Real Estate Company Accolade Fortifies Citrix XenApp VDI

Sanbolic, Inc. announced that Accolade, provider of real estate rental services to the people of Northern Holland, has chosen its Melio VDI solution to enable it to meet its HA objectives for its PVS-based Citrix XenApp environment.

Using Melio with Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS), Accolade now enjoys an available, scalable and robust platform from which to centrally create, manage, maintain and deliver XenApp server images throughout its entire data center.

Quality is a principle that Accolade applies to its business, including the company’s IT backbone, which encompasses an HP StorageWorks 6400 Enterprise Virtual Array, HP BladeSystem c7000 and VMware ESXi. Striving to reduce operational costs and improve data center efficiency, Accolade’s 220+ employees use thin client computers whose desktops are delivered via XenApp to simplify desktop management and maintenance.

"Using Melio for our PVS HA, all XenApp server images (vDisks) can be stored on a single storage volume accessible by all PVS servers simultaneously," said Berend Hut, manager I&A, Accolade. "Consolidating vDisks onto a single volume streamlines data and storage management, eases vDisk maintenance, and improves storage utilization, which also helps to lower costs."

"Bottom line, we needed to ensure that our XenApp infrastructure was absolutely bullet-proof – with the highest levels of availability and fault tolerance – completely resilient to any possible unforeseen event," concluded Hut. "With Sanbolic Melio, we got exactly that and quite a bit more."

"While traditional approaches to enabling PVS HA introduce single points of failure, data management overhead, limited to no scale-out capability and inefficient storage utilization, Melio helps organizations such as Accolade realize the full value of PVS by overcoming each of these challenges while reducing operational cost," said Andy Melmed, VP, enterprise architecture, Sanbolic. "Together, PVS and Melio provide the ideal solution for enabling highly available VDI environments."

With validation by hundreds of enterprise and government organizations running in production, Melio software enables and extends the capabilities of PVS-based XenApp and XenDesktop VDI solutions.

At Citrix Synergy 2013 taking place in Los Angeles, CA, May 22-24, Sanbolic will be demonstrating how to leverage Melio’s features and capabilities to achieve HA, dynamic scale-out, simplified data management, data protection and fast performance (650,000+ IO/s per server) at a fraction of the cost of external storage.