VMware Announces vSAN Customer Adoption in Higher Education

PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwired - June 27, 2017) - VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) today announced that Oakland University (OU), The University of South Carolina Upstate (USC Upstate) and Ventura County Community College District (VCCCD) have implemented VMware vSAN™, the leading 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 total cost of ownership (TCO) by up to 50 percent. Customer adoption of VMware vSAN has grown 150 percent overall year over year as it integrates and simplifies the management of compute and storage while lowering costs. (2)

Oakland University, USC Upstate and VCCCD are running VMware vSAN for business-critical applications and virtual desktop infrastructure in an era when budgets for education continue to tighten and IT is forced to do more with less. VMware vSAN creates simple shared storage for VMware vSphere® virtual machines enabling a resilient, high-performance scale-out architecture. vSAN is enabling educational institutions to seamlessly extend virtualization to storage, producing a HCI solution that works with existing tools, skillsets, software solutions and hardware platforms. Deploying VMware vSAN has enabled Oakland University, USC Upstate and VCCCD to evolve their data centers without risk, reduce TCO and scale their organizations.

Oakland University Achieves Operational and Capital Expenses Savings

A top-ranked academic institution in southeast Michigan, Oakland University said it experienced rapid 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 VMware vSphere, VMware vSAN and vRealize™ Suite across two data centers. Oakland University runs business-critical applications such as Banner by Ellucian and Moodle learning management system with vSAN. With 90 percent 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.

"Oakland University'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, Oakland University. "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."

University of South Carolina Upstate Improves Performance of VDI Environment

USC Upstate is a public university located in Spartanburg, South Carolina. The university migrated from a traditional SAN to VMware vSAN in support of its virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) used to run labs across the university. According to the university, students relying on VMware Horizon™ 7 have experienced considerable application performance improvement while administrators have benefitted from an improved management experience. Running more than 1,100 VMware Horizon 7 desktops, USC Upstate said it expects increased efficiency of its 12 terabyte all-flash storage system using the data reduction capabilities of VMware 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."

Ventura County Community College District Lowers Storage TCO by 50 Percent

Based in the greater Los Angeles area, VCCCD 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 comprehensive and 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 VMware vSphere, VCCCD replaced its legacy Fibre Channel SAN with VMware vSAN with a focus on modernizing all four of its 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, Microsoft Exchange and Tableau, among many others, with vSAN.

"With VMware vSAN, we're providing better performance and high availability for IT services to students, faculty and staff while significantly reducing storage TCO," said Dave Fuhrmann, associate vice chancellor, information technology, VCCCD. "We have seen an increase in efficiency and a reduction in complexity for IT storage management."

Supporting Quote

"VMware vSAN is equipping higher education institutions with innovative technology to modernize IT infrastructure while also delivering cost savings," said Lee Caswell, vice president of Products, Storage and Availability, VMware. "Hyper-convergence allows our customers to deliver 21st century learning and provide improved business continuity for campuses across the country."

Additional Resources

• Read more about USC Upstate's use of VMware vSAN
• Read more about VCCCD's use of VMware vSAN
• Learn more about VMware vSAN
• Read more VMware vSAN customer stories
• Try the VMware vSAN Hands-On Labs
• Connect with VMware on Twitter and Facebook

About VMware
VMware, a global leader in cloud infrastructure and business mobility, helps customers accelerate their digital transformation. VMware enables enterprises to master a software-defined approach to business and IT with VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture™ and solutions for the data center, mobility, and security. With 2016 revenue of $7.09 billion, VMware is headquartered in Palo Alto, CA and has over 500,000 customers and 75,000 partners worldwide.

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1. Internal VMware Analysis, May 2017
2. Internal VMware Analysis, May 2017
3. Oakland University Enrollment