UK Virtual Desktop Provider VESK Has Chosen Nexenta

Nexenta Systems, Inc. announced that VESK Ltd, a UK provider of hosted virtual desktops, has chosen NexentaStor to support its increasing storage and IO/s requirements and growing portfolio of cloud services.

Founded in 2009, VESK’s customers range from local government organisations with more than 500 employees to SMBs with as few as three users. It was one of the first companies to implement and support the VDI in Britain and, in recent years, it has expanded into providing cost-effective, accessible platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) capabilities from its three data centres – located in London, Singapore and the US.

However, as its client base and cloud offering grew, VESK continually found storage issues barring the way to future and sustainable growth – not only could its current business model no longer support any under utilisation of expensive storage equipment, but the management of an extended SAN risked swamping system administrators. Equally, with the need for a higher IO/s and 100% performance level uptime for high density applications, recurring issues like low caching ability and limited network speed further constricted the company’s development. Despite having more than 70 hyper-visor servers running, the legacy SAN was the crux of the problem.

VESK turned to NexentaStor as it needed a solution that could provide an agile and expandable architecture, one that is scalable to overcome random IO/s and could grow with the company.

“We have huge IO/s requirements for a range of I/O (Input/Output) profiles and Nexenta enables us to optimise and fulfill application and desktop needs from the storage layer upward,” said Richard De Napoli, head of infrastructure, VESK. “The solution gave us a strong storage foundation to expand into IaaS, PaaS, and DaaS.“

The solution, NexentaStor HA Cluster in a SAN, provides VESK with more than 130TB of raw storage, as well as read and write SSD caching. DR – backup and retrieval – is also increased with VESK’s three DR locations connect via 10GbE dark fibre and provided with an hourly data auto-sync. Furthermore, unlike with other suppliers’ solutions, NexentaStor enables VESK to cluster so it can add more SANs when required, removing the need to purchase a new solution when capacity is insight.

“VESK needed a storage solution that could keep up with, and facilitate, its continued growth,” explained Mark Jordan, VP, GM EMEA, Nexenta. “Its previous setups were simply not agile enough and prevented it from meeting the high demands of its client base. NexentaStor not only empowers VESK to provide for its existing customers with higher performance and reliability, but it also means VESK has a flexible and scalable architecture that can be easily expanded to meet the needs of tomorrow’s users too.”

The business was conducted via VA Technologies, a Nexenta reseller and system integrator based in Bedfordshire, UK.

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