Frankfurter Bankgesellschaft Cuts VDI Storage Costs “by 93%”

Atlantis Computing, Inc. announced that Frankfurter Bankgesellschaft, an international private bank with 7 billion Swiss Francs under management, has implemented Atlantis ILIO as part of its Citrix XenDesktop desktop virtualisation project to reduce the cost of storage by 93 per cent and improve the user experience.

Axept AG, a Swisscom IT services company, recommended and delivered the Atlantis ILIO solution to Frankfurter Bankgesellschaft, cutting the bank’s VDI storage costs and solving the performance challenges that were preventing the VDI project from being deployed company-wide.
 
"Atlantis ILIO is an enabler for VDI. If you don’t solve the storage I/O problem, the cost per desktop is extremely high. For Frankfurter Bank, the cost per desktop was 2,000 CHF using our SAN," said Zdravko Ruzicic, Head of Systems & Networkengineering, Frankfurter Bankgesellschaft. "If you don’t solve the cost and performance issues intelligently, management won’t accept the cost of VDI and it will lead to project cancellation. Atlantis ILIO enabled us to implement VDI for a lower cost than a physical PC by reusing our existing SAN more efficiently and reducing our storage costs by 93 per cent in the process."

Frankfurter Bankgesellschaft wanted to implement a virtual desktop client environment to provide secure and reliable remote access for employees and contract developers that could be managed by their IT staff. IT management was committed to the virtualisation strategy, but the pilot VDI deployment suffered from severe I/O bottlenecks and users complained about poor performance.

The bank considered several options to improve storage performance, but costs were staggering, particularly given the scale of the bank’s deployment and limited resources available. Choosing Atlantis ILIO allowed the bank to reduce IOPS required from the storage system, cut the storage capacity consumed and improved application response time for a fraction of the cost of buying additional SAN or SSD storage. Using Atlantis ILIO, Frankfurter Bank was able to reduce the cost of storage per desktop from 2,000 CHF per desktop to 132 CHF, or the equivalent of $2,223 USD down to $150 USD.

"Frankfurter Bankgesellschaft needed to find a solution to their VDI storage problem that could deliver performanceequal to a PC, with a lower cost than a PC, or they would have to cancel the VDI project," said Oliver Grossenbacher, Sales Manager at Axept AG. "Atlantis ILIO was a perfect software solution that integrated seamlessly into the bank’s existing Citrix XenDesktop infrastructure and allowed them to leverage the existing storage rather than buy additional expensive SAN or SSD storage. We have many other customers that find themselves in similar situations as they try to grow their VDI deployment, and we are very excited to be able to help them implement Atlantis ILIO in order to make their VDI deployment successful."

To read the Frankfurter Bankgesellschaft case study