Case Study: State Department of Health achieves expanded storage, faster performance, and 50% cost savings with VMware vSAN

State’s Department of Health Deploys VMware Virtual SAN to Increase Storage Capacity and Performance

The State Department of Health was struggling with an aging, nearly full storage environment that was slowing application performance and causing frequent outages for the Bureau of Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). With only about 13 TB (roughly 8 TB unusable), four IBM blades and an old SAN, the four-person server team spent excessive time on maintenance and recoveries, and WIC service disruptions—such as inability to print benefit checks—became unacceptable. The agency engaged VMware vSAN (VMware Virtual SAN) to address these challenges.

VMware vSAN was deployed integrated with VMware vSphere on Lenovo 3650‑M5 servers, consolidating 23 virtual servers onto a four‑node hyper‑converged cluster and expanding usable capacity to 45 TB. The implementation cut infrastructure cost by about 50% (from ~$300k to <$150k), reduced database update windows from 8–9 hours to roughly 1 hour, eliminated downtime, and freed the team to spend 40% less time on storage and infrastructure issues—delivering better performance, faster maintenance, and improved service delivery.