As a NASA Space-Grant College and home to the first Honors College in New Mexico, New Mexico State University (NMSU) is a world-class academic institution. It has also been a fixture of New Mexico’s community since 1888, now serving a multicultural student body across four campuses, a satellite learning center in Albuquerque, and 12 agricultural research and science centers.
For many students, it is a stepping stone to success. “We pride ourselves on empowering students across New Mexico to transform the world they live in,” says Director of IT Systems Administration, Allen Purcell, himself an NMSU alumnus. “My job is to choose the best technologies to support them in their journey.”
With the university’s complex legacy storage lagging in performance, operating in silos, and eating up hours of systems administrators’ time, Purcell and his team knew it was time for a change. On the advice of trusted partner Mainline Information Systems, they selected Pure Storage FlashArray//C to replace NMSU’s spinning disk storage.
“We designed our storage system with a high level of complexity, which was necessary to ensure its reliability given the limitations of the tools we had access to when we built it. Just onboarding someone to work in the environment was a Herculean task,” says Omar Valtierrez, Lead Systems Developer. “Pure replaced that complexity with the speed of flash and the user-friendliness of a platform solution.”