Maxta Enables VDI Implementation for Dutch Municipality

Maxta, Inc. announced that the town of Venray in the Netherlands has chosen its Maxta Storage Platform (MxSP), a software-only hypervisor-agnostic implementation of enterprise storage, to provide the performance and capacity needed to implement a VDI environment for hundreds of government employees.

Venray houses a diverse range of shops, historical and cultural treasures, and industrial enterprises. Its local government is responsible for administering the established policies and regulations for its 43,000 residents. Looking to implement a virtualized desktop environment for its 450 full- and part-time employees, Venray needed to find a solution that would complement its existing SAN storage array while eliminating single points of failure and ensuring that user experience in the View desktop wasn’t compromised.

With its SAN not properly sized to carry the VDI load and without enough IO/s to allow the placement of full desktops on the system, Venray IT management sought out a software-defined solution that would satisfy the requirements necessary to implement a virtualized environment. After considering several possible options, it was determined that Maxta’s resilient, scalable distributed VM Storage platform was the fit.

“The budget was very limited and another solution was not available so we began a search for software-defined storage offerings,” said Edwin Griesheimer, IT advisor for the city government of Venray. “Maxta looked interesting. The features Maxta offered fit perfectly compared to other software-based storage. Its storage redundancy over multiple nodes was a very compelling feature. And unlike complex disk solutions, Maxta was easy to use. There’s no need for expensive storage courses; Maxta can be learned within an hour!“

Maxta Storage delivers flash performance and HDD capacity for VDI environments. It leverages flash for both read and write-back caching delivering the performance required during boot storms or login storms. By converging applications, server virtualization, and storage on standard servers, it eliminates the need for storage arrays and storage management minimizing the cost of VDI deployments.

Additionally, capacity optimization features such as thin provisioning, in-line compression and de-duplication delivers capacity efficiency further reducing the cost per desktop. Unlimited number of capacity, time and performance efficient snapshots and zero-copy clones provide the ability to create thousands of virtual desktops. The snapshots and clones are VM-centric eliminating the need for managing storage constructs such as LUNs and volumes thus simplifying management. Maxta Storage delivers the performance and enterprise capabilities without sacrificing end-user experience.

“We are pleased that Venray selected Maxta MxSP to avoid a costly expansion of its SAN storage array that was necessitated by the implementation of a virtualized desktop environment,” said Yoram Novick, Maxta founder, president and CEO. “We were able to provide Venray with the redundancy they needed, enterprise functionality they could not find in other software-defined storage offerings, and improved cost and management simplicity over existing enterprise storage solutions.“