Anglia Ruskin University Opts for Violin Memory

Violin Memory, Inc. helped Anglia
Ruskin University virtualise nearly 1,000 desktops for 32,000 students.

Realizing the bottlenecks of disk, the university replaced their existing
architecture with a VDI solution that used Violin’s 3000 Series flash Memory
Array.

The Challenge

According to Gregor Waddell, assistant director of Anglia Ruskin
University, the University wanted to provide a modern and attractive desktop to
its students and staff, leverage recent technology innovations to reduce cost,
and improve the delivery of the latest software to those who need them
irrespective of location. It also needed to reduce power
consumption and contribute to sustainability objectives within its corporate
plan.

Anglia Ruskin had an understanding of the advantages of
virtualisation for its server infrastructure and had already pushed almost all
of its server estate over to VMWare Sphere. However, the real limiting factor
was the back-end storage performance in the VDI environment. The storage
performance required a solution that would scale to at least 800 concurrent
users with no appreciable degradation to user experience, and introduce a
resilient architecture, avoiding single points of failure.

The Solution:

After considering several options, Anglia Ruskin selected
Violin’s 3000 Series flash Memory Array for its ability to handle 220,000
random write IOPS in 4K blocks: more than twenty times the performance of a
comparable SAN disk array.

"We chose a 3000 Series
Violin flash Memory Array because it’s very well-engineered, reliable, and
offers high storage performance," said Waddell. "Storage performance is key to VDI, and our
existing traditional spinning disk did not offer good enough. The virtual machines needed 800-100 IOPS per
desktop, most of which were writes."

To cater to the heavy I/O loads generated by hundreds of users
logging on and launching apps, a traditional SAN based solution would have
required many shelves of disks, consumed more power, required
cooling, and incurred higher maintenance costs than the Violin Memory-based
solution. The project was part of an upgrade from an estate of around 4,500
Windows X-based PCs to Windows 7 – supporting a student
population of 32,000. Anglia Ruskin was keen to utilise virtualisation
technology to benefit the university.

ROI

After deploying the new VDI solution with Violin’s
flash Memory Array, the University saw significant benefits and cost savings.
The new desktop was initially launched within a new IT open access area in 2011
and is now being rolled out to a wider base including the staff.

"Feedback from our students and Student Union has been
excellent," said Waddell. "Our
architecture has allowed speedy additions of new software such as Adobe Dreamweaver.
We have also realised potential software license savings where software can be
licensed on a concurrent basis rather than a ‘per seat’ basis."

Benefits:

• Hosted VDI, associated software costs, training,
  consultancy and 400 thin clients had a total budget similar to that required to
  provide traditional PCs.
• Additional users may be added up to the existing server capacity of 600-700
  concurrent users by either adding thin or zero clients or by re-using existing
  PCs.
• Predicted power total consumption is <60-70% of comparable Windows 7 based
  PCs (using thin client devices). This includes all server and storage power
  consumption.