Case Study: Åbo Akademi achieves faster, more reliable storage and simplified management with VMware vSAN

Åbo Akademi - Customer case Study

Åbo Akademi, a Finnish university with campuses in Turku and Vaasa, faced an aging storage infrastructure whose support was ending. The existing NAS/SAN and physical server–based storage was hard to administer separately from the virtualized environment, updates could not be done all at once, and a small IT team needed a low‑disruption, quickly implemented solution. Åbo Akademi selected VMware vSAN (alongside their existing VMware vSphere 6 and vCenter platform) to modernize storage while minimizing operational impact.

Using VMware vSAN as a hyper‑converged, policy‑based storage layer integrated with vSphere and vCenter let Åbo Akademi manage storage from a single console, reuse x86 servers, and expand modularly. VMware vSAN delivered faster user‑facing services, measurable time savings for IT staff (“less working time to do things”), improved reliability with no crashes under heavy load, and reduced costs by avoiding specialized external disk systems.

Åbo Akademi

Björn Pundars

ICT-manager