Case Study: Fulton County Schools achieves nearly 90% faster application performance and 50% infrastructure cost savings with VMware vSAN

Fulton County Schools Improves Application Performance by Nearly 90 Percent with VMware Virtual SAN

Fulton County Schools, the fourth-largest system in Georgia serving about 96,000 students, was struggling with a sluggish student information system: key tasks took 30–45 minutes, latency rose to roughly 50 ms under heavy use, and a traditional SAN drove I/O congestion. A hardware refresh would have been costly without guaranteeing better performance, so FCS turned to VMware vSAN (VMware Virtual SAN) as a software-defined, hyperconverged alternative.

FCS deployed VMware vSAN in a two-week rollout, collapsing 21 physical servers to a three-node Virtual SAN cluster and using commodity servers to avoid vendor lock-in. VMware vSAN cut latency to under 1 ms, improved certain tasks by nearly 90% (reducing 30–45 minute operations to under 5 minutes), saved at least 50% of infrastructure costs (about $400,000), and simplified management so existing staff could maintain the environment.

Fulton County Schools

Kenny Wilder

Director of Network Infrastructure