Publicly funded and short-staffed, the Mississippi Community College Board needed to consolidate and cut costs. Its data warehouse’s storage arrays turned out to be the best place to start.

“Our current system was coming up for renewal, and the renewal itself was triple what it was a year before,” said Ray Smith (pictured), assistant executive director for technology at the Mississippi Community College Board.

The board serves as the base for the state’s 15 community colleges from which it collects data. It also provides internet to the schools.

Smith spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during said in an interview at Pure//Accelerate 2017 in San Francisco, California. (* Disclosure below.)

This tripling of its storage expense was one problem; overall information technology sprawl and inefficiency was another. MCCB decided to tackle both with a converged infrastructure stack.

“What we were looking for was a system that would allow us to bring all of our technical resources into a smaller unit,” Smith said.

The board began reading up on various converged offerings on the market. Some of them seemed to defeat the purpose of converging and simplifying, offering very complex systems that required add-on services for technical support, Smith explained.

So Smith and his colleagues ultimately decided on FlashStack, the converged system from Pure Storage Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc., with cost being a major deciding factor.

“We were able to purchase a Pure array for the cost of maintenance of what we were looking at before,” Smith said.

Flash storage side effects

The addition has conserved space, reduced heat and lowered overall operating costs of MCCB’s data center, Smith pointed out.

The simplicity of the system has freed staffers from constant IT hiccups to focus on other higher-value areas; they are redesigning the MCCB’s websites, for instance.

“I have a developer now that can spend his whole time developing as opposed to responding to some error message on a hard drive or whatever,” Smith concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Pure//Accelerate 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Pure//Accelerate 2017. Neither Pure Storage Inc. nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE