University of Portland Selects WhipTail

Faced with the challenge of improving campus-wide
PC kiosk performance, the University of Portland
in Portland, OR., needed a solution that enabled 250 simultaneous users
but could scale to thousands of simultaneous users.

WhipTail Technologies, Inc., in silicon storage arrays, had the solution to
their problem.

Campus kiosks and computer labs are run on a VMware View environment
utilizing a Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) architecture. They had
experienced issues with data bottlenecks and access delays, problems common to
large VDI deployments employing disk storage. Needless to say, user
satisfaction was less than favorable.

WhipTail proposed a silicon storage array as the hub for their VDI workload. This solution presented an easy,
flawless fit into the university’s existing VDI environment, delivering
improved data velocity, efficiency and convenience. Data now flows with
immediate response times and the environment is scalable to more than 1,000
simultaneous users.

"One of the biggest
challenges we faced was disk performance issues commonly associated with larger
VDI environments. Due to the way in which we are leveraging VDI and application
virtualization, it was critical we had the necessary disk subsystem to provide
the optimal experience," said Paul Disbury, CIO at the University of
Portland. "We selected the WhipTail
array because it was a solution that naturally fit into our Cisco UCS
environment, and it delivered on the WRITE speed, protocol support, energy
savings and ease of integration necessary to support our existing VDI
framework. With the integration of WhipTail, students and professors will be
able to access desktops and applications without interruption. The goal was to
provide an experience that was equal to or better than the local PC. With the
addition of the WhipTail storage array, we have finally accomplished that."

WhipTail secured this partnership with the University of Portland
through MCPc, Inc., a partner to University of Portland and a member of WhipTail’s
VAR program. MCPc’s referral to WhipTail reinforces that the silicon
storage array was the best choice to accelerate data and eliminate performance
lags for the customer.

"We are thrilled to have
brought the value of WhipTail to our friends at University of Portland. The
benefits of WhipTail’s silicon storage array will unleash the performance of
their VMWare VDI environment to unknown levels," says Darin Haines, CTO
at MCPc.

WhipTail’s silicon storage array runs on less than 200 watts and
supports up to 12TB of MLC flash with 250,000 IOs in a small 2U array populated by MLC flash drives. The array is tuned to
reduce latency in high I/O environments and possesses a proprietary operating
system designed to overcome the write performance and longevity challenges
typically associated with MLC flash.

"Universities benefit
from VDI computing because their large user populations need immediate access
to the same networks and resources," said Dan Crain, CEO of WhipTail.
"Successful VDI deployment is a
challenge, though, because virtualized environments demand a substantial amount
of data to move quickly, and many solutions require changes to the IT
framework. At WhipTail we meet these challenges with flash storage arrays built
for data performance and velocity that have the affinity to work within
existing IT environments."