Supporting a High-Speed Research Network

The University of Western Australia (UWA), based in Perth, is a global top 100 university with more than 28,000 undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students. With the Pure Storage platform, UWA effortlessly scales its storage infrastructure, ensuring support for critical research activities and empowering the next generation of research leaders.

The university is frequently ranked as one of the top 100 universities in the world due to its strong reputation for excellence in research. Today, much of it requires high-performance technology environments to handle data, analysis, and modeling.

Phil Norris, Senior Manager of Network and Systems at UWA, was tasked with leading a major transformation of the university’s data storage environment to support the critical research activities and growing data needs over the next decade. Phil and his team needed to ensure support for over 6 PB of research data, with the flexibility to scale as demands increase. By implementing the new Pure Storage platform, they not only enhanced the storage capacity and reliability for projects ranging from medical research to highly sensitive defense data and climate modeling, but also significantly reduced data center hosting charges due to the platform's reduced physical footprint. This transformation aligns with UWA’s commitment to environmental sustainability by minimizing energy consumption and supporting more eco-friendly operations, saving 80% on power.

The legacy data storage UWA had was costly to operate and difficult to scale. UWA decided to migrate to an outsourced data center environment managed by long-time systems integrator partner Atturra.

The legacy storage also required significant rack space, power, and cooling, which all impacted energy use. The switch to the highly efficient Pure Storage platform helps improve sustainability as part of the university’s environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals.

“We built ESG commitments into our UWA 2030 mission statement. This made it critically important that the solution help us reduce our carbon footprint,” says Norris. “With its compact footprint, the new storage requires 80% less power and significantly less cooling.”

UWA is currently planning a new high speed research network, set to launch early next year, to support the research requirements of the university, especially for graduate and doctoral research teams. Phil and his team didn’t want storage to become a bottleneck holding back research performance. They decided to pursue the flexibility and seamless capacity growth of a Storage-as-a Service (STaaS) model.

UWA selected Pure Storage FlashBlade//E™ via the Evergreen//One™ STaaS subscription to support the managed service environment as part of a larger managed service with long-time UWA systems integrator partner Atturra. This approach allows UWA to scale capacity up or down instantly while still achieving the security and performance of an all-flash, sustainable infrastructure.

Phil also takes comfort in how the Pure Storage platform helps protect against loss of critical research data. “One of the reasons I really liked the Pure Storage platform was the immutable and indelible snapshot capability of SafeMode,” says Phil. “If ransomware attempts to take hold of research data, I know my data is safe. It can’t be deleted, and I can recover it at any point.”

With scalability, performance, and security all wrapped in an environmentally friendly package, UWA is ready to support the next generation of leaders. “Our job is to make sure this environment will support UWA growth and ambitions to promote influential research. Pure has helped us to do that.”