Case Study: Saginaw Intermediate School District achieves 8x performance and a centralized VMware cloud with DataCore Software

Saginaw Intermediate School District - Customer Case Study

Saginaw Intermediate School District faced an aging, unsupported Xiotech SAN, server sprawl and capacity limits as it sought to expand county‑wide IT services. The district evaluated hardware SANs and virtualization options and chose to pursue storage virtualization with DataCore Software (using SANmelody) alongside a VMware server virtualization strategy to replace multiple local SAN deployments and enable a centralized, virtualized infrastructure.

DataCore Software virtualized the existing Xiotech storage into a mirrored, two‑site cloud (10 TB per site) integrated with VMware, creating a central hosting service for local districts. The deployment now runs 35–40 VMs across primary and mirrored ESX hosts, delivers an 8x performance boost (applications reduced from ~2 minutes to under 1 second), provides local HA and offsite DR, and supports ~2,000 employees and 10,000 students—serving 30–40% of the county while eliminating the need for duplicate SANs at each school.

Saginaw Intermediate School District

Jeff Johnson

Director of Technical Services