GIW Industries pumps up VDI performance

GIW Industries was about to embark on a strategic VDI project using Citrix XenDesktop 7.5, however, Lucas McCuistian, the company’s IT, systems and network administrator, was worried that storage bottlenecks would jeopardise the project’s success.

“Most problems with VDI come from slow reads and writes to storage,” said McCuistian. “Given that, I was willing to spend money at the beginning of the project to avoid any storage performance problems.”

GIW Industries was happy with its existing NetApp FAS 2220 storage system, and did not want to spend $100,000 or more on a storage upgrade. The company searched for alternatives, and chose to deploy Dell SSDs and PernixData FVP software instead (at the recommendation of their trusted partner, Philotek).

“PernixData puts storage reads and writes into high speed server media for optimal VDI performance and cost effective scale-out,” said McCuistian. “In addition, we could keep our NetApp array and accompanying data services, avoiding rip and replace headaches. With a new decoupled storage architecture, we cost-effectively rolled out VDI without our end users noticing a difference in performance.”

The company plans to triple the size of its VDI environment in the coming years, with PernixData FVP software playing a key role in these plans.

“When you have software like FVP that you can install and then walk away from, it easily becomes a strategic part of your IT infrastructure,” said McCuistian. “Now that we have decoupled our storage, I cannot imagine going to any other type of storage architecture.”
PernixData FVP is a key infrastructure element of any virtualised data centre. The software virtualises server side flash and memory into a clustered acceleration tier that enables IT administrators to quickly, easily and cost-effectively optimise VM performance while scaling-out storage performance with compute resources.