Hempstead School District selects WhipTail for more productive virtual desktop in classroom

WHIPPANY, USA: WhipTail, maker of the world’s first and most widely deployed enterprise flash storage array, announced that Hempstead School District, one of Long Island’s largest districts with approximately 7,000 students, selected the WhipTail solid-state storage array to serve as the storage hub for its VMware View deployment. WhipTail has enabled a seamless, manageable SSD storage solution, meeting the performance demands necessary to deploy the most productive virtual desktop experience in the classroom.

Dr. Patricia Garcia, Superintendent of Schools at Hempstead Public Schools charged Carlos Ramirez, District Director of Technology and his technical team with the task to fulfill three requirements:

1) The storage solution had to be easily deployed and maintained, scalable across the district’s vast networks and desktops;
2) The array had to support high amounts of WRITE IO, allowing VDI to meet the full performance expectations for a highly productive learning environment where students could realize maximum virtual desktop availability during computer classes, without disruptive VDI launch delays;
3) The array had to be attained at an investment level within the district maintenance budget, without a massive added infrastructure investment up front.

After evaluation of multiple vendors the technical team led by Dave Lasker, network administrator, found that WhipTail was the only storage solution that met all three requirements and came highly recommended by the district’s VDI partners for the implementation of a pilot plan.

The Whiptail solid-state storage solution behaves like a traditional storage array, effectively reducing hardware and software costs tied to alternative solutions. Enabling students’ maximum productivity in the classroom was priority, but Hempstead Public Schools was also looking to realize energy savings, and after thorough analysis, it was clear that Whip Tail could help them achieve all of these goals.

Whiptail’s solid-state storage array runs on less than 200 watts and supports up to 12 TB of MLC flash with a remarkable 250,000 IO/sin a small 2U array fully populated by cost-effective MLC flash drives. The WhipTail array is highly tuned for low latency, high IO environments and possesses a proprietary operating system designed to overcome the write performance and longevity challenges typically associated with MLC flash. A recent Lab Validation Report developed by Enterprise Strategy Group explores the benefits of the WhipTail solid-state array in more detail.

“The overwhelming storage infrastructure required to support successful VDI deployment is becoming a major challenge for many looking to achieve the best of IT computing. WhipTail approaches the problem with an array that is built for performance – high amounts of WRITE IO,” said Dan Crain, CEO, WhipTail. “When you start talking in terms of IOPs (WRITE IOPs in particular), as is the case when dealing with virtual desktop environments, the focus should be on cost-per-IOP – not cost-per-GB. This puts WhipTail at a 90 percent cost advantage when up against HDD solutions. WhipTail also provides companies with up to 80% percent energy savings compared to traditional storage.”