University of Portland Deploys Alacritech NFS Acceleration

Alacritech, Inc., in NFS storage acceleration, announced that the
University of Portland has deployed its ANX 1500 NFS acceleration appliance to implement a VDI across
their campus network.

The ANX 1500 allowed the university to overcome storage IO challenges and
deliver increased performance while cutting both short and long-term costs.

Storage can be a costly performance roadblock within
VDI environments. The University of Portland, while experiencing initial
success in its VDI pilot, knew that to support a university wide roll-out
addressing 3,000 users, including support for its newly re-designed
digital library, required that its storage be better optimized to better deal
with read latency. Left unchecked, NFS writes would consume NAS bandwidth and
steal from NFS read performance. Despite using higher speed SAS disk drives and flash as cache in its NAS implementation, read latency was still creeping in.

To address the VDI storage bottleneck, the university
elected to deploy a pure SSD array solution. While latencies did fall, the
solution was expensive and represented an adjunct solution to its present and
valued NAS infrastructure.

Tom Ank, the storage IT engineer for the university,
was faced with the need to add more SSD storage to support the wider roll-out
when he was presented with the Alacritech solution. He chose it because
he was intrigued by their ability to provide equal or better performance than
SSD storage at a fraction of the cost.

"I liked
the idea that Alacritech’s ANX platform could directly integrate with our
current NAS system, rather than our current configuration, which was two
distinct, separately managed storage systems. Furthermore, the read latency for
the ANX was actually less than our pure SSD solution and could be purchased at
a fraction of the cost. The ANX also enabled us to use less expensive and higher
capacity media behind our filers," said Ank.

"The fact
that the ANX 1500 was able to demonstrate less latency than a pure SSD array,
with ample headroom to offload more applications, is a testimony to
Alacritech’s data acceleration technologies," said Doug Rainbolt,
Alacritech’s VP marketing.

By making use of the ANX 1500, the university expects
to save approximately $200K over the next year. The ANX 1500 will also extend
the life of the filer, providing greater savings. In addition, SATA drives
can now be integrated into the storage system rather than
more costly SAS HDDs. As a result, the university is anticipating that in
subsequent fiscal years, they will save around 50% per year off the cost of
additional storage.