School district CIO explains switch to Tegile Systems
Jeremy Heide, CIO of Brighton Colorado's school district 27J, was kind enough to expain the district's choice of a Tegile Systems storage solution over an HP P6300 Enterprise Virtual Array to support a VDI roll out. Thanks for taking the time to explain what happened and a bit about the choice to go with Tegile Systems Jeremy.
Please introduce yourself and your organization
Jeremy Heide, CIO of School District 27J in Brighton, Colorado.
The mission of School District 27J, with the support of the family and community, is to ensure that all students have the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed for present and future competence and success.
Beliefs that support the mission and serve as a foundation for the general learning outcomes are:
- All students can learn.
- Success breeds success.
- Schools with community support manage the conditions for success.
What were you doing that needed this type of technology?
The district launched its VDI environment with a 100-desktop pilot program with the expectation that it would later scale to 800 desktops to complete the first of a three-phase rollout.
Having had experience with a virtual SAN server environment before, we designed and implemented an architecture featuring an HP P6300 Enterprise Virtual Array. As the system went live on the first day of the school year, the resulting boot storm from teachers logging in crashed the backend of the infrastructure.
A VMware consultant who was onsite for the launch did some whiteboard calculations that revealed that the HP SAN was undersized and basically was not going to work.
What products did you consider before making a selection?
We originally installed an HP P6300 Enterprise Virtual Array that crashed. My staff and I began looking at other storage options that could quickly overcome the hardware failure they had experienced.
One option was to try for more IOPS by inserting a tray of solid-state drives into the EVA but that was going to take HP 30 days to deliver and the district needed help sooner than later.
We also looked at products from Dell and Nexsan before taking a ‘leap of faith’ and trusting a solution from Tegile Systems to overcome the issues they were facing.
Why did you select this product?
Tegile came out and looked at what we had, assessed our needs in the timeframe we had and implemented a solution in the middle of an outage. They worked with the VMware engineer that was helping us to design a storage system that would address our unique challenges and was able to deliver the Zebi solution within a week of us placing the order.
What tangible benefits have you received through the use of this product?
School District 27J currently is utilizing two Zebi units for two pools to support 866 virtual desktops. Desktop delivery times that were initially measured in hours on the HP system now only take 14 seconds with Tegile. With its built-in compression and deduplication features, the school district was able to reduce the 25 TB of storage written to their Zebi array by 90% to only 2.5 TB. And the units’ performance enhancements have convinced staff that they can successfully accelerate their 3-year plan for offering VDI from teachers to libraries to students.
What advice would you offer others facing similar circumstances?
Taking the conservative disk array approach from a large company like HP definitely didn’t work. Tegile came out and looked at what we had, assessed our needs in the timeframe we had and implemented a solution in the middle of an outage. They worked with the VMware engineer that was helping us to design a storage system that would address our unique challenges and was able to deliver the solution within a week of us placing the order. This is where working with a smaller, dedicated vendor with innovative technology excels.
Switching your way of thinking to a new approach will make all the difference.