NexGen Storage today announced its n5 Series storage system has been deployed by ROCORI School District for its district-wide virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). The school district consolidated its VDI storage and the data storage for all of its other applications and systems onto a single NexGen n5 Series storage system. Based on a hybrid solid-state architecture, the n5 Series storage system provides Storage Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities that enable users to manage mixed workloads and guarantee performance for all applications. With the NexGen n5 storage system, the ROCORI School District achieved:

• Ample capacity and performance to store all its data on a single storage system and to accommodate future growth requirements
• 10x the performance for the same price versus a competitive name-brand solution
• 90% reduction in rack space with the same IOPS versus a competitive name-brand solution

“We’re able to use NexGen for all our workloads, including VDI, which greatly simplifies management,” said Brian Michalski, technology director, ROCORI School District. “The other solutions we evaluated would have required us to run VDI on a separate SAN in isolation from all of our other applications and systems, complicating our environment and forcing us to manage multiple storage solutions.”

Minnesota-based ROCORI School District is taking a forward-thinking approach to storage. When it decided to deploy a virtual infrastructure of up to 1,000 desktops, it initiated an evaluation of the latest SAN technologies to identify the best solution to support its planned VDI environment designed to meet the needs of its computer labs, students, faculty and staff.

ROCORI School District selected a NexGen n5 Series storage system, which provided 100,000 IOPS and 22 TBs of usable capacity, all within a 3U footprint. NexGen’s Storage QoS feature gave the school district the confidence to combine intermittently IO-intensive applications such as VDI on the same storage as other high-priority applications. The District is currently using NexGen storage to accommodate all of its applications and systems, including its computer lab VDI deployment, Microsoft Exchange 2010, multiple Microsoft SQL Server instances, web servers, VMware vCenter, the Skyward student information system, the district file servers, and its domain controllers.

Most importantly, the NexGen system allows the district’s IT staff to assign “mission critical” policies to its VDI deployment, Exchange Server, SQL Server instances, and Skyward application, so it can guarantee the performance necessary to maintain targeted performance levels for all of these applications.

The ROCORI School District will continue to expand its VDI initiative into multiple computer labs over the next couple of years. The NexGen solution has sufficient capacity and performance headroom to support the district’s projected growth and planned initiatives, including a student-friendly “bring your own laptop” program for high school students, in which each student laptop will run VMware View and its corresponding virtual desktop will reside on the NexGen n5 Storage System.

“Datacenters with mixed-workload environments need storage solutions that provide performance consistency and predictability for all applications at a low cost,” said Chris McCall, vice president of marketing, NexGen Storage. “By allowing IT administrators to run other workloads along with VDI on shared storage, NexGen’s n5 storage systems provide complete control over application storage performance within VDI environments. What’s more, it provides superior VDI economics by allowing organizations to consolidate, reduce storage footprint and save money from both a $/IOP and $/GB perspective.”

To learn more about NexGen’s solutions, attend its live webinar, “Provision and Guarantee VMware Datastore Performance” on Thursday, November 15, 2012 at 12:00 noon ET. Register here.

About NexGen Storage

NexGen Storage offers the first PCIe solid-state storage system designed from the ground up to manage performance just like capacity. Unlike any other shared storage system, NexGen offers both Storage QoS for managing performance and Service Levels to ensure mission-critical application performance no matter what happens. At the same time, NexGen’s PCIe solid-state architecture avoids performance bottlenecks to offer the best price/performance ratio of any midrange storage solution. Committed to channel success, NexGen provides reseller partners registered deal protection and rich margins on every opportunity. For more information, visit www.nexgenstorage.com.

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