Finkelstein & Partners Has Chosen WhipTail SSD SAN

WhipTail Tech announced that Finkelstein & Partners has chosen WhipTail’s 1.5 TB Virtual Desktop XLR8r Hybrid edition as its storage component in migrating from a traditional physical server approach to a virtualized one. With the XLR8r appliance, Finkelstein & Partners has improved performance in key areas, such as Microsoft Exchange, and saved a substantial amount of disk space.

Finkelstein & Partners is the umbrella that includes firms such as Jacoby & Meyers; and Fine, Olin & Anderman. In total, the firm has 350 attorneys and staff distributed across 17 locations nationwide.

"I was very intrigued by the XLR8r SAN because of the built-in dedupe and compression functionalities, and the incredibly higher performance due to the use of SSDs," said John Pasqualicchio, senior systems administrator for Finkelstein & Partners. "In segregating Exchange 2010 to WhipTail’s XLR8r, for instance, we’ve seen a huge increase in the speed and response time."

For the same cost as the 14 TB shelf Finkelstein had been considering, the firm bought the XLR8r and filled it with 1.5 TB of solid-state storage and 6 TB of conventional hard disk storage. That 7.5 TB well surpassed the efficiency of the 14 TB shelf they would have gotten for the same price.

"For every virtual machine that we house, we need to allocate a specific amount of disk. If we have a virtual machine with 40 GB of space, we need to have that 40 GB of space available on our SAN. That said, multiply by, say 50 virtual machines, you’re up to 2 TB worth of storage," said Pasqualicchio. "With the XLR8r appliance and deduplication, we were able to mitigate that to a major degree. We’re talking going from 2 TB of traditional storage to about a half TB on XLR8r [running all the same stuff] because of the deduplication and compression ratio we’re getting with XLR8r."

The Virtual Desktop XLR8r is specifically designed to optimize IO-demanding VDI images. Random workloads – such as those in virtualized scenarios – are extremely challenging for traditional 15K rpm spinning disks. A fully loaded production-ready virtual desktop image requires between 20-40 IOPS to run at an acceptable level. A standard HDD array only runs at 200 IOPS per drive. The math becomes binary at this point. The Virtual Desktop XLR8r creates a dramatically larger "performance pool," thereby eliminating disk contention and alleviating up to 90 percent of the storage costs associated with VDI. Since the XLR8r is completely solid-state in nature, it offers 90X less latency and 150,000 IOPS in a single 180 watt 2U appliance. Not surprisingly, it more than satisfies many Green IT initiatives.

"The challenges Finkelstein faced while considering virtualization infrastructure storage options are certainly not uncommon," said James Candelaria, CTO of WhipTail. "With the growing popularity of virtual desktop environments, storage performance, space and power concerns, and cost are all key factors that go into making that final decision. With our Virtual Desktop XLR8r, this decision is becoming an easier one to make."