€

About Pure Storage

Pure Storage (NYSE:PSTG) helps companies push the boundaries of whatā€™s possible. Pure's end-to-end data platform - including FlashArray, FlashBlade and our converged offering with Cisco, FlashStack ā€“ is powered by innovative software thatā€™s cloud-connected for management from anywhere on a mobile device and supported by the Evergreen business model. The companyā€™s all-flash based technology, combined with its customer-friendly business model, drives business and IT transformation with solutions that are effortless, efficient and evergreen. With Pure's industry leading Satmetrix-certified NPS score of 83.5, Pure customers are some of the happiest in the world, and include organisations of all sizes, across an ever-expanding range of industries.

Connect with Pure Storage:

Read the blog

Converse on Twitter

Follow on LinkedIn

FlashStack Solutions

Analyst Recognition:

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays

IDC MarketScape for All-Flash Arrays

Pure Storage, Pure1, FlashStack and the "P" Logo mark are trademarks of Pure Storage, Inc. All other trademarks or names referenced in this document are the property of their respective owners.

###

Press Contact

Sabrina Johnson

Sabrina.johnson@purestorage.com

+1 405.496.1116

Your Browser Is No Longer Supported!

Older browsers often represent security risks. In order to deliver the best possible experience when using our site, please update to any of these latest browsers.