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Optimising the desktop

Editorial Type: Case Study     Date: 09-2015    Views: 2332      





VESK, the UK’s largest provider of hosted virtual desktops, has chosen NexentaStor to support its increasing storage and IOPS requirements and growing portfolio of cloud services

In 2009, after nine months of development, the founders of an already established IT support business set up VESK, one of the first companies to implement virtual desktops in the UK. Today, VESK is a privately held London based VDI specialist that owns its headquarters and the data centre infrastructure from the ground up. VESK is the fastest-growing supplier of virtual desktops in the UK. Its customers range from local government organisations with more than 500 users to small businesses with as few as three users. VESK has expanded into providing platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) from its three data centres in London, one in Singapore, and another in the US.

SWAMPED BY THE SAN
As it added more users, VESK needed a storage solution that could grow while delivering the required IOPS to support its client base. The solution also needed to provide performance levels suitable for high density applications, both in-house and for its clients.

The company progressed through three different storage solutions. It began with the Dell MD 3000is entry-level SAN, but performance began to suffer when it hit 150 users and VESK could not take advantage of any caching store even though it was 90% empty. The company then upgraded to an EqualLogic solution at a cost of £40,000. While the built-in SAN replication was an attractive feature, the product fell down because of its low caching ability and limited network speed.

While VESK had more than 70 servers running on Hypervisors, the issue was not the number of servers but the SAN. VESK realised it required bigger input/output operations per second (IOPS) and high performance all the time to make its system work for all users. Delivering a VDI required high performance and high availability to run a large number of applications, such as Outlook, Sage, and others.

VESK's business model could not support this underutilisation of expensive storage. Management of the SANs threatened to swamp the system administrators and significantly increased the individual cost of each user to VESK.

HIGH AVAILABILITY, HIGH PERFORMANCE
After a strong recommendation from a colleague, VESK looked at ZFS-based NexentaStor and then went with VA Technologies, a Nexenta Reseller and high performance system integrator based in Bedfordshire. VESK selected a NexentaStor High Availability (HA) SAN solution, which provided VESK with more than 130TB of raw storage, as well as read and write SSD caching to present Network File System (NFS) shares to its Citrix XenServer Hypervisors. The storage arrays were configured to provide complete JBOD redundancy, both with the data drives and SSD caches, so in the event of a JBOD loss, the storage system would still be available to the hypervisors.

VESK's primary site is based in London. Disaster recovery locations at the three remaining data centres replicate the data over high speed interconnects every hour, to provide quick rollback of data and automatic failover should the primary site fail. NexentaStor delivered the solution VESK needed to provide the required IOPS for a VDI environment. With other suppliers, VESK would have had to buy complete new solutions each time it approached limits on a SAN. But with NexentaStor the company can order the same equipment and build another SAN, because NexentaStor allows it to cluster SANs and simply add more when needed.

VESK turned to NexentaStor as it needed a solution that could provide an agile and expandable architecture, one that is scalable to overcome random IOPS and could grow with the company. “We have huge IOPS requirements for a range of I/O (Input/Output) profiles and Nexenta enables us to optimise and fulfil application and desktop needs from the storage layer upward,” said Richard De Napoli, head of infrastructure at VESK. “The solution gave us a strong storage foundation to expand into IaaS, PaaS, and DaaS.”



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