Anglia Ruskin University selects Violin storage ahead of Hitachi and Fusion-io

Violin Memory "out-performed" competitors, says IT director

Anglia Ruskin University selected US company Violin Memory's flash storage solution ahead of alternatives from Hitachi, Fusion-io and Whiptail as it "out-performed" its competitors, according to the university's assistant IT director Gregor Waddell.

Waddell told Computing that the university had chosen the VMware View VDI solution due to its power efficiency, and soon recognised that in order to run the solution successfully it would need strong storage performance.

He explained that the university had a Hitachi disc-based SAN [Storage Area Network] and attempted to use it for the VDI solution.

"We were encouraged by Hitachi to look at our existing spinning disc SAN. We did a proof of concept and benchmarked about 50 desktops on Hitachi's spinning discs," Waddell said.

"The results were quite unsatisfactory. It was very slow in loading and that was not what we needed for a good student experience. However, it is great for our enterprise applications and databases; we run our file sharing off of it and it is very reliable for that."

He said that he looked at solid state solutions from Whiptill and Fusion-io, and the flash-based Violin solution and carried out a benchmark on each before deciding on a 3000 Series Violin flash Memory Array.

"Violin has the most reliable offering. It was robust and it has a larger number of customers in comparison to other specialist storage vendors, and its performance was great for us. When we benchmarked we didn't see a degradation of performance from the storage. We ran out of server capacity before we ran out of storage capacity which was a good thing," said Waddell.

Waddell also stated that Violin was able to demonstrate a sustainable support management offering to ensure it gets good support into the future.

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Anglia Ruskin University selects Violin storage ahead of Hitachi and Fusion-io

Violin Memory "out-performed" competitors, says IT director

He also explained that to cater for the heavy input/output loads that would be generated by the mass of users logging on and launching apps, a traditional SAN solution would have consumed more power, as it would require significant cooling, and incur higher maintenance costs than the Violin Memory-based solution.

Along with the Violin solution, the university overhauled its IT architecture by incorporating HP Blade servers, a 10Gbit network, low power zero clients (also known as thin clients) from Samsung and LG, and an upgrade to Windows 7 and Office 2010.

Waddell said that the overall costs were similar to those that would have been required to provide traditional PCs, partly because of saving on power consumption.

"Low power consumption was important; with Violin we have zero clients that run on 30-40 per cent less energy [than desktops]. Power consumption for a desktop could be between 120 to 170 watts and for the solution we have it is between 50 and 90 watts, and this includes the storage and server infrastructure," he said.

The new desktop solution was initially launched within an IT testing area in August 2011, and is now being rolled out to a wider base including the staff. This will aim to allow 1,400 concurrent users access to 40 applications, depending on an individual's workload.

"Feedback from our students and the Student Union has been excellent. Our architecture has allowed the addition of new software such as Adobe Dreamweaver. We have also realised potential software licence savings, where software can be licensed on a concurrent basis rather than a ‘per seat' basis," Waddell added.