Case Study: CenturyLink achieves cost-efficient all-flash cloud performance and $1.2M savings with VMware vSAN

Centurylink Provides Cost-Efficient All-Flash Performance for Cloud Services with Vmware vSAN

CenturyLink, a major U.S. telecommunications and cloud services provider operating CenturyLink Cloud across dozens of data centers, faced high storage costs, inconsistent database performance, and growing operational complexity from traditional SANs. To modernize primary VM storage and deliver scalable, cost-effective performance, CenturyLink adopted VMware vSAN (integrated with VMware vSphere) as its software‑defined, hyper‑converged storage solution.

CenturyLink deployed all‑flash VMware vSAN clusters on Dell servers across six data centers, replacing legacy SANs and enabling per‑VM performance and fault‑tolerance controls while simplifying management. The VMware vSAN implementation delivered measurable results—over 6 million IOPS from all‑flash clusters, a greater than 50% reduction in data center deployment costs (saving $1.2M on the most recent deployment), lower CapEx/OpEx, and rapid scale to 60,000+ VMs.

CenturyLink

Jeremyah Corner

Director of Software Development