HyperGrid, Enterprise Cloud-as-a-Service leader, has successfully assisted global business travel provider JacTravel in migrating to an agile, high-performing alternative virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environment. By enabling the company to move beyond its archaic legacy infrastructure, JacTravel has experienced significantly improved IT efficiency, placing the company in a position to better serve its customers.
Prior to working with HyperGrid, JacTravel was running a Citrix VDI solution which caused the company considerable technical issues. With the acquisition of a new company in 2015 that saw a near doubling in its user base, it was crucial for JacTravel to find a new solution which was fit for purpose, one that would ensure its back-end infrastructure was fully redundant, expandable and fault-tolerant, while ensuring a rapid return on investment.
Corin Grieves, Head of Service Design at JacTravel, said: “Whatever solution we found had to ease desktop management and increase security. One of the main selling points for VDI is the theoretical nirvana of a centrally controlled and administered desktop that should be – if implemented correctly – much more secure than traditional standalone desktops running on end-user computers.
“We originally looked at a number of cloud-based options and even completely outsourcing the VDI, but we realised pretty early on in the process that we needed a quick solution that could phase in 550 deployments across our multi-tenancy platform.”
After assessing a range of options, including AWS, JacTravel chose HyperGrid’s HyperConverged Infrastructure (HCI), which delivers a VDI-in-a-box solution. This was deployed rapidly, can be incrementally added to as needed, and can scale to thousands of desktops in one grid.
After switching to the HyperGrid platform, JacTravel managed to cut its footprint significantly, moving from 12 physical rack servers running on a Citrix environment to 2u worth of rack space. This associated space saving has delivered financial benefits in terms of power consumption and reduced carbon emissions.
Post-migration, the performance gain of each virtual desktop has been significant. The deployment included replacing outdated equipment with all-flash architecture that is up to ten times faster. Combined with a scalable, pay-for-usage model and features such as inline erasure encoding, straightforward modular scaling and integration with native Windows Server and Microsoft Cloud with Azure, this has brought significant benefits to JacTravel in terms of increased productivity and quality of service.
Doug Rich, Vice President of EMEA at HyperGrid, said: “Working with JacTravel has proven to be an extremely successful partnership. As a company with significant customer demands to fulfil, it was important that they had a VDI solution that could perform at a consistently high level, but was also able to scale up or down according to the changing needs of the business.
“Flexibility and agility are crucial in any modern IT solution – organisations can no longer rely on clunky, outdated legacy infrastructure which cannot keep up with the pace of modern business. For this reason, HyperGrid’s HCI solution was able to meet JacTravel’s challenges.
Grieves added: “The HyperGrid team’s understanding of our business – and the challenges we were confronted with – was impressive. The fact that HyperGrid came in at the right price, with the right lead times, was impressive in its own right.
“But it was the way the team worked with us on delivering the Proof of Concept that further impressed us. We were told we could operate the system for as long as we needed to feel comfortable with it. It all worked very well and in terms of initial VDI remit, the HyperGrid solution has massively overperformed.”
