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

Community College District Delivers 21st Century Learning with VMware vSAN

Ventura County Community College District (VCCCD), which serves more than 31,000 students across three colleges in Ventura County, California, needed to modernize four data centers to support technology-dependent learning and administration. Legacy Fibre Channel SANs were creating performance bottlenecks, noisy‑neighbor and support issues, scalability limits, and risk of downtime—challenges the district had to solve without large CapEx investments or specialist storage staff.

VCCCD replaced its SANs with VMware vSAN hybrid clusters on Dell PowerEdge servers, extending its VMware vSphere virtualization to storage and using vSAN Health Service and vRealize Log Insight for monitoring. The change delivered faster application response, higher availability (keeping classes and business running during failures), flexible scale-up/scale-out growth, per‑VM QoS, and simplified management that let a first‑time storage admin manage Tier‑1 storage—reducing storage TCO by about 50%.

Ventura County Community College District

Dean Adams

Systems Administator