Building Higher Education’s Digital Frontier

Deakin University relies on the agility, simplicity, and speed of Pure Storage to support new services and applications, engage big data and AI initiatives, and improve overall operational efficiency. With Pure Storage arrays, the university powers state-of-the art initiatives such as its award-winning AI virtual assistant Deakin Genie and its way-finding app Deakin Scout that helps staff and students connect and navigate the campuses.

At the forefront of cutting-edge technology and personalised learning, Deakin University is in the top two per cent of the world’s universities, with more than 60,000 students across five campuses. As one of Australia’s largest universities, Deakin University has developed a strong reputation for innovation and is renowned for its technology-rich environment, with almost a quarter of its students studying from academic content hosted entirely on the cloud.

Deakin University is setting a new digital standard in tertiary education relying on Pure Storage arrays to power state-of-the art initiatives such as Deakin Genie, an award-winning AI virtual assistant to help students keep track of their daily lives, and Deakin Scout, a way-finding app to help staff and students connect with one another and move around the campuses.

Recognised as one of the world’s most digitally innovative organisations by the 2018 Digital Edge 50 awards, Deakin University is in high demand for local and international students with enrollment numbers significantly increasing over the past seven years. To ensure Deakin University retains its distinctive student experience as it continues to grow, the technology team has focused on ensuring it has a scalable, agile and high-performance IT infrastructure, helping to streamline operational efficiency and support new AI and big data initiatives.

Deakin University’s commitment to building higher education’s digital frontier manifests in a number of ways. From world-class research, services, and facilities to its technological infrastructure, Deakin is constantly striving to enhance student experience, research outcomes and industry partnerships.

To develop and deliver category-leading initiatives, as well as improve overall operational efficiency, including database and virtualisation support, the university requires both stability and speed in its highly centralised ICT operation across all tiers of storage.

“You can’t even have a discussion about digital transformation if you don’t have a stable ICT operation and reliable services on the backend,” says Craig Warren, Executive Director, ICT Infrastructure Services at Deakin University. “We’ve always been focused on both high availability and digital innovation, so we needed a storage system that was equally reliable and agile to support these critical initiatives.”

Existing storage was unable to support the needs of rapid growth and 60,000+ students. Storage infrastructure was approaching the end of its life cycle, and digital transformation efforts required stability and agility of ICT operation across all tiers of storage. “Pure Storage stood out as the most powerful and resilient solution to accelerate our ability to deliver new and innovative services across the university,” says Warren.

When Deakin implemented Pure Storage, Warren was impressed by how quick and efficient it was to get into production. The ICT team was also able to migrate production workloads live, during the day, without any disruption or downtime. The simplicity and ease-of-use of the Pure Storage system means Deakin University can spend less time worrying about its ICT environment and more time on digital initiatives and new services for students.

“The Pure Storage infrastructure never constrains our development or innovation programs—in fact, it supports them right out of the gate,” observes Warren. “We’re able to be nimble and agile without worrying if we can rely on our underlying architecture.”

The impact of the Pure Storage all-flash arrays has been felt across the university since day one, increasing performance by between 7 and 12 per cent across the entire enterprise.

“We evaluated a number of players, and Pure Storage came out on top, getting a high score on each of our requirements,” says Warren. “During the proof of concept, Pure was the only one that actually achieved the compression rates claimed out of the box.”

Since transitioning to all-flash, Deakin University has witnessed an increase in the availability and supportability of its services and reduced admin overhead considerably. “From easy configuration to instant clones and snapshots, Pure Storage is one big storage array that just does everything for us,” says Warren. “We’re now managing twice the amount of storage space as we did three years ago, with the same number of resources.”

Automation is another important area for Deakin University, where the backend infrastructure team focuses on automated provisioning from storage tier to firewall and has a homegrown automation platform. For Deakin, it is crucial that underlying storage supports these automation efforts.

“Pure Storage completely delivered on this,” Warren explains. “It integrated seamlessly, provisioning just automatically worked on the system, and it provides the robust APIs and web services we need.”

In addition to the availability and scalability of FlashArray systems, Deakin University chose Pure Storage for its strength in the Australian market and quality customer support. Warren notes, “Pure’s channel partner, Cirrus Networks, was extremely helpful and we liked that they had successfully deployed Pure Storage to quite a number of other large Aussie organisations. It was an easy transaction and a great outcome for everyone involved.”

As it executes on its vision to enable a globally connected education for the jobs of the future, Deakin University has spearheaded a number of award-winning digital initiatives, such as the complex and intelligent AI virtual assistant, Deakin Genie, and location-based service, Deakin Scout. With Pure Storage, the university can move forward with confidence, continuing to innovate and offering even more applications for its students, staff, alumni and partners without worrying about performance overhead. “Innovation is all about user experience for us, and Pure Storage enables us to really hone in on that,” says Warren.

Deakin University has its eye on the future and sees Pure Storage as a partner it can grow with.

“One important factor that led us to choose Pure Storage was the maturity and concrete detail of its product roadmap,” concludes Warren.