Case Study: Guelph Hydro reduces data center footprint, cuts power costs, and boosts VDI performance with HPE SimpliVity

Guelph Hydro modernizes data center with HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged solution

Guelph Hydro, a Canadian electric utility, was struggling with spotty virtual desktop (VDI) performance, frequent user disconnects, and a cluttered data center dominated by SANs and multiple switches. The IT team spent many off‑hours resizing storage and supporting 80–90 users, faced high power and cooling costs, and lacked the backup capacity needed as they expanded VDI to AutoCAD users.

In 2015 the company deployed HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure, consolidating hardware and simplifying management. The change delivered a dramatic improvement in VDI performance and user satisfaction (previously ~60–70 help‑desk calls), reduced data center footprint and power/cooling by eliminating SANs and switches, sped storage provisioning from up to an hour to minutes, removed the separate backup tool (saving 49 TB) and achieved 39:1 backup efficiency, freeing IT time for DR planning and new projects.

Guelph Hydro

Adam Borecki

Systems Analyst