French Business School ESSEC Implements Two Pure Storage FlashArrays

Pure Storage, Inc. announced that ESSEC Business School, internationally renowned in higher education, implemented its FlashArray to increase the performance of its VDI.

As a result, student’s computer login access time decreased by 50%.

ESSEC switched to a VMware Horizon View virtualised desktop infrastructure environment quite some time ago, but realized then that the disk storage became a bottleneck, in particular with regards to performance. To find a reliable and robust technical solution, ESSEC decided to call on the expertise of their integrator, AntemetA SASU. They encouraged the business school to test the Pure Storage FlashArray. ESSEC deployed between October and December 2014, 600 workstations with 100% flash FlashArray. Then, In January 2015, an additional 600 self-service workstations were also switched over to the Pure Storage array. In May 2015, ESSEC deployed a second Pure Storage array to enable a 50/50 load balancing charge. The 1,200 virtualised desktops use only 4TB of flash instead of the required 40TB with HDDs, all with more speed and simplicity in the technical operation.

“The challenge for virtualised desktops for students is the fact that they have a variety of needs and requirements: population’s compute and access requirements vary greatly. [delete: is very heterogeneous]: on one hand in terms of the various high tech devices they bring in and on the other hand with regards to their computer knowledge levels,” says Olivier Le Mao, systems manager, ESSEC.” This is why we needed a very simple, high-performance solution, working right away and with top support. We have all that with Pure Storage, plus guarantees in terms of performance, data deduplication and compression. It helped us to avoid adding ten classic disk shelves, which dramatically reduced the footprint of our data centers. Furthermore, instead of costing us 3 years of our IT budget, which any other similar solution with a HDD array would have cost, working with the Pure Storage solution cuts this back to only one year’s budget.“

“Investing and deploying VMware Horizon View and then not have it working optimally due to a storage delay is unacceptable,” adds Yann Le Borgne, country manager France, Pure Storage. “World class universities need world class technology to allow students to maximize learning. And with our Evergreen program we make sure it will stay that way for a very long time.“