Dive Brief:
- Campuses with cutting edge technology and interactive learning capability can’t make a difference if students and faculty are stymied trying to access the tools.
- Western Oregon University judiciously purchased more expensive solid state drives to store content that faculty and students needed to access most quickly, leaving hard disks to store other network components.
- Now 10 times the users can access video files and other course content at the same time without causing any problems, freeing up IT staff members from putting out fires to working on upgrades and other improvements.
Dive Insight:
In describing his university’s successful fix for University Business, Western Oregon University CIO Bill Kernan explains why hard disks are so much more easily overwhelmed. They bring up content with the use of a mechanical arm, which has to move to the area of the storage system in which that content is stored. Solid state drives store information in microchips and don’t need any mechanical parts to access content. They’re more powerful than hard disks and more expensive, which is why WOU had to choose where to use them rather than simply shifting its entire storage system. For other campuses interested in targeted improvements, the purchase of a select few solid state drives could make a world of difference.