Case Study: Tri-County Technical College achieves cost-effective, high-performance VDI with Nutanix

For Tri-County College, Nutanix Has the Secret Sauce to Make VDI Cost-Effective and Fast

Tri-County Technical College, a four‑campus community college serving over 9,000 students in South Carolina, wanted to replace location‑bound lab PCs with flexible virtual desktops so students could access application‑specific workstations (AutoCAD, QuickBooks, etc.) from any campus or home. Traditional servers and SAN storage proved too costly and potentially underperforming for VDI, making the project initially unfeasible.

The college deployed a Nutanix NX‑2000 converged compute-and-storage appliance with VMware View (including PCIe flash) to deliver high IOPS, simple scaling, and minimal rack space. The solution installed in a day, preserved desktop performance, and cut costs—about $250 per virtual desktop and an estimated $375,000 capital savings at 1,500 seats—while freeing rack space, reducing management time and power consumption, and enabling a successful campuswide VDI rollout.

TriCounty Technical College

Matt Edwards

IT Operations Manager