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VMware vSAN Customer Adoption in Educational Institutions

At Oakland University, University of South Carolina Upstate, Ventura County Community College District

VMware, Inc. announced that Oakland University (OU), The University of South Carolina Upstate  (USC Upstate) and Ventura County Community College District (VCCCD) have implemented VMware vSAN, a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solution with more than 8,000 customers.1

Faced with tight IT budgets, higher education customers are turning to HCI solutions powered by vSAN to lower TCO by up to 50%. Customer adoption of vSAN has grown 150% overall year over year as it integrates and simplifies the management of compute and storage while lowering costs.2

OU, USC Upstate and VCCCD are running VMware vSAN for business-critical applications and VDI in an era when budgets for education continue to tighten and IT is forced to do more with less. vSAN creates simple shared storage for vSphere VMs enabling a resilient scale-out architecture. It is enabling educational institutions to extend virtualization to storage, producing a HCI solution that works with existing tools, skill-sets, software solutions and hardware platforms. Deploying vSAN has the three institutions to evolve their data centers without risk, reduce TCO and scale their organizations.

OU Achieves Operational and Capital Expenses Savings
A top-ranked academic institution in southeast Michigan, OU said it experienced enrollment growth and needed to move its legacy IT infrastructure to a software-defined data center in order to drive cost control, ease of use and performance. To help consolidate multiple technologies and hardware, the university is relying on vSphere, vSAN and vRealize Suite across two data centers. The university runs business-critical applications such as Banner by Ellucian and Moodle learning management system with vSAN. With 90% of its data centers virtualized, the university said it has achieved faster, more agile storage provisioning and easy scalability to support continued university growth with VMware vSAN.

OU’s enrollment reached 20,711 students for fall 2015 – experiencing the highest enrollment growth for universities in the state over the past five- and 10-year periods,” said Mariusz Nowak, director of infrastructure services, OU. “VMware vSAN was the only solution that delivered the agility and performance we needed to scale our business to meet the demands of increased student enrollment. We have seen increased stability for university operations as well as student and staff services because of VMware vSAN.

USC Upstate Improves Performance of VDI Environment
It is a public university located in Spartanburg, SC. The university migrated from a traditional SAN to vSAN in support of its VDI used to run labs across the university. According to the university, students relying on VMware Horizon 7 have experienced application performance improvement while administrators have benefited from an improved management experience. Running more than 1,100 VMware Horizon 7 desktops, the institution said it expects increased efficiency of its 12TB all-flash storage system using the data reduction capabilities of vSAN including data deduplication, data compression and erasure coding capabilities.

“The performance level of VMware vSAN was the driving force as to why we went with VMware vSAN,” said Kevin Hodges, VDI systems administrator, USC Upstate. “When it came down to it, VMware vSAN is simple to manage and cost effective.

VCCCDLowers Storage TCO by 50%
Based in the greater Los Angeles area, it serves more than 31,000 students and employs more than 1,700 faculty and staff at its three colleges – Moorpark College, Oxnard College and Ventura College. In order to provide students and staff with access to quality educational opportunities, the district sought to modernize its data center environment and address availability, performance and scalability concerns of its SAN storage infrastructure. After implementing vSphere, VCCCD replaced its legacy FC SAN with vSAN with a focus on modernizing its four data centers. By adopting HCI solutions powered by vSAN, the district said it can meet the growing needs of its students, faculty, and staff while reducing CapEx and OpEx. VCCCD runs business-critical applications such as Banner by Ellucian, Desire2Learn learning management system, Exchange and Tableau, among many others, with vSAN.

With VMware vSAN, we’re providing better performance and HA for IT services to students, faculty and staff while reducing storage TCO,” said Dave Fuhrmann, associate vice chancellor, IT, VCCCD. “We have seen an increase in efficiency and a reduction in complexity for IT storage management.

VMware vSAN is equipping higher education institutions with innovative technology to modernize IT infrastructure while also delivering cost savings,” said Lee Caswell, VP of products, storage and availability, VMware. “Hyper-convergence allows our customers to deliver 21st century learning and provide improved BC for campuses across the country.

More about USC Upstate’s use of VMware vSAN
More about VCCCD’s use of VMware vSAN
More about VMware vSAN

1 Internal VMware Analysis, May 2017
2 Internal VMware Analysis, May 2017

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