Ohio Department of Developmental Disabilities Adopts WhipTail

WhipTail Tech, manufacturer of enterprise solid-state SAN appliances, announced that The Ohio Department of Developmental Disabilities (DODD) selected WhipTail’s Virtual Desktop XLR8r to provide the storage infrastructure for their shift to a virtualized desktop model with VMware View.

The DODD chose the XLR8r over other solutions because of its superior write IOPS and savings on power, cooling and rack space.

The DODD is responsible for overseeing a statewide system of supports and services for the more than 80,000 Ohioans with developmental disabilities and their families. The organization’s View deployment affected 1,500 internal users.

Selecting VMware’s View to enable his IT staff to change, update and provision applications rapidly, Kipp Bertke, Director of IT for the DODD, saw the shift to a virtualized desktop model as a key for business agility and enhanced data security. However, when the DODD began to design the architecture of the 1,500-user environment, challenges surrounding the storage infrastructure appeared.

"We assumed we could do it through our original SAN, which was a bad assumption," said Bertke. "We reviewed other storage options to support the View deployment. Our existing SAN vendor does support SSD as a cache, but when implementing VDI there are a lot of unknowns, especially on a broader scale such as ours."

With its write IOPS capabilities and savings it provides on power, cooling and rack space, WhipTail’s Virtual Desktop XLR8r became a focus for the DODD’s design. "WhipTail’s proprietary software spreads the writes around the complement of solid-state drives within its appliance. It’s actually built to accentuate SSDs and not just any array that has SSDs jammed into it. Their wear endurance software is a huge advantage and one of the single-biggest reasons we went with the XLR8r; its purpose-built, plain and simple," said Bertke.

The Virtual Desktop XLR8r is designed to optimize IO-demanding VDI images. Random workloads – such as those in virtualized scenarios – are challenging for traditional 15K rpm spinning disks. A fully loaded production-ready virtual desktop image requires between 20-40 IOPS to run at an acceptable level. A standard HDD array only runs at 200 IOPS per drive. The Virtual Desktop XLR8r creates a larger ‘performance pool,’ thereby eliminating disk contention and alleviating up to 90 percent of the storage costs associated with VDI. Since the XLR8r is completely solid-state in nature, it offers 90X less latency and 250,000 IOPS in a single 180 watt 2U appliance.

"The DODD’s deployment of VMware’s View virtual desktop software is one of the largest known state and local government roll-outs in the U.S., and a prime example of the need for a solution like the XLR8r," said Brian Feller, VP of sales and operations at WhipTail. "As have many large organizations before them, they found themselves up against issues with storage performance and costs when rolling out their virtual desktop infrastructure – the two most common hurdles companies face when scaling a virtual desktop infrastructure. But we predicted those challenges – the missing link in virtual desktop implementations, if you will – and developed the Virtual Desktop XLR8r to bridge that gap."

"The WhipTail XLR8r offered the opportunity for the DODD to accelerate the entire View deployment in this budget cycle. The existing SAN players are just not built this way," said Bertke. "It’s like buying a series of minivans for capacity when what I really need is the performance of one Ferrari at the price of a Honda."

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