Kenton School and St Wilfrid’s Catholic High School Acquire Whiptail Flash Arrays

WhipTail Technologies, Inc. has helped two UK schools
improve the hardware and application performance of their new VDI using its Accela
Flash storage arrays.

The technology provides scalable IOPS,
ensuring that educational institutions such as Kenton School and St Wilfrid’s Catholic High School are
equipped to handle the increased data transfer demands of virtualized
environments.

Technology that can boost performance in
these areas is in strong demand in educational institutions, where it is
increasingly common for pupils to participate in lessons on individual laptops
each owned by the school. This creates challenges for IT managers, as hardware
and application performance suffers with widespread simultaneous activity – a
problem compounded by the high IOPS demands of VDI, which is increasingly being
rolled out in schools as an alternative to justifying the expense of upgrading
or replacing outdated hardware.

Paul Kernohan, network manager at Kenton
School in Newcastle upon Tyne, emphasized the need to balance performance
and quality of end-user experience with value for money: "With so many users performing IT tasks
simultaneously, our storage needs to be able to handle massive peaks and
troughs in IOPS. Our top priorities are speed and the ability to meet the IOPS
demands of our new VMware view VDI. But we were conscious of the need to future-proof
our infrastructure to justify spending public money. We looked at hybrid HDD/SSD, but their IOPS performance was no
improvement. Once we decided on SSD, Whiptail was the only supplier we
considered: no other product delivers such high performance, and the
scalability of the ACCELA means we won’t need to rip it out when we convert
more of our storage to SSD."

At St Wilfrid’s Catholic High School and
Sixth Form College in Wakefield, teachers complained to ICT manager Chris
Slater that they wasted up to 30 minutes per lesson waiting for the whole class
to log on. Reluctant to commit to the recurring cost and inconvenience of
replacing or upgrading classroom hardware, Slater deployed a VMware view VDI
powered by a Whiptail ACCELA array, and the benefits of flash storage have been obvious.

"We
currently have 60 VMs, but we plan to increase this to 600. VDI also lets us
keep 60 desktops that would otherwise be nearing the end of their life this
academic year – and there will be plenty more in the future. The storage
product we use needs to offer the right blend of speed, capacity, and
scalability. When evaluating suppliers, we found that many sacrificed too much
speed by providing broader functionality: we would be adding boxes every year,
taking the long-term cost of ownership way beyond our budget. Whiptail was the
only logical choice. Class log-on time is down to only four minutes, and
virtual PCs are much easier to support, as we can resolve issues remotely without
disrupting students’ work. And we are saving time and money by not having to
replace the old classroom hardware."

Brian
Feller, VP and GM of Whiptail EMEA, predicts substantially increased uptake of
SSD in the education sector: "As
more institutions deploy VDI to reduce the traditionally high turnover and cost
of hardware, they will increasingly rely on SSDs to provide the necessary
resilience to highly demanding IOPS requirements. IT managers will soon realize
that traditional HDDs are no longer equipped to deliver the quality of end-user
experience expected when young people’s educations are at stake."