Sharks Sports & Entertainment Scores With All-Flash VDI Deployment

Pure Storage, Inc. announced that Sharks Sports & Entertainment (SSE), parent company of the National Hockey League (NHL) club the San Jose Sharks, has selected and deployed FlashArray to support its VDI.

After a selection process, SSE selected Pure Storage for its blend of inline data reduction, deduplication and compression technologies, which maximize storage utilization and deliver performance gains for VDI and other performance workloads, for less than the cost of mechanical disk.

Based in San Jose, CA, Sharks Sports & Entertainment manages several sports and entertainment properties that include the San Jose Sharks of the NHL and Massachusetts-based Worcester Sharks of the American Hockey League (AHL). Additionally, SSE manages the SAP Center at San Jose, a popular sports and entertainment venue that is home to the San Jose Sharks and features concerts and events year round, as well as several public ice facilities throughout the Bay Area, including Sharks Ice at San Jose.

With its venues and users spread across the US, SSE opted to roll out a Citrix Zen Desktop 7.0 VDI deployment to connect them, however, its existing legacy storage maxed out after adding only a dozen users. In order to migrate to a virtualized environment that could support its distributed knowledge workers with BYOD, SSE needed a higher performance storage solution to sustain it.

SSE’s director of IT Uy Ut assessed a range of enterprise storage options that included the disk, flash/disk hybrids, and all-flash storage array solutions. After an evaluation process, he concluded that the Pure Storage FlashArray was the most cost-competitive solution that could deliver a uniform, non-disruptive user experience to its distributed workforce, and meet the performance requirements of their VDI deployment at scale, with room to grow in the future.

“We wanted a ‘set-it-and-forget-it’ product that would give our distributed organization tier zero storage performance, without a tier zero price tag. We evaluated all the available storage options and vendors on the market – no one even came close to meeting our requirements like Pure Storage,” said Ut. “FlashArray smoked the competition in terms of the performance gains we needed to support our VDI rollout, and offered rapid time to deployment, simplified storage management, and a scale out/scale up architecture at cost parity with mechanical disk and hybrids solutions. The decision to go with Pure Storage was a no-brainer.”

The effects of SSE’s FlashArray implementation on its data infrastructure were immediate and tangible: the company is now achieving up to 12:1 data reduction and sub-millisecond latency – not just for VDI, but across all its performance enterprise applications and workloads, including Exchange, SQL databases, file shares, and virtual applications.

“Everything is easier with Pure Storage. They have created more than just a great product – they’ve created a great company. The Pure support team makes me feel like we’re all in it together, and treats every user and application in our environment like a first-class citizen,” said Ut.

With support from Pure Storage, SSE has now rolled out its VDI deployment – over 250 desktops nationwide – without added IT complexity, and has realized operational and storage cost savings by replacing its legacy disk arrays. And FlashArray’s resilient, scalable architecture and non-disruptive capacity upgrades will support future growth to SSE’s organization and VDI at scale.

“FlashArray has delivered on its promises in every dimension and exceeded our very high expectations – we’re beyond thrilled with the performance benefits,” said Ut. “When our users don’t have to think about IT, they are able to sell more tickets and put better players on the ice. This is not only a huge win for me, but also for our employees, players and fans.”

“FlashArray is a perfect solution for companies like SSE that are implementing or expanding a VDI deployment, because it delivers the performance, resiliency, scalability and efficiency that VDI requires,” said Matt Kixmoeller, VP products, Pure Storage. “At Pure, we believe that delivering a fundamentally better storage experience is about more than just great technology – it requires that we deliver excellence across the entire product lifecycle.“