Hospital deploys Pure Storage all-flash storage for EHR, VDI

After finding that even a hybrid flash array failed to prevent its most important application from slowing to a crawl during activity spikes, Riverview Hospital switched to an all solid-state array to reduce latency and handle writes faster.

Riverview Hospital is a full-service county hospital in Noblesville, Ind., with 154 beds, 20 off-site facilities and nearly 1,200 employees.

Early this year, the hospital switched to an 11 TB Pure Storage FlashArray to increase the IOPS available for a few critical applications, mainly its Allscripts Healthcare Solutions Inc.'s Pro electronic healthcare records (EHR) system, a 550-seat VMware Inc. View 4.6 virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployment, and Citrix Systems Inc. XenApp virtual servers.

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U.S. Army conquers virtualized desktop challenges with hybrid tiers

To give its doctors more time to treat patients, the U.S. Army is converting its desktop health care patient record application system to a virtual desktop infrastructure.

The project takes advantage of tiered storage with RAM, solid-state drives (SSDs) and hard drives. It includes NetApp storage arrays, Atlantis Computing's ILIO Diskless virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) storage optimization software, Hewlett-Packard (HP) blade servers with SSDs, and Citrix Systems' XenDesktop and XenApp software to virtualize desktops and applications.

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Virsto upgrades virtual machine storage management SW for HA

Virsto Software Corp. this week updated its virtual machine storage management software for VMware Inc.'s vSphere server virtualization platform. Virsto for vSphere 2.0 includes improved high-availability functionality to protect data during hardware failures and increased support for Citrix Systems Inc.'s XenDesktop virtual desktop infrastructure platform.

Virsto launched in 2010 with support only for Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor, and added its vSphere product in January 2012. Virsto's software, which the vendor refers to as a storage hypervisor, uses a logging architecture to improve virtual environment performance. It also supports writable clones and snapshots for provisioning storage and protecting data.

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Virsto software adds support for XenDesktop VDI environments

Virsto Software Corp. has identified improving virtual desktop storage performance as a major area where its software aimed at improving virtual machine (VM) I/O can help. This week it released a beta version of Virsto for Citrix Systems Inc.’s XenDesktop 5.5 virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) platform on VMware vSphere.

Virsto for XenDesktop follows the company’s vSphere support release in January and its initial product launch for Microsoft Hyper-V in February 2010.

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Virtual desktop software aims to help storage VDI performance

It’s no secret that implementing a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) can play havoc with storage performance and cost.

Storage system vendors have developed features and entire arrays designed to help solve these problems, but third-party virtual desktop software tools can also help solve problems for organizations planning and implementing a VDI.

Software products designed to boost storage performance or reduce capacity requirements for VDI projects are available in the areas of storage optimization, predeployment analytics, virtual file systems and application management software.

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VDI implementation without boot storms for Ohio DoDD

The Ohio Department of Developmental Disabilities (DoDD) faced a big decision about its PC infrastructure 18 months ago. It either had to replace 80% of the agency’s desktops because they were between 4 and 7 years old, or move to VDI. Brian Brothers, DoDD’s network administrator manager, found a VDI implementation would be cheaper, and he went with VMware View because it is a VMware shop.

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