QLogic, the industry leader in Fibre Channel adapters, today announced
that the Titusville, Pa. School District has implemented a QLogic
FabricCache solution to maximize the performance and scalability of the
district's virtual desktop initiative and overall IT infrastructure, and
realize immediate and long-term savings on current and future IT
investments.
The Titusville
School District supports 2,200 students from elementary through high
school across six campuses. The core IT infrastructure delivers
applications through leased lines and a private fiber optic network
connecting the campuses' 1,400 desktop PCs, laptop PCs, netbooks and
tablet computers. Despite aggressive replacement and upgrade policies at
the district, aging equipment coupled with a growing number of devices
was hampering classroom productivity, slowing application response times
and frustrating students and faculty.
The Titusville IT team launched a virtual desktop
initiative and quickly realized that architecting a district-wide
deployment took more resources than they had in-house. The district
turned to Cross IT, a QLogic Advanced Solutions Partner specializing in
virtualization technology and the education market, to help develop and
implement a plan. QLogic Advanced Solutions Partners receive
well-rounded business, technology and consultancy training to help
ensure customers improve business results by reaping maximum benefit
from technology investments.
"To
bridge the gap between fast application performance and aging PCs, we
recommended virtual desktop software from VMware and FabricCache
adapters from QLogic," said Thomas Breakiron, manager of technical
services at Cross IT. "Virtual desktop implementations require storage
solutions with a large number of high performance hard disk drives (HDD)
to effectively replace desktop PCs. With the need for such a large
investment in storage, the overall savings would have been minimal. By
adding FabriCache adapters with flash memory, we reduced PC replacements
and cut down on the number of expensive drives required. This
subsequently reduced power usage and significant cooling and maintenance
costs, resulting in substantial savings."
QLogic FabricCache is the industry's first caching
storage area network (SAN) adapter, combining the market-leading QLogic
Fibre Channel adapter, intelligent caching and I/O management with a
server-based PCIe flash card. The FabricCache solution massively exceeds
the performance possible from traditional SAN-based technology with a
design breakthrough that enables acceleration of virtualized and
clustered applications without changes to existing server software or
infrastructure. With a FabricCache adapter capable of 300,000 IOPS of
performance versus only 180 IOPS for a hard disk drive (HDD), the
district was able to increase performance and drive down costs for
Titusville by using a handful of FabricCache adapters instead of
multiple trays full of disk drives.
With VMware Horizon View desktop virtualization software, old
PCs became dumb displays and no longer needed beefy processing power
and memory capacity to run the resource-intensive applications used by
the schools. Virtual desktop servers send individual screens over the
network, which are painted on each user's PC, netbook or tablet.
"Virtual desktops and
FabricCache made old PCs blazing fast again, and the useful life of
computers was doubled - slashing replacement costs," said John Frye,
director of technology, Titusville Area School District. "The lower cost
of FabricCache delivered immediate cost-savings for the Titusville
School District, versus a multi-year return-on-investment approach using
disk drives for storage. The cost savings resulted in freeing
substantial funds for network and server infrastructure improvements and
other important initiatives."
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