Sycamore Community School District 427 Focus on Virtual Desktop and Hyper ISE Customer Case Study

Sycamore Community School District 427 (Sycamore CUSD427) has over 3,800 students and 550 staff members. It currently supports 840 virtual desktops running XP and Windows 7 via Citrix VDI, with a total of 1,300 virtual desktops to be implemented within the year.

Sean Larson, Network Administrator for Sycamore CUSD427, implemented VDI on a “traditional” storage system used for a wide variety of applications. Prior to implementing VDI, Sycamore CUSD427’ storage system vendor and Citrix approved the configuration, leading Sean to believe that everything would operate without incident. However, users and Sean observed a significant slow down in both VDI and other applications sporadically throughout the day.

Sean said, “The entire infrastructure would just stop working. VDI’s would stop. Servers would stop. We were seeing applications just freeze up. We monitored our environment and we realized that boot storms would occur every 45 minutes because of classes changing. We were maxing out the IOPS on our controller. We then looked at how many more spindles we would need to increase our IOPS — it was just too expensive, so we looked at alternatives.”

Sean discovered Hyper ISE at Camp IT in Chicago and learned about its ability to support over 60,000 IOPS in a 3U chassis. He wanted a demo that week and was testing Hyper ISE five days later. Sean immediately migrated his VDIs to Hyper ISE and the problem disappeared.

According to Sean, “Hyper ISE solved our VDI performance problems immediately and it cost four times less than our other storage vendor’s product. We considered four other vendors including our existing one, but the decision came down to IOPS, price/performance, and footprint. We have no space in our data center and expanding is not an option."

“From day one, Hyper ISE performed flawlessly and actually fixed some other issues we were having with a couple of our XenApp servers. We did the math and it was a no-brainer. Hyper ISE's cost per VDI was actually lower than what we would pay for a physical desktop. I know that would not have happened with another storage vendor. It is ideal for our VDI environment. And we are using it for other applications as well, making the TCO even lower. And there is plenty of additional headroom for more virtual desktops and other applications that we intend to implement later this year, which makes Hyper ISE that much more valuable to us. Hyper ISE is a rock-solid storage system that combines SSD and SAS drives that gives the optimum amount of storage and IOPS.”