USC Viterbi School of Engineering Has Deployed PernixData FVP Software

PernixData, Inc. announced that the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, an institution internationally recognized for creating new models of education, research and commercialization, has deployed its FVP software and is expected to keep pace with the constantly changing demands of faculty and students and handle its constituents’ diverse application needs, all while saving time, space and money.

To address the challenges of limited classroom space and hardware in each location, the school deployed a VDI using VMware Horizon running on Dell PowerEdge servers with local SSDs to boot non-persistent linked clones. This offloaded key VDI functions from Viterbi’s existing Dell EqualLogic hybrid arrays, which are used to store student data.

“We saw great VDI performance with local SSDs in place, but it simply couldn’t scale cost effectively, said Michael Goay, executive director of IT, USC Viterbi School of Engineering. I wanted to add VDI images without constantly worrying about how to afford and manage storage performance, and needed a comprehensive solution that would work consistently across all applications, on all devices, in all classrooms.”

The school considered replacing its hybrid array with an all flash array (AFA), but ultimately decided on trying PernixData FVP software, which promised to deliver better performance at a better price.

FVP was installed inside the school’s hypervisor with no changes were made to existing servers, storage or virtual desktops. With FVP, the school expects to create a low latency, fault tolerant I/O acceleration tier across servers using RAM, a concept known as infrastructure level in-memory computing. This would enable storage R/W to be handled inside the hosts, minimizing VDI latency and ensuring scale-out growth.

“We expect FVP to deliver high VDI performance by offloading data intensive tasks, said Goay. It is extremely easy to scale, and we expect to save substantial money by avoiding expensive AFA upgrades. Plus, it is certified with VMware Horizon, so we expect seamless deployment and operations.”

With over 600 virtual desktops currently accelerated by FVP, students at Viterbi are expecting to see a noticeable improvement in desktop responsiveness. As students have better access to more services, Viterbi is expecting to see class enrollment go up.

Going forward, Viterbi expects to use FVP software for more general purpose applications, like database servers, email servers, file servers, web servers, desktop streaming servers, and more.

“My goal is to have FVP on every administrative server,” concluded Goay.