German School Berufsbildende Schulen Technik Opts for Tintri

Tintri, Inc. announced that Berufsbildende Schulen Technik (BBS), a vocational school located in Cloppenburg, Germany, is now using Tintri VMstore to power its entire VDI infrastructure supporting over 2,700 on campus VDI users.

By deploying Tintri’s smarter storage, BBS has solved its existing storage bottleneck, resulting in much shorter boot times for virtual desktops and lower latency on a single storage array.

BBS provides training for a variety of jobs in different industries. The school deployed a VDI environment in 2009 using VMware ESXi on its HP storage environment but found VDI users were experiencing excessive boot times on its existing legacy storage iSCSI platform.

Andreas Loosen, IT Manager, BBS, said: “It would take several minutes for users to log into their virtual environments with our old storage system. To speed up access, we had to pre-start all of the virtual desktops as we couldn’t afford to create pools of floating desktops that were ready to start when all of the users logged on. As a result, we would frequently experience boot storms that would make it impossible to deliver desktops to users in a timely manner.“

After testing two storage platforms head-to-head, BBS chose Tintri’s T540 array which has reduced latency by 500% – to less than 10ms on average. Additionally, the high IO/s performance means BBS suffers no significant performance impact even when starting 25-50 desktops simultaneously.

Tintri’s T540 array was also easy to implement, Loosen explained: “Tintri promised we could set up the arrays in 30 minutes. In reality, we were up and running in under 10 minutes! The arrays were incredibly easy to install. By contrast, it took over two days to implement the EMC storage we tested, even though it was installed by a storage expert.“

Doug Rich, EMEA VP, Tintri, said: “BBS needed to improve its experience for VDI users as the performance of the underlying legacy SAN storage created a massive bottleneck. Deployment of Tintri’s smart storage resulted in better performance and greater efficiency. With latency now 500% lower, boot storms are a thing of the past for BBS.“