Case Study: Keck Medical Center achieves a scalable, lower-cost data warehouse with VMware vSAN

Keck Medical Center of USC Sidesteps SAN Bottleneck, Launches New Data Warehouse with VMware Virtual SAN Solution

Keck Medical Center, a leading academic medical facility, needed a new data warehouse for business and medical analytics but found its conventional SAN lacked the capacity and funding for expansion. Facing limited staff and an urgent need to get analysts working, the center adopted VMware vSAN as a hyperconverged storage alternative (deployed on Dell PowerEdge R715 servers with Fusion-io flash) to avoid costly SAN upgrades.

Using VMware vSAN, Keck built two clusters—a five-node production cluster hosting about 15 TB of production data and a three-node cluster holding more than 10 TB for development and backup—supporting 150 active users with plans to scale toward ~500. The VMware vSAN solution delivered rapid deployment, policy-based storage management, seamless incremental scaling, integration with Site Recovery Manager, and roughly a 30% lower cost per I/O versus a traditional SAN.

Keck Medical Center

Manu Mishra

Senior Infrastructure Engineer