NATS Selects Violin Flash Arrays

Violin Memory, Inc. has been selected to provide NATS, the provider of air navigation services
and solutions in the UK, with flash memory arrays for its forthcoming 6,000
seat VDI rollout.

NATS is to implement a multi-million pound project to transfer all of its
desktop IT services to a cloud-based infrastructure. By creating a secure,
virtual desktop environment NATS expects to reduce costs by £9 million over the
next four years, shrink its environmental footprint, improve flexibility, meet
their demanding SLAs and deliver improved quality of service to approximately
4,500 users.

This is the largest implementation of cloud-based infrastructure in the
transport sector to date. It will allow more effective collaboration between
NATS staff and business partners across NATS locations, over multiple
geographic regions. Staff will have access to the services, information and
applications they need for their particular role, creating a customised
experience.

The solution will be based on Violin Memory 6000 Series Flash Memory Arrays
that each provide up to 1 million IOPS at low latency. HA was of paramount
concern and Violin Flash Memory Arrays offer enterprise levels of
redundancy.

"To cater for the heavy loads
generated by boot storms and logoff periods, a traditional SAN based solution
would have required many shelves of disks, consumed more power, required
significant cooling and incurred higher maintenance costs," explains
Gavin Walker, CIO for NATS.

He continues: "We needed a
high-performance solution which would scale to at least 6,000 seats with no
appreciable degradation to user experience. Using Violin Memory will also
introduce a resilient architecture, avoiding single points of failure."

Garry Veale, MD Violin Memory EMEA, said: "This is a significant project which we believe gives NATS a better
return on their application investments, delivering better user experience, at
less infrastructure cost. They will be able to deploy wholly new application capabilities to
their user population without having to involve any ‘rip and replace
technologies’