Case Study: Ventura County Community College District achieves uninterrupted 21st‑century learning and 50% lower storage TCO with VMware vSAN

Ventura County Community College District Delivers 21st Century Learning with Vmware vSAN

Ventura County Community College District (Ventura County) serves more than 31,000 students across three colleges and relied heavily on virtualized servers but faced storage bottlenecks, noisy‑neighbor issues, and single points of failure in its legacy Fibre Channel SANs. The district needed higher availability and performance for critical apps and databases, simpler day‑to‑day storage management without specialized staff, and a way to scale without large CapEx — building on its VMware vSphere environment and adopting VMware vSAN for storage virtualization.

Ventura County replaced its SANs with VMware vSAN, deploying four hybrid vSAN clusters (200 TB supporting 500+ VMs) across its data centers and using per‑VM storage policies and QoS to eliminate noisy‑neighbor problems. The VMware vSAN rollout delivered noticeably faster application response, uninterrupted classroom services (survived a host loss with no data loss), easier management for a first‑time storage admin, flexible scale‑up/out, and a 50% reduction in overall storage TCO.

Ventura County

Aaron Kay

IT Support Specialist III