Deploying a High Speed and Affordable Storage Solution in a VDI Environment

Challenges

Vandis has fostered an ongoing relationship with this fabric and textile company over many years by completing previous projects and continually engaging in future plans. This company has worked with Vandis’ Lead Systems Architect and Lead Infrastructure Architect across a wide range of technology projects. Past projects have included implementing a new wireless environment and upgrading their security solution. Working with the same Vandis employees that are familiar with their network has strengthen our relationship and allowed for continuous open communication between both organizations. When the time came for this company to purchase a new storage system for their VDI environment, they looked towards Vandis to provide them with the best solutions to achieve their goals.

Selection Criteria

This fabric and textile company decided to undertake this project because of their need for a high speed and affordable storage solution for their second generation VDI environment. They were looking for a solution that was easy to use, simple to deploy and had great performance. If the implementation of the solution went well and the company was happy with the performance, they were also considering the same storage system as an alternative to their existing unified storage system within their VMware server environment.  Vandis had to work within a tight window as they were given only one month to complete the sales cycle and implement the new solution for the customer’s VDI environment because of the upcoming expiration of the existing storage solution. The organization was looking to observe how the new solution would perform after implementation as this would give them adequate time to make a decision regarding their general storage solution before it was up for renewal. With the specific needs of this project taken into account, Vandis proposed three different solutions to achieve their goal. The three storage solutions that Vandis suggested were NetApp, Nimble Storage and EMC.

Solution

After reviewing each solution with Vandis and determining what would be the best fit for their environment, the company chose Nimble Storage. They were impressed with the capability of the technology and put a great deal of trust into Vandis’ Lead Systems Architect recommendations. The customer purchased a single CS300 for their VDI environment and a pair of CS300’s along with a CS215 for all of their primary line of business storage. Vandis performed the basic installation and setup of the solution while also walking the company through the best networking and VMware practices for utilizing iSCSI storage. This was the company’s first time using iSCSI storage so Vandis worked with them to integrate it within their network equipment and to make sure proper redundancy was in place. In addition, Vandis performed a transfer of knowledge of the Nimble Storage tool set, allowing them to take advantage of the snapshot, replication, and application level integration tools that Nimble offers with every array.

Results

Since the implementation of the Nimble Storage solution, performance has been exceptional and met all the requirements the company was hoping to achieve. Replication and snapshot have worked flawlessly and the company was able to reduce the datacenter footprint of their storage systems by over 12RU of space and to half the power consumption of the legacy system.