---
title: "Three hundred people sign in at nine, and nothing slows down"
url: "https://www.iopstor.com/case-studies/three-hundred-people-sign-in-at-nine-and-nothing-slows-down"
type: "Case Studies"
published: "2026-09-22"
updated: "2026-10-15"
description: "Three hundred people signing in within minutes of each other brought a spinning-disk file server to its knees. Software-defined storage on enterprise SSD absorbed the peak, and has done for three years."
---

# Three hundred people sign in at nine, and nothing slows down

Three hundred people signing in within minutes of each other brought a spinning-disk file server to its knees. Software-defined storage on enterprise SSD absorbed the peak, and has done for three years.

## Challenge

Every morning more than three hundred people signed in within a few minutes of each other, and the profiles and home folders they were all reaching for sat on one file server built from spinning disks. Those disks could not serve that many reads and writes at once. Signing in took minutes, and the first hour of the working day went on waiting.

## Solution

IOPStor recommended enterprise SSD. It cost more than the budget allowed, so consumer NVMe drives went in instead, and they reached end of life within three months, worn out by the volume a three-hundred-user morning puts through them. What went in after that was not simply better drives: IOPStor software-defined storage on enterprise SSD, sized for the peak rather than the daily average.

## Results

Three years on, nobody notices nine o'clock. Three hundred people sign in together and the storage is not the thing they wait for. The peak no longer comes close to what the array can serve, so the same system takes on new staff without another conversation about drives.

- **300+** — Signing in within minutes of each other
- **1500+** — Sign ins Every week, at full speed
- **3 Years+** — Since the last slow morning

THE ARCHITECTURE

## What we deployed

Not a faster drive. A different architecture, sized for the morning peak rather than the daily average.

- IOPStor software-defined storage
- Enterprise SSD, sized for the peak not the average
- Profiles and home folders served from one pool
- Headroom for staff who have not been hired yet

## Is your storage the thing everyone waits for?

Tell us what you are running and we will size a solution.

[Contact us](/contact-us)

## All Case Studies

- [A post-production company grows from 8 people to 100 on IOPStor storage](/case-studies/a-post-production-company-grows-from-8-people-to-100-on-iopstor-storage.md): Eight people passing files from hand to hand became a hundred across video editing, 3D and After Effects, working from IOPStor storage that gives each department its own pool and its own bandwidth.
- [After its 100 TB RAID failed, a hospital chose IOPStor for storage it can rely on](/case-studies/after-its-100-tb-raid-failed-a-hospital-chose-iopstor-for-storage-it-can-rely-on.md): The hospital's 100 TB RAID failed, and the company that supplied it would not repair it. IOPStor replaced it with a 100 TB NAS and a single compute node, protected by snapshots and a disaster-recovery system that keeps a copy offsite in the cloud.
- [Six branches and a hundred users on one IOPStor hyper-converged system](/case-studies/six-branches-and-a-hundred-users-on-one-iopstor-hyper-converged-system.md): A manufacturer whose branches each held their own copy of the data now runs six sites on a single IOPStor hyper-converged system, with every employee working inside it through VMware Horizon.