Marshall & Sterling Insurance, a 150-year-old insurance provider with 26 locations across the United States, has completed a new Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) rollout to 300 users in three weeks with the Atlantis HyperScale all-flash hyper-converged appliance. Atlantis HyperScale integrates servers, storage and virtualisation into a single appliance that delivers significantly greater storage performance at 50–90 per cent lower cost.
Marshall & Sterling selected Atlantis HyperScale after realising the limitations of its existing disk-based SAN to support the planned VDI rollout and enterprise-wide switch to Citrix-based desktops. Without additional large IT investments, the company’s existing infrastructure could only support an additional 160 virtual desktops.
“There was no way we could spin up another 300 to 400 virtual desktops, much less do it cost effectively,” said Jim Dahoney, Marshall & Sterling vice president and CIO. “Through our previous approach, we would have had to purchase double – if not triple – the number of host VMware licenses and multiple hardware appliances.”
AxiomIO, an Atlantis reseller, recommended the Atlantis HyperScale, all-flash, hyper-converged appliance, which provides over 12TBs of effective space using only 4TBs of actual flash.
“I was a bit skeptical as to whether the Atlantis solution could actually deliver on these numbers,” Dahoney said. “In fact, the numbers suggested that a single Atlantis HyperScale appliance could supply the same VDI density and CPU/memory performance as three to four of our existing hyper-converged appliances, which was too good to ignore.”
With the help of AxiomIO, Atlantis worked with Marshall & Sterling to deploy the HyperScale appliance and provision more than 300 virtual desktops, along with new dual monitors, and thin clients to replace traditional PCs in three weeks. Since the HyperScale installation, the insurance agency has witnessed significant performance gains in both deduplication and client responsiveness. Employee log in times are less than 20 seconds and average roughly 15 seconds. The new VDI-driven thin clients cost a third of the traditional replacement PCs.
“Using the Atlantis solution, we were able to revamp our VDI infrastructure quickly, efficiently, and cost effectively with much better performance than our prior solutions,” Dahoney said. “I feel lucky that we found out about Atlantis at the right time.”
“Atlantis HyperScale helped Marshall & Sterling meet its VDI goals at half the price of what our competitors offer,” said Bob Davis, Atlantis chief marketing officer. “We are proud of our team’s expertise and our technology for being able to improve Marshall & Sterling’s end-user experience, save money and reduce energy costs in the process.”
