Optimised environment stops performance bottlenecks and lagging remote desktops

Uplands Community College, a centre of excellence and technical specialism senior school and sixth form college in East Sussex, have invigorated their thin client journey using DataCore and low cost, high performance OCZ Flash storage at a quarter of the price of dedicated storage. Today, over one thousand students and 200 staff require access to a consistent onsite and remote learning environment in a VDI journey that began 6 years ago.

Neil Harris, the College’s ICT Support Manager, led the march towards a flexible Virtual Desktop Infrastructure provided through VMware’s Horizon VDI and continued to optimise and enhance the environment across the years. Initially the install gave students remote access to a central source for software application delivery and for document storage while providing dynamic desktop provisioning as numbers fluctuated with each intake. It also secured student’s irreplaceable coursework which had previously been subjected to austere storage limits. But, like so many others, the college’s VDI experience came with a price – the heavy demands it places on storage hardware to provide high performance, non-stop availability and manageability that can accommodate ongoing fluctuations.

Neil expands: “We always knew that VDI would come with high performance requirements for the underlying storage. Put simply, it’s extremely resource hungry. For years we managed to secure the VDI environment successfully using DataCore’s Software-defined Storage platform, repeatedly deferring storage hardware refresh cycles.”

DataCore’s SANsymphony solution flexibly pooled and stretched the capacity of former existing arrays. However stretch can only go so far and some of the hardware initially repurposed for storage was now reaching end of life with an unacceptably high price tag for extension of support.

For students and staff, the ageing hardware started to impact each day with regular performance bottlenecks especially at morning login as the ageing hardware struggled to cope with peaks of data throughput. Tipping the experience further still was the install of new Windows applications, alongside the intensive student use of graphic applications and video streaming. Budget had also fluctuated according to student numbers, so to stem the decline, the college conducted a seamless overhaul to address the weakest links in the VDI chain and to do so with a keen eye on the overall spend.

Neil worked with the colleges’ existing education advisor, M-Tech Systems Ltd. They formally assessed the infrastructure and identified the weakest points for the thick and thin clients to lie with the integrated SAS drives within the ageing HP DL storage hardware. They recommended an upgrade to the latest version of SANsymphony-v10 merging the colleges’ two separate SANs into one highly available, easily maintained, highly performant pool. This could be achieved simply by slotting in low cost, high performance Flash storage that could be added into a standard server and cost a quarter of the price of dedicated storage. This Flash storage took the face of affordable OCZ RevoDrive 960GB Solid State Drive Flash slotted in directly into the storage pool to feed hungry applications. This, together with the unique way SANsymphony utilises its own caching technology rather than committing to disk, would provide unassailable leaps in performance for thin clients.

No longer were users stalled by long and unpredictable waits in peak times – their applications and desktops were served from the SAN within less than a second. Desktops remain highly available, assured and highly performing. Back in the server room, IT has easier VDI management. DataCore’s SANsymphony-V provides centralised management and automating storage related tasks across the college. Neil is now able to recreate all the desktops across 100 virtual machines in under 20 minutes by simple point and click. ICT can now continue cost monitoring without fear of overprovisioning, with DataCore’s thin provisioning capabilities, SANsymphony presents pre-defined virtual volumes from the central storage pool to the applications, while the capacity is allocated automatically when really needed.

Neil urges other education establishments not to give up on their remote desktop journey. “Since using DataCore, our storage-related spending has been reduced by over 50%, and we provide a first rate user experience which we now have achieved - with a few tweaks along the way.”