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Chico State, a California state university, recently announced that it has successfully built its hosting center on a cloud-based storage infrastructure using the $950,000 donation from NetApp, a provider of innovative storage and data management solutions. The new hosting center has now been enhanced to support classroom instruction, and training in business processes and enterprise systems technology to a large number of students.

In a statement, Regina Kunkle, vice president, State and Local Government and Higher Education, NetApp, said, "Attracting more students into programs that will give them real experience for the competitive job market is one of NetApp's key goals. Better preparing students for real-world business applications is a great outcome for the school and for the community. Our technology allows Chico State to cut costs, reduce energy use, and provide a great benefit to its students."

Chico State and four other peer-hosting centers across the globe offer accounting and business concepts courses to students under the SAP (News - Alert) University Alliance. The educational institutions use state-of-the-art, real-world technology within the classrooms to provide students with an experience similar to other University Alliance (News - Alert) member university locations.

Chico State was reeling under an increasing demand for hosting services to support its extensive program reach. This resulted in the need for refreshing its data center infrastructure based on a cloud storage foundation which could enhance its data center efficiencies and optimize information storage over a single platform. The collaboration between Chico State and NetApp resulted in the development of a storage solution capable of supporting the critical SAP software while also functioning as a foundation for supporting the school’s hosting center operation.

Chico State was able to deploy the FlexPod architecture which allows a wide range of SAP products for various academic needs to be quickly deployed. At present, Chico State is a service provider for more than 140 schools within North and South America that offer students with SAP-enhanced education courses each year.