Wichita State University advances innovation with applied learning

The campus of Wichita State University on the Kansas plains is an innovation jewel in plain sight. Thanks to its proximity to aeronautical industry giants and supporting civil and defense companies, the university has always been a model for industry cooperation.

Recently, the school has accelerated its business-education partnerships and diversified them to include a broader range of industries and technologies. The need to advance research and digital transformation has created opportunities for the university, students, and partner companies like NetApp that require a skilled workforce.

NetApp has enhanced its commitment to the school by building a new facility on the WSU Innovation Center campus for development and testing of products and support for other partner companies. The investment provides a direct link between NetApp and the future technology leaders attending the school.

NetApp has built a completely new Innovation Campus facility, opening in the summer of 2022. The 168,000-square-foot building is designed as an open office plan, with more than 600 workstations and a large data center to be used for product development and testing. NetApp employees are already working out of a temporary facility in support of the effort.

NetApp is working with one of its partners to expand the high-performance computing capabilities available to campus labs and partners. Although it’s still in the early stages of development, an HPC environment would dramatically improve the responsiveness of researchers and allow them to take on more complex projects. Ongoing improvement in facilities and partnerships mean that everyone wins—students, industry, the university, and the community.

Areas of civilian and defense research that are benefiting from NetApp technology include artificial intelligence and machine learning simulations for crash testing and missile defense. Running simulations and processing predictive algorithms demands high-performance computing and the storage to back it up. NetApp delivers the underlying storage infrastructure and the management capabilities to allocate resources in multitenant environments and hybrid clouds.