Case Study: University of Colorado Boulder achieves 70% lower endpoint costs and major energy savings with HPE Nimble Storage

University of Colorado Boulder Housing and Dining Services Goes Green With New Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

University of Colorado Boulder’s Housing & Dining Services (HDS) supports 7,500 residents across 25 residence halls and manages dining, facilities, e‑commerce and campus card operations for a large, distributed workforce. Rapid IT growth — from 150 PCs to over 500 workstations, 155 databases and 25 critical business systems — made patching, backup, malware protection, procurement costs and power consumption increasingly difficult, and prior virtualization attempts lacked the stability, performance and scalability HDS needed.

HDS deployed VMware View 5 virtual desktops on Cisco UCS B‑series blades with Nimble Storage CS240 hybrid arrays and zero‑client endpoints. The solution delivered high IOPS performance at roughly one‑tenth the cost of all‑flash arrays, linear compute scalability, centralized management and improved security, cut ongoing endpoint procurement costs by 70%, reduced workstation power from ~150–200W to 32W (about $40K/year savings), and enabled faster provisioning, remote work and non‑disruptive scaling.

University of Colorado Boulder