Case Study: Saddleback Valley Unified School District achieves reduced data center footprint and major cost savings with HPE SimpliVity

Saddleback School District - Customer Case Study

Saddleback Valley Unified School District (SVUSD), the fourth-largest school district in the country serving about 31,000 students across 34 schools in South Orange County, faced rapidly growing storage needs and aging infrastructure. With a 50TB iSCSI SAN and 20 blade servers supporting roughly 100 VMs (including a 3,000-user Exchange, multiple SQL databases and web/collaboration services), the district struggled with 25–35% annual data growth, costly annual SAN expansions, high energy and maintenance costs, and complex LUN management.

SVUSD replaced its legacy environment with a SimpliVity OmniCube hyperconverged Data Virtualization Platform (expanded to a three-node federation with 10GbE), gaining inline deduplication, compression and VM-centric backups. The move consolidated 20 blades and two SANs into three 2U OmniCubes (over a 6x hardware reduction), cut software licensing costs by 75%, dramatically improved application performance and restore times, simplified management, and delivered lower energy and scaling costs while enabling plans for integrated DR.

Saddleback Valley Unified School District

Rich Dear

Systems Manager