Optimising your Storage Properly planned and optimised storage can be the difference between success and failure for desktop virtualisation projects - particularly as they scale up to operational use.

The Storage Challenge

	Customer Feedback
	"When an organisation seeks to exploit leading edge technology, you need to recognise that you need a partner which is an expert to make success easier." "In Centralis BUPA found experts who also matched our delivery approach in every way and, best of all, kept to their promises."	Ian Shaw, Head of IT Services, BUPA
	Business & Technical Benefits
	Desktop Strategy - Buy the right specification of storage for your virtualisation requirements Budget: Significantly reduce the cost of your  virtualisation projects Scalability: Avoid bottlenecks and performance hits around "boot storms" etc as numbers scale up from POC  User Performance: Deliver optimum login and load times Responsiveness: Correctly specified and optimised storage allows organisations to respond more quickly to changes and new demands
	Customer Feedback
	"In discussions with our preferred solution provider Centralis it became apparent that, for a Virtualised environment, the storage solutions provided by NetApp not only provided the greatest flexibility, resilience and growth but also made operational management (especially provisioning) easier. The solution offered excellent value when comparing our requirements with what the market had to offer . "	Bill Remmer, Head I.T. Dudley PCT
	Selected Centralis Case Studies
	NSK Managed Service delivers improvement for key UK manufacturer. Royal Marsden Hospital NHS Trust Delivering secure access to patient records for major cancer treatment hospital. LGC International access for UK scientific standards agency.

Storage was one of the early bottlenecks in server virtualisation as organisations discovered that flexible and resilient systems required not only lots of centralised storage, but lots of fast and reliable centralised storage. 

Moving applications and desktops into the centre has thrown up its own additional challenges.  Not only is careful design needed to avoid a massive storage requirement, but consideration also has to be given to the way desktops read from and (more importantly) write to storage.

Many proof of concept and pilot installations of desktop virtualisation have progressed very well using existing SAN and NAS capacity, only for performance to drop off dramatically when scaled up beyond the initial group of  users.

Similarly, any business case for virtualising desktops is likely to unravel very quickly if storage costs are not factored in and minimised from the start.
 

How Centralis Can Help

Centralis specialises in optimising storage for desktop virtualisation.  Whether your priority is maximising performance or minimising cost (or both), our understanding of the impact of desktop virtualisation on storage is invaluable - that's why we won the NetApp award for outstanding achievement in this area.

The main benefits of working with us on your storage strategy are:

• Excellent track record and references in storage for desktop and virtualisation projects
• Award winning solutions backed by vendor accreditation
• Storage provided and optimised as part of an end-to-end solution

If you want the most scalable and flexible storage solution for virtualisation Centralis recommends NetApp.

NetApp has featured in many Centralis success stories because it allows customers to reduce VDI storage costs, provision thousands of virtual desktops in minutes with nearly instant, low-overhead storage cloning and provide continuous access through automated disaster recovery.

NetApp also features VDI performance acceleration that addresses desktop boot or login storms and back up solutions for virtual desktops and user data that cost-effectively keep a daily history of every desktop for months or years.

NetApp provides the flexibility, high availability, and cost effectiveness required to grow your virtual desktop environment.

To request more information about NetApp storage please contact us.

If you are looking to really scale up your virtual desktop estate, Centralis recommends Atlantis ILIO.

Atlantis ILIO is a VDI storage and performance optimisation software solution that integrates with Citrix and other VDI offerings to cut storage costs, provide IT teams with more storage options and boost desktop performance.

Atlantis ILIO fundamentally changes the economics and performance characteristics of VDI by intelligently optimising how the Microsoft Windows operating system interacts with VDI storage.

To find out how Atlantis can boost performance and reduce the costs of strategic desktop virtualisation click here.

How Customers Benefit

• Reduce costs - Optimising your storage minimises the amount you have to buy

• Improve performance - Significantly reduce users login and load times

• Improve scalability - Avoid performance and scaling issues by removing bottlenecks

• Improve reliability - Ensure that your desktops and data are highly available and backed up
   

What to do next

• Meet with a Centralis pre-sales consultant to discuss your options – no charge or obligation to proceed

• Find out how similar organisations have benefitted

• Discover how storage optimisation could be the key to both the savings and performance you need
   

Contact us for more information on Optimising Storage

Centralis Desktop Transformation

For more information on how Centralis can help with all aspects of Desktop Transformation, please see:

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