How an Educational Services Organization Modernized Its Infrastructure with MinIO

A leading educational services organization embarked on a mission to transform its IT infrastructure, integrating AI and modernizing its systems to better support national-scale solution.

As part of its digital transformation, the organization needed an object storage solution that could deliver high performance and scalability workloads,” Anas explains. “The setup aligned perfectly with our infrastructure goals.”

One of the core requirements was S3 compatibility, enabling smooth interoperability across infrastructure. The solution also needed to support AI and machine learning (ML) workloads, provide cost-efficient scaling, and ensure business continuity through active-active replication.

“We needed a storage solution that could act like a CDN [Content Delivery Network] for static content while also handling AI and ML workloads with zero RPO and RTO,” explains Anas Marzouq AlMarabha, Cloud and Infrastructure Architect. “MinIO fit the bill perfectly by delivering the performance, efficiency, and seamless integration we were looking for.”

After considering several alternatives, including Nutanix and NetApp, the organization selected MinIO for its superior performance, scalability, and flexibility.

Choosing the Right Deployment Model

To ensure an optimal setup, the organization evaluated MinIO on Kubernetes, aiming for a deployment that could support their expanding infrastructure. They found that deploying MinIO with the MinIO Operator on Kubernetes offered unparalleled scalability, multi-tenancy, and simplified management to handle multiple workloads.

“Deploying MinIO on Kubernetes gave us the ability to scale up or down quickly, and multi-tenancy support made it easy to manage"

How the Organization Uses MinIO

MinIO now powers critical parts of the organization’s operations. It supports AI-driven applications used for automation and personalized services and acts as the backbone for the data lake, where user information and ML models are stored. The organization also uses MinIO to store website content, ensuring fast, reliable access to static assets.

Beyond AI and content management, MinIO supports the organization’s service desk platform, helping manage attachments and documents. A document-sharing portal has also been deployed using MinIO, allowing users to upload and share files with secure or public access.

“Our MinIO-powered document-sharing portal has become essential,” Anas notes. “Users can upload files, manage them securely, and share them as needed, whether internally or externally.”

The Results: Faster Performance and Lower Costs

The organization saw immediate benefits after deploying MinIO. Data processing speeds improved by 40%, enabling faster application performance across the board. Additionally, they achieved a 30% reduction in storage and compute costs, optimizing their overall infrastructure.

The MinIO deployment currently manages around 10 terabytes of data, with data volumes growing at 12% annually. Despite this growth, the entire system is managed by just five employees, reflecting the efficiency of MinIO’s platform.

“MinIO provided immediate performance improvements,” Anas says. “We reduced our operational costs by 30%, and the fact that only five employees can manage the entire deployment speaks volumes about how efficient MinIO really is.”

Scaling for the Future

With MinIO as the foundation of its infrastructure, the organization is planning further growth. They intend to expand their AI capabilities with predictive analytics and personalized services in the coming months. As part of their broader cloud transformation, they will migrate more workloads to the cloud using microservices-based architectures.

The organization is also preparing to launch new data lakehouse and data science projects to enhance their ability to manage and analyze data.

“MinIO is at the heart of our cloud strategy,” says Anas. “It gives us the flexibility to handle growing data volumes efficiently and supports the innovation we need for future projects.”

Ensuring Business Continuity and Supporting Users

A key feature for the organization has been MinIO’s active-active replication, which ensures operations continue uninterrupted, even if a data center goes offline. This has been essential for maintaining business continuity and meeting the demands of national-scale operations.

MinIO also supports the organization’s document-sharing platform, which allows users to upload files with time-limited or secure access. The portal currently manages several hundred documents, with the capacity to scale as usage increases.

“Our users rely on the MinIO-powered portal for secure file sharing,” Anas says. “It’s a critical part of our infrastructure and has made managing documents much easier.”

MinIO Delivers Beyond Expectations

The educational services organization’s digital transformation has been a success, with MinIO providing the performance, scalability, and efficiency they needed to modernize their infrastructure. MinIO’s active-active replication ensures business continuity, while its S3 compatibility and Kubernetes-based deployment allow for seamless scaling.

“Every feature we needed, MinIO delivered,” concludes Anas. “The platform continues to meet all of our evolving requirements, and we are confident it will support us as we expand our AI and cloud capabilities.”

With MinIO as a key part of their infrastructure, the organization is well-positioned to continue driving innovation and meeting the needs of its users. If your organization is ready to modernize its infrastructure, contact us at hello@min.io or our Slack channel today to learn more.

For more information, tune into the podcast https://youtu.be/aYv8KyL1MEU.