County expands VDI environment with 'flash first' hybrid storage array

When Bartholomew County, Ind. expanded its virtual desktop infrastructure, IT Director Jim Hartsook acquired a Tintri VMstore T540 hybrid storage array that mixes solid-state drives and hard disk drives for better performance and easier management, instead of expanding his legacy HDD array.

Hartsook's department supports more than 455 users in 10 geographically dispersed offices. In the summer of 2011, the department decided to expand its VMware View deployment from a 50-seat mobile training operation to more general use; it now supports around 200 users.

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Tegile flash hybrid array accelerates dental school's virtual app

When the University of Colorado School of Dental Medicine (UC SDM) found the latency of its newly installed virtual application environment unacceptable, its IT team decided flash was called for and looked into whether it required an all-flash or hybrid array.

The final decision was a hybrid system -- the Tegile Systems Zebi HA2100EP.

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Allant speeds big data analytics with Kaminario K2 all-flash storage

When its heavy big data analytics processing required more storage and more performance to run in a timely manner, the Allant Group added an all-flash array to its storage collection.

The Chicago-based marketing performance company processes hundreds of millions of files for its business intelligence and marketing services. To improve extract, transform and load time, it added a Kaminario K2 solid-state disk (SSD) array to its Hewlett-Packard 3PAR and Nimble Storage hybrid flash arrays.

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Coraid EtherDrive helps Emerson College simplify its VM management

When the three-person IT team at Boston-based Emerson College decided to simplify the communications and arts institution's data center, the first thing to go was tape. Fibre Channel was next.

The college replaced its direct-to-tape backup system with a disk-to-disk off-site replication product, according to Frankie Frain, Emerson's manager of network systems. No surprise there, since many IT groups have gone from tape to disk backup.

Switching from Fibre Channel (FC) to Ethernet storage is also not unheard of, although FC is far from being as endangered as tape. But what Emerson did that was different was to move to two Coraid EtherDrive SRX arrays, rather than a more common iSCSI Ethernet storage system, while it consolidated servers with VMware in May 2012.

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Law firm uses NexGen hybrid array to keep cases moving

Chief Information Officer Rich Wills said he doesn't consider his law firm on the cutting edge of technology. But rapid data growth pushed Keating Muething & Klekamp PLL (KMK) to buy a hybrid flash array from startup NexGen Storage Inc. when traditional hard drive arrays failed to keep up with his IOPS requirements.

"We're a law firm," Wills said. "We don't really do new stuff. Cutting-edge [technology] and law firms do not necessarily exist in the same technology plan."

However, data growth and e-discovery are common in law firms, and that was the case with Cincinnati, Ohio-based KMK.

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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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Storage hypervisor solves city's VM management and performance problem

Moving its physical servers into a VMware vSphere virtualized environment three years ago caused a problem for the city of San Luis Obispo, Calif., IT team. City Network Services Supervisor Miguel Guardado found he constantly needed more spindles for his Dell Compellent storage array to keep up with IOPS requirements.

He eventually solved the problem by letting Virsto Software Corp. VM management software do much of the work, but not until after he made several hardware additions.

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Tegile hybrid SAN SSD solves contractor's VDI performance issues

Despite his initial skepticism that a change in storage systems would make a difference, Egan Company CIO Jim Nonn said a Tegile Systems Zebi hybrid SAN array significantly improved his sluggish 220-seat virtual desktop infrastructure setup.

Nonn said the switch to the combination solid-state and hard drive system reduced response times and capacity requirements for the Brooklyn Park, Mich.-based construction contractor.

Egan has about 20 computer-aided design (CAD) workers and 200 general knowledge workers using VMware Inc. View 5.1 virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) software. Nonn said his legacy 50 TB Dell Inc. Compellent storage array wasn't providing the performance his VDI environment required. VMware View Client boot times were taking more than five minutes, and performance was sluggish.

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ViaWest chooses SolidFire flash array for performance, storage QoS

Denver-based cloud service provider ViaWest turned to a SolidFire all-flash array for the underlying storage of its cloud to improve performance and management.

Matt Wallace, ViaWest's director of cloud architecture, knew an all-flash array would give him a performance boost, but he also needed to manage that performance for multiple customers. That led him to SolidFire, which offers granular quality of service (QoS) for its flash arrays aimed at cloud providers.

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Nimble Storage hybrid array improves law firm's VDI performance

When traditional spinning disk arrays came up short on performance for its virtual desktop infrastructure, Minneapolis-based law firm Lindquist & Vennum switched to a hybrid array from Nimble Storage Inc.

The Nimble Storage hybrid array's solid-state drives (SSDs) provide enough performance for the company's 350 persistent virtual desktops, as well as other applications.

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Lab speeds up test app with Kaminario K2 all-flash array

When Nick Mahmood discovered in May that his legacy storage area network (SAN) couldn't supply the necessary IOPS and lower latency required to support his network consolidation project, he turned to a 10 TB Kaminario Inc. K2 all-flash storage array.

Mahmood is the vice president of IT for environmental testing laboratory TestAmerica Laboratories Inc., which analyzes environmental samples and provides analytical reports using its TALS laboratory information management system.

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National Geographic chooses tape archiving to store PBs of content

While many organizations want to eliminate tape, National Geographic Global Media (NG Global) embraces tape archiving to store between 5 and 10 TB of media content every day.

Kyle Knack, NG Global’s director of infrastructure systems, said his company has petabytes of data in his long-term tape archive and requires a highly available tape library to make sure the data is protected, searchable and retrievable.

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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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Compellent SAN is added to Orlando Magic's IT lineup

The Orlando Magic are one of the National Basketball Association's most successful franchises, with a trip to the NBA finals in 2009 and the Eastern Conference finals last season. But when Frank Frazier joined the organization as project and application manager in January 2008, the team lacked a SAN and he had to do a full-court press to get his storage infrastructure ready to support a state-of-the-art arena due to open this fall. A Compellent Technologies Inc. SAN (Compellent SAN) was his pick.

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Law school council IT disaster recovery plan aces its examinations

While Hurricane Katrina forced many organizations in the New Orleans area to implement IT disaster recovery plans after the fact, the devastating 2005 storm also prompted the Newtown, PA-based Law School Admission Council (LSAC) to plan for a disaster as a preventive measure.

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NFS alternative meets Los Alamos National Laboratory's high-performance computing needs

The high-performance computing (HPC) team at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico is looking for a NFS alternative to benefit its supercomputing processing.

The Los Alamos National Laboratory is home to the federal government's weapons research facility, which uses Panasas Inc. network-attached storage (NAS) for its research data.

However, the laboratory can't use NFS for weapons research because it doesn't scale high enough, said Gary Grider, deputy division leader for high-performance computing. So the lab uses Panasas' proprietary DirectFlow parallel client technology, as well as IBM's General Parallel File System (GPFS) and Oracle Corp.'s Lustre parallel file system.

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iSCSI storage system implemented by University of Alaska Fairbanks

After confronting scalability problems with NFS, the Bioinformatics Core at the University of Alaska Fairbanks adopted an iSCSI storage system and has some lessons to share from its implementation.

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Overland Snap Server NAS watches over Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Annex NYC exhibits

SearchStorage.com
August 4, 2009

The IT staff that set up the tech infrastructure at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Annex NYC consider their storage system a key piece of the building's security plan. While the Overland Storage Inc. Snap Server 620 network-attached storage (NAS) appliance doesn't actually handle any security, it does store data from the IP camera system the Annex relies on to keep its valuable exhibits safe. Full Story

Coraid Inc. EtherDrive gives North Canton, Ohio, school district a lesson in AoE storage

Coraid Inc.'s EtherDrive products provided the City of North Canton, Ohio, with a lesson in ATA over Ethernet (AoE) storage when it was trying to deal with the increased demands of a growing school district and capacity-sucking multimedia files.

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