Rocori School District Deploys NexGen Storage

NexGen
Storage, Inc. announced its n5 Series storage system has been deployed by
ROCORI School District for its district-wide VDI.

The school district consolidated its VDI storage and the data storage for all
of its other applications and systems onto a single NexGen n5 Series storage
system. Based on a hybrid solid-state architecture, the n5 Series storage
system provides storage QoS capabilities that enable users
to manage mixed workloads and guarantee performance for all applications.

With n5 storage system, ROCORI School District achieved:

• Capacity and performance to store all its data on a single storage system
  and to accommodate future growth requirements
• 10x the performance for the same price versus a competitive name-brand solution
• 90% reduction in rack space with the same IOPS versus a competitive name-brand
  solution

"We’re
able to use NexGen for all our workloads, including VDI, which greatly
simplifies management," said Brian Michalski, technology director,
ROCORI School District. "The other
solutions we evaluated would have required us to run VDI on a separate SAN in
isolation from all of our other applications and systems, complicating our
environment and forcing us to manage multiple storage solutions."

Minnesota-based ROCORI School District is
taking a forward-thinking approach to storage. When it decided to deploy a
virtual infrastructure of up to 1,000 desktops, it initiated an evaluation of
the latest SAN technologies to identify the best solution to support its
planned VDI environment designed to meet the needs of its computer labs,
students, faculty and staff.

It selected an n5
Series storage system, which provided 100,000 IOPS and 22TBs of usable
capacity, all within a 3U footprint. NexGen’s Storage QoS feature gave the
school district the confidence to combine intermittently IO-intensive
applications such as VDI on the same storage as other high-priority
applications. The District is currently using NexGen storage to accommodate all
of its applications and systems, including its computer lab VDI deployment, Exchange 2010, multiple SQL Server instances, web servers, vCenter, the Skyward student information system, the district file
servers, and its domain controllers.

Most importantly, the NexGen system allows
the district’s IT staff to assign mission-critical policies
to its VDI deployment, Exchange Server, SQL Server instances, and Skyward
application, so it can guarantee the performance necessary to maintain targeted
performance levels for all of these applications.

The ROCORI School District will continue to
expand its VDI initiative into multiple computer labs over the next couple of
years. The NexGen solution has sufficient capacity and performance headroom to
support the district’s projected growth and planned initiatives, including a
student-friendly ‘bring your own laptop’ program for high school
students, in which each student laptop will run VMware View and its
corresponding virtual desktop will reside on the n5.

"Datacenters
with mixed-workload environments need storage solutions that provide
performance consistency and predictability for all applications at a low cost," said Chris McCall, VP of marketing, NexGen Storage. "By allowing IT administrators to run other
workloads along with VDI on shared storage, NexGen’s n5 storage systems provide
complete control over application storage performance within VDI environments.
What’s more, it provides superior VDI economics by allowing organizations to
consolidate, reduce storage footprint and save money from both a $/IOP and $/GB
perspective."