Case Study: U.S. Government Agency achieves lower costs and a scalable, high-performance private cloud with VMware vSAN

U.S. Government Agency Prepares IT Storage for Cloud Service Delivery with VMware Virtual SAN Technology

The U.S. Government Agency, a departmental headquarters supporting about 2,000 workers, needed to evolve a partially virtualized IT environment into a scalable, low‑cost private cloud while reducing capital and administrative costs and improving storage performance. Facing mixed NAS and hardware SAN systems nearing capacity, the agency turned to VMware vSAN (VMware Virtual SAN) to virtualize its storage tier and support its VMware‑based server and desktop virtualization platforms.

VMware vSAN was piloted and then rolled out into production—an eight‑node cluster hosting 100 VMs with 20 TB of storage (planned to grow to 50 TB) plus multi‑node desktop clusters serving 130 users—delivering easier management, stronger security posture, and SAN‑comparable IOPS without network traversal. The agency expects about a 33% reduction in storage capital cost and up to a 50% reduction in total cost of ownership including administrative savings; VMware vSAN also enabled faster performance, seamless scaling, and successful security audit outcomes.