Case Study: Barren County Schools achieves full virtualization, higher uptime and seamless maintenance with DataCore Software SANmelody

Barren County Schools - Customer Case Study

Barren County Schools in Glasgow, Kentucky faced growing server sprawl, low utilization and a need for higher uptime and maintenance flexibility across its district of schools. The IT team chose VMware vSphere for server virtualization and selected DataCore Software’s SANmelody storage virtualization as the SAN backbone after evaluating other SAN options to provide portability and avoid vendor‑locked hardware.

DataCore’s SANmelody was deployed with Xiotech arrays (running on repurposed DELL 2850 nodes) to virtualize the storage pool and support VMware vSphere, enabling a live migration from the existing EMC SAN. The result: consolidation from 30 physical servers to 4 hosts running 30 VMs, a 16 TB SAN managed by SANmelody, and reliable service for 5,500 users across the district — delivering seamless maintenance, improved uptime and easier hardware refreshes thanks to DataCore.

Barren County Schools

Steve Gumm

IT Director