NetApp All Flash Storage Accelerates VDI for Large Physicians Group

The client is a large physician group on the West Coast, providing care to thousands of patients through its extensive network of physicians and other healthcare providers. They have their own datacenter along with services, systems and processes to enable timely, cost-effective, quality patient care.

The physicians group wanted to better serve their patients in an evolving technology landscape, which required providing an excellent user experience for a growing virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) user base, scaling VDI storage without downtime. Being under HIPAA compliance, they needed to retain data protection, integration, and storage efficiency features for an existing NetApp FAS storage system.

For this reason, they were interested in NetApp’s All Flash FAS (AFF) systems, which would address enterprise storage requirements with high performance, superior flexibility, and best-in-class data management. They sought out InterVision for the project, given our long-standing partnership with NetApp and ability to deliver this technology to our client base.

InterVision prioritized the client’s long-term strategy, so that the result would enable future growth. We deployed an all-flash FAS configuration to improve I/O performance for production virtual desktops.

We helped the client add a two-node A700 AFF HA system to their existing four-node NetApp FAS cluster. Equipped with eight 40 Gigabit Ethernet (40GbE) interfaces per controller, the system eliminated the bandwidth bottle-necks that were increasingly moving to the network from storage as flash got faster and faster. Once the new controllers were seamlessly integrated into their existing environment, the client was able to non-disruptively move their existing VDI workloads over to the new controllers and instantly noticed a significant performance increase by taking full advantage of the speed and scalability that flash drives have to offer.

NetApp’s unparalleled speed, agility and ease of management gave the client the confidence they needed to expand their VDI offering and roll out their Windows 10 VDI environment to all of their users, allowing them to increase productivity and increase customer satisfaction all while maintaining an excellent level of performance, versatility and a maintainability.

Performance: Delivered superior virtual desktop performance with less than 1ms latency.

Scale: Scaled non-disruptively for both capacity and IOPS.

Data Efficiency: Recouped up to 85% of VDI storage space with NetApp deduplication, reducing storage costs.

Flexibility: Non-disruptively migrated workloads to manage performance expectations.

Reduced IT Footprint: High capacity flash drives offered massive storage capabilities in a compact form factor.

 

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