28/10/2011
By Scott Thompson
Frankfurter Bankgesellschaft has implemented Atlantis ILIO as part of its Citrix XenDesktop desktop virtualisation project.
The aim is to reduce the cost of storage by 93 per cent and improve the user experience. Axept recommended and delivered the ILIO solution, cutting the bank’s VDI storage costs and solving the performance challenges that were preventing the project from being deployed company-wide.
“Atlantis ILIO is an enabler for VDI. If you don't solve the storage I/O problem, the cost per desktop is extremely high. For Frankfurter Bank, the cost per desktop was 2,000 CHF using our SAN,” says Zdravko Ruzicic, head of systems and network engineering, Frankfurter Bankgesellschaft. “If you don't solve the cost and performance issues intelligently, management won’t accept the cost of VDI and it will lead to project cancellation. Atlantis ILIO enabled us to implement VDI for a lower cost than a physical PC by reusing our existing SAN more efficiently and reducing our storage costs by 93 per cent in the process.”
The bank wanted to implement a virtual desktop client environment to provide secure and reliable remote access for employees and contract developers that could easily be managed by their IT staff. But the pilot VDI deployment suffered from severe I/O bottlenecks and users complained about poor performance. It considered several options to improve storage performance, but costs were staggering, particularly given the scale of the bank’s deployment and limited resources available. Choosing Atlantis ILIO allowed the bank to dramatically reduce IOPS required from the storage system, cut the storage capacity consumed and improved application response time for a fraction of the cost of buyingadditional SAN or SSD storage. Using Atlantis ILIO, Frankfurter Bank was able to reduce the cost of storage per desktop from 2,000 CHF per desktop to just 132 CHF, or the equivalent of $2,223 USD down to $150 USD with an improved user experience.
