Case Study: Sacramento City College achieves high-performance, cost-saving VDI deployment with HPE Nimble Storage

Sacramento City College Solves the Equation for Deploying High-Performance, Cost-Slashing VDI

Sacramento City College, an open‑access community college serving more than 25,000 students and 2,100 staff, was burdened by the cost and complexity of supporting 2,500 physical PCs and Macs. Its legacy SAN provided no performance visibility and couldn’t cope with VDI I/O spikes (boot/login/recomposition storms), making a virtual desktop rollout impractical despite clear cost‑saving potential.

The IT team deployed two Nimble CS220 arrays with VMware View, using Nimble’s CASL tierless SSD caching to eliminate log‑in storms, simplify management, and provide real‑time/historical performance visibility. With 300 virtual desktops already running and a Phase One target of 500, the college cut per‑desktop hardware costs from $900 to $280 (about $620 saved each) and projects roughly $310,000 in savings for the initial 500 VDIs while reducing ongoing operational overhead and easing future scale.

Sacramento City College

Daniel Kwong

Senior IT Analyst