Case Study: Locarno Film Festival achieves tenfold performance boost and doubled storage capacity with VMware vSAN

Ensuring reliable services and festival-ready performance levels with VMware vSAN

Locarno Film Festival, a major international art‑house event in Switzerland, faced aging IT infrastructure that struggled with huge seasonal user spikes and a limited non‑profit budget. The festival needed to double storage capacity, boost performance, and ensure reliable, flexible systems to support thousands of staff and hundreds of thousands of visitors during the event.

Working with VMware partner 4IT Solutions, Locarno adopted a hyper‑converged HPE server cluster managed by VMware vSAN, implemented with no service interruption. The upgrade doubled storage from 6 to 12 TB, increased IOPS roughly tenfold (from ~4,000 to over 40,000), and delivered greater reliability, scalability and easier management — all with limited additional investment.

Locarno Film Festival

Malcolm Tunzi

Head of Information Technology