Case Study: Lake Superior College achieves faster VMware performance and simpler storage management with Tintri

Lake Superior College Makes the Educated Decision to Move to Tintri Storage

Lake Superior College, a two-year community and technical college in Duluth, Minnesota, needed to improve storage performance and capacity for its growing VMware environment and planned VDI rollout. Its legacy HP SANs were struggling with I/O-intensive virtual workloads, creating high latency and forcing administrators to constantly move VMs around to balance performance. Tintri was selected as the vendor, with the Tintri VMstore T820 used as the new storage platform.

Tintri implemented VM-aware storage that integrated with VMware and simplified management through a single NFS volume and vSphere Web Client visibility. The results were immediate: deployment took under 20 minutes, latency dropped from 12–14 ms to about 1.6 ms, and 80% of VMs showed no measurable latency. Lake Superior College reached 98% virtualization, expanded to 128 VMs, and successfully began using Tintri for VDI, including cloning full virtual desktops in just 37 seconds.

Lake Superior College

Ryan Schaefer

Senior Network Administrator