Energy Utility Company in Switzerland, AXPO Chooses Sanbolic

Sanbolic,
Inc. announced that Axpo Holding AG, the
largest an energy utility company in Switzerland, has deployed Sanbolic
Melio software to ensure HA and increase scalability of its Citrix Virtual
Desktop Infrastructure.

AXPO had two datacenters, approximately 30 miles (50km) apart. Each data
center hosted a Citrix XenApp server farm, which was provisioned dynamically
using Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS). AXPO used replication between the
sites to keep the vDisks at both sites synchronized and to provide DR
capability. For the next phase of the implementation, the company was preparing
to rollout XenDesktop to thousands of users. AXPO had three requirements for their VDI environment:

HA, a consistent user experience and
a
cost-efficient infrastructure:

• HA: AXPO needed a HA environment for its XenApp and the planned
  XenDesktop rollout. This required multiple servers for Citrix Provisioning
  Services (PVS), so that the service could remain available during maintenance
  windows or in the event of server failure.
• Consistent
  User Experience: It needed to avoid a degraded
  user experience during peak usage periods, which were most noticeable during
  start-of-day logons. It had previously required additional provisioning servers
  and storage to support I/O requirements.
• Cost-Efficiency: It needed to
  minimize upfront and on-going storage expense. Each Provisioning Server
  required access to all of the XenApp and XenDesktop images. Replicating the
  images among the storage volumes assigned to each Provisioning Server added
  complexity and overhead, as well as increased storage cost.

After a review and evaluation process of
available options, AXPO selected Sanbolic’s Melio VDI software to provide scale-out
of XenDesktop and XenApp, while delivering performance and
improved storage utilization. Active/active storage access and centralized
management through the Melio platform also proved features to ensure image
availability and simplified management.

AXPO obtained the following benefits
with
the Sanbolic Melio VDI solution:

• Flexible scale-out to thousands of Citrix
  desktops, while meeting availability requirements and customer service-level
  expectations.
• Reduced storage capital requirements by
  more than 50%, by eliminating the need to have redundant local copies for each
  Provisioning Server.
• Reduced storage management expense by
  providing centralized management of desktop images.
• Eliminated scheduled outages by enabling
  on-line expansion of the VDI environment.

"Being
prepared to scale out to thousands of virtual desktops without additional
hardware cost, and knowing that we are optimizing server and storage
utilization without slowing down daily operations, is worth a lot to the entire
team here at AXPO," said Daniel Fritz, team manager, AXPO. "Sanbolic’s Melio VDI made this vision a
reality."

Fritz continued: "We are now storing all our images on Melio volumes for HA. Melio VDI lets us add servers and expand volumes on-the-fly
without reboot or downtime. We are prepared to scale to 2,000 XenDesktops at
any point."

"Sanbolic’s Melio VDI delivered the
HA, ease of maintenance and seamless scale-out AXPO required for
its Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop environments. By managing files and
application data independent of the underlying storage medium, Melio now
enables its storage volumes to be easily migrated across hardware and sites to
meet varying service levels and availability requirements," said Eva
Helen, president, COO and co-founder, Sanbolic. "Each AXPO data center can now use a single shared copy of the images,
thereby dramatically increasing utilization and simplifying management.
Moreover, Melio’s embedded replication capability ensures the most recent
copies of all vDisks are synchronized between both data centers in the event of
a site-wide failure."

She continued: "With Melio VDI’s
scale-out capabilities, AXPO can now add additional PVS servers and storage
resources on the fly, without requiring a maintenance window. This allows AXPO
to maintain optimal user experience as they continue to support a growing
number of third-party customers."

Specs of AXPO’s Sanbolic
Melio VDI Solution
AXPO now uses Melio VDI software to enable multiple PVS servers
within each datacenter to share concurrent access to a single volume that
contains all the XenApp server image files (vDisks) or XenDesktop images.

Melio VDI provides active/active storage access to multiple PVS servers,
allowing AXPO to store hundreds of XenApp image files in two volumes: one
volume accessed by the PVS servers in the first data center and the second
volume accessed by the PVS servers in the second data center.

This configuration simplifies vDisk management and maintenance. It also
provides continuous vDisk availability in the event of PVS server failures.
Melio VDI also supports the dynamic addition of PVS servers and on-demand
volume expansion, while the Citrix environment remains on-line. This enables scale-out
of the infrastructure to support thousands of desktops, maintaining a
consistent user experience even during morning boot storms.