Hawai’i Medical Service Association Deploys Atlantis Ilio

Atlantis Computing, Inc. announced that the
Hawai’i Medical Service Association (HMSA), an independent licensee of the Blue
Cross and Blue Shield Association, has deployed Atlantis ILIO storage
optimization software with ioMemory products from Fusion-io, Inc. as part of the
first phase of its VMware View rollout.

The cost and operational
complexity of maintaining and refreshing thousands of physical PCs drove HMSA
to rethink its desktop computing strategy and initiate a switch to virtual
desktops.

HMSA chose ILIO to provide a better-than-PC user experience,
while increasing the number of virtual desktops per server from 30 to 200.

"There was a confluence of business reasons that drove us to
begin the migration to desktop virtualization," said Stuart Shirai,
manager, network and telecom information systems, HMSA. "We didn’t want
to spend the time and money required to do another desktop refresh and users
wanted a variety of devices that we couldn’t practically support.
Virtualization was the cornerstone of solving both problems."

After
managing two separate desktop refresh projects in 2003 and 2009, Shirai was
reluctant to manage the time, cost, and frustration of replacing HMSA’s entire
fleet of more than 2,000 physical PCs. In addition to replacing the PCs, HMSA
was bound by compliance requirements to ensure that HDDs of the previous
PCs were disposed of in accordance with HIPAA regulations.

"I had my heart set on avoiding another desktop refresh,"
continued Shirai. "My goal was to render the endpoint irrelevant. If we
can centralize desktops, we can avoid the desktop refresh, open up bring your
own device (BYOD), and simplify security."

After having success with
server virtualization, Shirai looked in-house to leverage his team’s
virtualization expertise and apply it to virtualizing desktops.

"I saw that a lot of other people were making the mistake of
treating a virtual desktop like it was a virtual server," continued
Shirai."What we learned in the early going, was that the I/O profiles on a
desktop are radically different than a server, and we avoided making that
mistake by building our VDI architecture to deliver more IOPS per virtual desktop
than our physical PCs."

Shirai and his team found that the I/O profile for
a virtualized Windows desktop, was write-intensive, required a large
number of low latency IOPS to perform well, and suffered from a phenomenon
known as the I/O blender effect that makes it difficult for storage systems to
keep pace. With traditional shared storage, it wasn’t able to deliver
equal performance to a physical PC. After researching the options, HMSA
selected ILIO storage optimization software in combination with flash
memory-based ioMemory to deliver the combination of performance
and cost.

"The combination of Atlantis ILIO and Fusion-io has delivered
the performance we wanted at a cost per desktop that is comparable to a
physical PC," continued Shirai. "With the performance of our virtual
desktops, we believe users will be beating down our door to get a virtual
desktop."

Mark Choi, an HMSA infrastructure engineer, led the effort to
design the VDI architecture. After testing traditional SAN/NAS storage, Choi
found that they only provide about one-tenth of IOPS of their existing physical PC hard drives.

"We are trying to eliminate any dependency on our SAN for
performance," said Mark Choi, infrastructure engineer, HMSA. "All of
the desktops are stored locally on each server in the Atlantis ILIO datastore
that connects to a Fusion ioMemory device, while the users’ personal documents,
settings, and application data are redirected to our shared SAN storage."

Using ILIO and Fusion-io, HMSA was able to achieve 10 times the IOPS
of a normal PC HDD and deliver similar performance to a laptop with its
own SSD drive. HMSA virtual desktops have a boot time of 7 seconds and launch
applications such as Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel in less than 1
second.

"The physical desktops we have provide users with
anywhere from 50 to 150 IOPS per desktop," continued Choi. "The VDI
architectures with traditional SAN/NAS storage only gave us 10 to 20 IOPS per
desktop, which wasn’t acceptable to us. The combination of Atlantis ILIO and
Fusion-io enables us to guarantee 1000 IOPS per desktop. In some cases, I have
seen as much as 20,000 IOPS per desktop."

While performance was the
primary driver, it was also critical that HMSA be able to maximize the number
of users that could be run on a single server equipped with an ioDrive to make
the project economically viable. With a 40GB image, HMSA was only able to fit
30 virtual desktops per 1.2TB ioDrive card. ILIO reduced the size of
the virtual desktop images by 90% to 4GB, enabling HMSA to reach a density of
200 virtual desktops per server with 30% of the drive still available for
growth.

"Before Atlantis ILIO, we were able to fit 30 desktops per
ioMemory device," continued Choi. "With Atlantis ILIO, we can now get
up to 200 virtual desktops on the same server and ioMemory device, which makes
delivering that level of performance cost effective."

After completing
their VDI deployment, HMSA plans to launch a BYOD initiative to give users the
option to use their own devices such as smartphones, iPads, and MacBooks to
access their HMSA desktop.

"We intend to launch a BYOD initiative as our existing physical
PCs depreciate and replace them with virtual desktops that users can access
from any device they like," continued Shirai.

"Achieving equal or better
performance than a PC is critical to adoption and success of VDI," said
Gary Orenstein, VP of products, Fusion-io."The combination of Atlantis
ILIO software and Fusion ioMemory enables customers like HMSA to deliver
amazing desktop performance and increase the number of desktops per server,
making VDI not only economically viable, but in many cases, preferred."

"Many of our customers have found that delivering enough IOPS to equal
physical PC performance is challenging and costly," said Bernard
Harguindeguy, CEO, Atlantis Computing. "HMSA is one of the few customers
that understood the IOPS problem from the beginning and applied their
virtualization expertise to build an impressive VDI deployment at a low cost
per desktop with Atlantis ILIO and Fusion-io."

To watch the HMSA video case study