Software-define dstorage for virtual desktop provider

Founded in 2009, VESK’s customers range from local government organisations with more than 500 employees to small business with as few as three users. It was one of the first companies to implement and support the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) in Britain and, in recent years, it has expanded into providing cost-effective, accessible platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) capabilities from its three data centres – located in London, Singapore and the US.

However, as its client base and cloud offering grew, VESK continually found storage issues barring the way to future and sustainable growth – not only could its current business model no long support any underutilisation of expensive storage equipment, but the management of an extended storage area network (SAN) risked swamping system administrators. Equally, with the need for a higher IOPS and 100 percent performance level uptime for high density applications, recurring issues like low caching ability and limited network speed further constricted the company’s development. Despite having more than 70 hyper-visor servers running, the legacy SAN was the crux of the problem.

VESK turned to NexentaStor as it needed a solution that could provide an agile and expandable architecture, one that is scalable to overcome random IOPS and could grow with the company. “We have huge IOPS requirements for a range of I/O (Input/Output) profiles and Nexenta enables us to optimise and fulfil application and desktop needs from the storage layer upward,” said Richard De Napoli, head of infrastructure at VESK. “The solution gave us a strong storage foundation to expand into IaaS, PaaS, and DaaS.”

The solution, NexentaStor High Availability (HA) Cluster in a SAN, provides VESK with more than 130TB of raw storage, as well as read and write SSD caching. Disaster recovery – backup and retrieval – is also dramatically increased with VESK’s three disaster recovery locations connect via 10GbE dark fibre and provided with an hourly data auto-sync. Furthermore, unlike with other suppliers’ solutions, NexentaStor enables VESK to cluster so it can simply add more SANs when required, removing the need to purchase a new solution when capacity is insight.

“VESK needed a storage solution that could keep up with, and facilitate, its continued growth,” explained Mark Jordan, VP, GM EMEA at Nexenta. “Its previous setups were simply not agile enough and prevented it from meeting the high demands of its client base. NexentaStor not only empowers VESK to provide for its existing customers with higher performance and reliability, but it also means VESK has a flexible and scalable architecture that can be easily expanded to meet the needs of tomorrow’s users too.”