The Pensions Trust Selects WhipTail SSD SAN Array

WhipTail Tech, manufacturer of enterprise solid-state SAN appliances, announced that The Pensions Trust integrated WhipTail’s Virtual Desktop XLR8r to overcome the IO throughput and budgetary hurdles standing between them and the rollout of their new virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) with VMware’s View solution.

Since its installation, the Virtual Desktop XLR8r has improved end user satisfaction by eliminating high latency and poor response times, and decreased VDI-associated storage costs.

The Pensions Trust is one of the leading multi-employer occupational pension funds in the UK for the Third Sector. Established for more than 60 years, The Pensions Trust has assets of more than £4.41 billion and serves over 150,000 employers and members.

When The Pensions Trust tried implementing VDI using its existing hard-disk drive SAN, users would complain of slow responses. "Since virtualized desktop infrastructures inherently require high WRITE IOs, the major challenges we experienced with VDI were wrapped around storage performance," said Darren Bull, Business Support Manager, The Pensions Trust. "When looking at how we could increase performance with our existing SAN, the only option was to add way more storage capacity than we actually needed, just to get the spindle count necessary to achieve the IO required. We decided to find a more VDI-friendly storage alternative."

The Pensions Trust decided on the Virtual Desktop XLR8r after considering several options, including solutions that combined a solid-state cache with traditional disk arrays, and ‘man in the middle’ caching solutions that relieve the pressure on the underlying disk. However, these solutions were not a fit from an ease-of-use and cost standpoint.

"With the XLR8r, things that would typically be immediately noticeable to our VDI users, such as cloning operations occurring on the same LUN they were working on, boot storms, AV rollouts and so on disappeared immediately. We were able to watch an HD video on a VDI desktop whilst provisioning a desktop pool on the same LUN, and rebooting about 50 others at the same time. Our viewing was uninterrupted and throughout disk latency was pretty much zero. Its performance on IOPS (especially WRITE IOPS) was dramatic," said Bull.

The Virtual Desktop XLR8r is designed to optimize IO-demanding VDI images. Random workloads – such as those in virtualized scenarios – are challenging for traditional 15K rpm spinning disks. A 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 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 250,000 IOPS in a single 180 watt 2U appliance. As a result, it satisfies green IT initiatives.

"Every day, we and our partners talk with companies worldwide like The Pensions Trust – companies looking for a VDI storage solution that will give them the performance they need without the cost required to get there with traditional storage solutions. With the XLR8r, we’re helping these companies pay pennies per IO instead of dollars per IO," said Brian Feller, VP of sales and operations at WhipTail. "We encourage customers to do their due diligence in comparing XLR8r to the other options available to them. After all, if they do, the decision is really a no brainer. The Virtual Desktop XLR8r was made specifically to help alleviate the storage performance, space, power and cost concerns associated with VDI deployments."

"Since we have implemented the XLR8r, users have stopped mentioning any slowness with our VMware View deployment," said Bull. "At its slowest, it [XLR8r] has always been much quicker than our old SAN on its best day. This implementation has enabled us to complete our VDI deployment with total confidence that the underlying storage platform can handle anything we throw at it."

"Years ago, we introduced iSCSI as the storage protocol. Now we introduce WhipTail and its line of XLR8r solutions as the affordable SSD SAN," said Jur Faber, CEO, Consolidate IT, VAD for WhipTail in the UK and Europe. "With WhipTail’s entirely flash-based architecture, customers now have a truly scalable centralized storage solution, with all the known benefits of a SAN. It’s perfect for VMware VDI and database customers that simply do not accept the latency seen on standard mechanical storage that keeps the CPU and the customers waiting."