Case Study: California Public Utilities Commission achieves nearly total virtualization and 25–30% performance improvements with NetApp SolidFire

Breaking the 80% Barrier to Reach Nearly Total Virtualization

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), a state regulator responsible for utilities across California, had virtualized roughly 80% of its IT environment but hit a hard limit: legacy scale-up storage couldn’t handle the high-IOPS workloads, drove up costs, and caused VDI performance failures and outages that blocked virtualization of the remaining 20%.

By deploying NetApp SolidFire all‑flash, scale‑out storage with volume-level QoS and tight VMware integration, CPUC virtualized its most demanding workloads (Microsoft SQL and VDI), eliminated boot storms, and reduced its storage footprint from 21U to 4U. The solution delivered 25–30% performance improvements, higher availability, lower licensing and operational costs, easier management, and capacity to scale VDI and other applications further.

California Public Utilities Commission

Albert Fuller

Infrastructure Manager