Future-Proofing With Flash

Customer:

Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) is one of the most prestigious universities in Hong Kong, with approximately 15,000 students currently enrolled. Established in 1991, HKUST has already earned itself world renown with its leadership in the advancement of science, technology, business and humanities in the region. The university experienced poor end-user performance and difficulty in administration running VDI on legacy storage, so HKUST transitioned to flash with Pure Storage to drastically increase performance and bid farewell to previous technical challenges. Now equipped with a self-managing, scalable flash array capable of high IOPS and effective data reduction, the university offers access to high-performance persistent desktops over VDI to faculty members and students.

Challenges:

• Virtual desktop performance slowed by even a small pool of concurrent users.
• Disk-based storage unable to provide desirable IOPS.

Use Case:

• VDI – VMware® Horizon® 7

Business Transformation:

• The school can now dedicate IT manpower to discovering innovative ways of utilizing IT for better education.
  

IT Transformation:

• Boot storms no longer drag the system down.
• Systems running significantly faster to provide a positive user experience.
• Reduced storage physical footprint; running VDI with just one FlashArray//M10.
• Easy management of virtual machines.
• Achieved a data reduction rate of 19:1.