With Pure Storage

Increasing the Time Students Spend Learning

Matt Kixmoeller, Vice President of Products at Pure StorageMountain View, CA (USA), August 2015 - Pure Storage, an independent solid-state array vendor, has announced that Judson Independent School District (ISD), an educational organization serving more than 23,000 students in Bexar County, Texas, implemented Pure Storage to dramatically reduce login time for its virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environment so students can spend more time learning. One of Judson ISD's largest schools immediately saw a 95 percent improvement in response time, reducing login time from 15 minutes down to an average of 36 seconds.

Judson ISD's mission is to provide a quality education to students, empowering them to be successful in a global society that makes technology an increasingly vital tool in its educational experience. As the school district continues to add more students and applications, demands on the infrastructure increase, resulting in very slow response times. Before implementing Pure Storage, students wasted up to one third of a 45-minute class period waiting to login to a lesson application.

After Judson ISD deployed Pure Storage in one of their largest schools in the district in February 2014, the success of this initial deployment prompted the district to install Pure Storage in all of its data centers and expand the use beyond its origin with Citrix XenDesktop for VDI to back office financial systems, network monitoring, and Microsoft SQL Server.

"Nearly everything we do is dependent upon access to technology. Installation of Pure Storage reduced our costs and increased efficiency by slashing login times to quickly enhance the end-user experience for students and staff," said Steve Young, Chief Technology Officer at Judson ISD. "Due to the simplicity of the Pure solution, our IT department did not have to add any additional staff, and we now save time previously spent managing storage, so the team can focus on other core tasks that improve the learning experience. The best way we can describe Pure Storage is simple, reliable, and fast."

As a result of deploying Pure Storage all-flash arrays, Judson ISD experienced

  • reduction in application login time: time reduced by up to 95 percent, from 15 minutes to 36 seconds on average;
  • expand application footprint: simplicity of Pure Storage has allowed the district to add arrays and applications without any additional staff needed;
  • significant savings on CAPEX and OPEX: 10:1 average data reduction optimizing efficiency of storage resources, decreased power, and cooling costs in the data center; no downtime during software upgrades.

"We don't want storage to a be a burden for our customers, so we provide them with simple and reliable technology that allows them to focus on more important priorities, in this case helping students learn," said Matt Kixmoeller, Vice President of Products at Pure Storage. "Technology should improve the educational experience not hinder it. Pure Storage changes the way organizations manage applications to deliver reliable and fast response times under increasing demands that ultimately results in a positive impact on the end user."