Oregon State University, a public institution with more than 26,000 students and growing VDI workloads wanted a high performance storage tier for their VDI environment. However, they wanted the solution to be up and running before the school summer session began, along with being easy to operate and scale on an on-going basis, without requiring large upfront investments.
Alan Sprague, the university’s lead system administrator, found Virtual SAN to be the perfect solution for the university’s requirements. The narrow deployment window was no longer an issue as they could deploy the solution in just three days. Adjusting capacity and performance to the demands of each university semester is no longer an issue either; they can simply scale by adding a few servers at a time. With latency issues gone they’ve been able to turn over classrooms in two to three minutes.
“With Virtual SAN I now have a stable environment that I can grow organically or shrink organically depending on what our needs are. So it was really a no-brainer. Before Virtual SAN, we had no ability to scale. Now… it’s a piece of cake; if I want to add additional capacity, I just add an additional server. I don’t have to worry about whether my SAN can grow or not.”
— Alan Sprague, System Administrator, Oregon State University
Most importantly, Alan and his team, who were responsible for the evaluation and final deployment of Virtual SAN, believe that this is the right way to do storage.