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Current Filter: Storage>>>>>Case study> Educating neater Editorial Type: Case Study Date: 07-2015 Views: 2356 Key Topics: Storage Virtualisation Flash SSD SAN VDI Key Companies: Datacore M-Tech Systems OCZ Key Products: SANsymphony-V OCZ RevoDrive Key Industries: Education | |||
| Early VDI education adopters, Uplands Community College, have invigorated their VDI and application environment and stopped performance bottlenecks In an all too familiar story of lagging remote desktops, Neil Harris, ICT Support Manager, Uplands Community College takes you through their journey to cost-effective resolution and unassailable leaps in performance for thin clients. A centre of excellence and technical specialism senior school and sixth form college, Uplands Community College (UCC) in East Sussex aims to offer its one thousand students and 200 staff a consistent onsite and remote learning environment. Six years ago Neil was instrumental in the march towards a flexible Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) through VMware's Horizon VDI. The install gave students remote access to a central source for software application delivery and for document storage while providing dynamic desktop provisioning as numbers fluctuated with each intake. It also secured student's irreplaceable coursework which had previously been subjected to austere storage limits. But, like so many others, the college's VDI experience came at a price - the heavy demands it places on storage hardware to provide high performance, non-stop availability and manageability that can accommodate ongoing fluctuations.
STRETCHING LIFE EXPECTANCY For students and staff, the ageing hardware started to impact each day with regular performance bottlenecks especially at morning login as the ageing hardware struggled to cope with peaks of data throughput. Tipping the experience further still was the install of new Windows applications, alongside the intensive student use of graphic applications and video streaming. Budget had also fluctuated according to student numbers, so to stem the decline the college conducted a seamless overhaul to address the weakest links in the VDI chain, and to do so with a keen eye on the overall spend. Neil worked with the colleges' existing education advisor, M-Tech Systems Ltd. They formally assessed the infrastructure and identified the weakest points for the thick and thin clients to lie with the integrated SAS drives within the ageing HP DL storage hardware. They recommended an upgrade to the latest version of SANsymphony-v10 merging the colleges' two separate SANs into one highly available, easily maintained, highly performant pool. This could be achieved simply by slotting in low cost, high performance Flash storage that could be added into a standard server and cost a quarter of the price of dedicated storage. This Flash storage took the form of affordable OCZ RevoDrive 960GB Solid State Drive Flash slotted in directly into the storage pool to feed hungry applications. This, together with the unique way SANsymphony utilises its own caching technology rather than committing to disk, would provide unassailable leaps in performance for thin clients.
WAITING TIMES REDUCED Neil is now able to recreate all the desktops across 100 virtual machines in under 20 minutes by simple point and click. ICT can now continue cost monitoring without fear of over-provisioning, with DataCore's thin provisioning capabilities, SANsymphony presents pre-defined virtual volumes from the central storage pool to the applications, while the capacity is allocated automatically when really needed.
Neil urges other education establishments not to give up on their remote desktop journey. "Since using DataCore, our storage-related spending has been reduced by over 50%, and we provide a first rate user experience which we now have achieved - with a few tweaks along the way."
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