Case Study: Åbo Akademi achieves faster, easier-to-manage storage and lower costs with VMware VSAN

Åbo Akademi - Customer Case Study

Åbo Akademi University, a multi-campus Finnish higher‑education institution, faced aging storage infrastructure across its Turku and Vaasa data centres. The legacy NAS/SAN and physical server setup was reaching end‑of‑support, was managed separately from the virtual environment, and was costly and time‑consuming to maintain — challenges made worse by limited IT staff and the need to avoid service interruptions for constantly used applications.

The university extended its existing VMware vSphere/vCenter platform with VMware VSAN to create a hyperconverged, policy‑based storage layer that could be rolled out gradually on standard x86 servers. The result was centralized control, faster and more reliable services, reduced maintenance time and costs, and an easily expandable modular system (with planned migration toward SSD/hybrid storage) that delivered no service breaks and measurable user‑perceived speed improvements.

Åbo Akademi

Björn Pundars

ICT-manager