University of Portland Selects WhipTail

Faced with the challenge of improving campus-wide PC kiosk performance, the University of Portland in Portland, OR., needed a solution that enabled 250 simultaneous users but could scale to thousands of simultaneous users.

WhipTail Technologies, Inc., in silicon storage arrays, had the solution to their problem.

Campus kiosks and computer labs are run on a VMware View environment utilizing a Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) architecture. They had experienced issues with data bottlenecks and access delays, problems common to large VDI deployments employing disk storage. Needless to say, user satisfaction was less than favorable.

WhipTail proposed a silicon storage array as the hub for their VDI workload. This solution presented an easy, flawless fit into the university's existing VDI environment, delivering improved data velocity, efficiency and convenience. Data now flows with immediate response times and the environment is scalable to more than 1,000 simultaneous users.

"One of the biggest challenges we faced was disk performance issues commonly associated with larger VDI environments. Due to the way in which we are leveraging VDI and application virtualization, it was critical we had the necessary disk subsystem to provide the optimal experience," said Paul Disbury, CIO at the University of Portland. "We selected the WhipTail array because it was a solution that naturally fit into our Cisco UCS environment, and it delivered on the WRITE speed, protocol support, energy savings and ease of integration necessary to support our existing VDI framework. With the integration of WhipTail, students and professors will be able to access desktops and applications without interruption. The goal was to provide an experience that was equal to or better than the local PC. With the addition of the WhipTail storage array, we have finally accomplished that."

WhipTail secured this partnership with the University of Portland through MCPc, Inc., a partner to University of Portland and a member of WhipTail's VAR program. MCPc's referral to WhipTail reinforces that the silicon storage array was the best choice to accelerate data and eliminate performance lags for the customer.

"We are thrilled to have brought the value of WhipTail to our friends at University of Portland. The benefits of WhipTail's silicon storage array will unleash the performance of their VMWare VDI environment to unknown levels," says Darin Haines, CTO at MCPc.

WhipTail's silicon storage array runs on less than 200 watts and supports up to 12TB of MLC flash with 250,000 IOs in a small 2U array populated by MLC flash drives. The array is tuned to reduce latency in high I/O environments and possesses a proprietary operating system designed to overcome the write performance and longevity challenges typically associated with MLC flash.

"Universities benefit from VDI computing because their large user populations need immediate access to the same networks and resources," said Dan Crain, CEO of WhipTail. "Successful VDI deployment is a challenge, though, because virtualized environments demand a substantial amount of data to move quickly, and many solutions require changes to the IT framework. At WhipTail we meet these challenges with flash storage arrays built for data performance and velocity that have the affinity to work within existing IT environments."