Case Study: Queen's University eliminates application lag and cuts storage costs with VMware vSAN

Queen's University Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science Deploys Vmware Virtual SAN

Queen’s University Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science faced severe infrastructure bottlenecks: its EMC VNX SAN couldn’t keep up with more than 100 resource‑intensive engineering applications, causing slow application launches that cost students as much as 15% of lab time, increased IT support burdens, and rising storage costs. To address this, Queen’s turned to VMware vSAN alongside VMware Horizon desktop virtualization to evaluate a hyper‑converged solution that could improve performance and reduce CapEx.

The faculty replaced the external SAN with VMware vSAN hyper‑converged infrastructure and deployed VMware Horizon VDI (with NVIDIA GRID on Dell PowerEdge servers), scaling to 250 virtual machines and supporting roughly 3,500 students and 100 staff with 150–200 concurrent users. VMware vSAN eliminated login and launch lags, boosted 3D modeling and Office performance, simplified management and scaling, and—combined with the Dell migration—helped cut CapEx by about 25%, delivering noticeably faster, more reliable access for users.

Queen’s University

Stephen Hunt

Director of Information Technology for the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science