Switzerland’s Furniture and Carpet Retailer Möbel Hubacher Selects Atlantis USX

When Möbel Hubacher AG, Switzerland’s furniture and carpet retailer, wanted to give its 150 employees greater mobility on its massive show floor, it turned to Atlantis USX to help create a performant VDI.

The virtual desktop PCs, with USX software-defined storage, give Möbel Hubacher employees faster access to information at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions.

Möbel Hubacher’s decision to transform to VDI came as its Microsoft Terminal Server Farm was nearing the end of its lifecycle. The company’s IT staff saw this as an opportunity to convert their entire environment to virtualised desktops with VMware. At the same time, it needed to ensure a high level of performance to support its demanding applications.

“Our purchasing department uses performance intensive applications with large product files that can be as big as 500MB,” said Möbel Hubacher CIO Daniel Rado. “When those files are opened, the performance of our previous system dipped dramatically. We wanted to improve performance and give our employees the ability to be more mobile on the sales floor.“

After reviewing solutions from HP, Dell EqualLogic and others, USX was selected for its affordability and performance. To support its virtual desktops, Möbel Hubacher deployed USX with a solution provided by Bechtle IT System House Bern, running on converged IBM servers.

“We looked at solutions from several resellers and discovered that Atlantis partner Bechtle IT System House Bern was the only partner to offer a solution that included in-memory technology,” Rado said. “To use RAM for storage is every IT manager’s dream as there is no faster storage medium and we needed a solution that would be able to handle our workload.“

Upon installing the USX solution, Möbel Hubacher began noticing improvements in performance. Every virtual desktop that ran on Atlantis performed faster than their physical PC workstations with local SSDs. With deduplication rates of up to 90%, each of the servers is running 50 desktops with one master image of 50GB.

“The Atlantis platform has been up and running for a year and we haven’t experienced any issues at all,” Rado said. “Entire new desktops can be rolled out in 15 minutes, instead of the full hour it used to take with our previous storage solution, and updates are much easier to administer. Atlantis Computing has given us a platform that can overcome almost anything we throw at it.“

“Customers like Möbel Hubacher depend on their VDI environments to empower their employees to improve sales and provide better services to their customers,” said Bob Davis, Atlantis CMO. “We are proud to help Möbel Hubacher achieve its VDI goals with a software defined solution that delivers the performance they need, and more, at a fraction of the cost of traditional SAN or NAS solutions from our competitors.“