PernixData FVP Flash Storage for Tidelands Bank

PernixData, Inc. announced that Tidelands Bank, a family of banks spread across South Carolina, has implemented PernixData FVP to strengthen VDI performance with Citrix XenDesktop.

VDI latency is now under 0.4ms, the lowest level of latency that Tidelands Bank has experienced to date.

In early 2013, Tidelands Bank looked to replace its aging desktops with much cheaper thin clients system-wide. After an initial proof of concept, performance appeared normal. However, as the VDI base grew, application response time consequently dropped to unacceptable levels. Upon analysis, Tidelands Bank determined that the root of the problems stemmed from the SAN.

“When I looked at our vCenter, the server CPUs and RAM were both under 50% throughout the day, but utilization in our iSCSI SAN was over 80 percent,” said an executive with Tidelands Bank. “We clearly didn’t have enough IO/s to support our virtual desktop requirements, so the hunt was on for a fix.”

Tidelands Bank considered adding shelves to the SAN, but ultimately determined that would cost the company upwards of $100,000. What’s more, adding disks wouldn’t guarantee a solution to the problem of poor VDI response times. Instead, the bank turned its attention to flash storage.

“Server-side flash-specifically the ability to locate flash in the server-was appealing, however, the software also needed to be able to work across a variety of hosts and flash devices,” said the executive. “One look at PernixData and we knew we had found the answer to our problem.”

After a recommendation by VAR eGroup, Inc., Tidelands Bank turned to PernixData and found the flash hypervisor software superior for its ability to:

• Virtualize all server-side flash into a clustered acceleration tier that enables IT administrators to scale out storage performance-and do so independent of storage capacity.
• Render read and write performance for all VMs, without the need to change existing server and storage infrastructure.
• Change how storage is designed and operated in virtual data centers.

“We saw immediate value with PernixData FVP. After just 30 minutes, the software was up and running and accelerating traffic across clusters of hosts, delivering over 100,000 IO/s per host with 800-1,000 IO/s available per virtual desktop,” said the Tidelands Bank executive. “In addition to incredible speed and performance gains, PernixData FVP also saves us money. The technology has allowed us to reduce our dollar cost per TB by two thirds, which from a storage architecture standpoint is a total game changer.”

To view the Tidelands Bank case study