Case Study: Southern College of Optometry (SCO) achieves $150,000+ cost savings and modernized storage with StarWind Software (StarWind VSAN)

Southern College of Optometry (SCO) reduces operating costs significantly by replacing the end-of-life storage infrastructure and getting ongoing savings thanks to StarWind

Southern College of Optometry (SCO), a private non-profit optometry school in Memphis, faced aging, end-of-life Fibre Channel switches and SANs supporting its VMware ESXi environment. Replacing the legacy FC infrastructure outright would have been costly, so SCO wanted a more cost-effective, future-proof iSCSI solution to lower maintenance expenses.

SCO initially added StarWind SAN for archiving and then moved to a full StarWind Virtual SAN deployment, replacing FC with two iSCSI SANs (spinning disks for general storage and an SSD SAN for critical VMs). The change delivered immediate savings of about $150,000, improved performance and high availability, and ongoing lower maintenance costs that help the college keep tuition down.

Southern College of Optometry

Bill Hopper

Manager of Network Services