VDI project pays dividends for Bank of Stockton

The 146-year-old company with nearly $2 billion in assets is the oldest bank in California, but the first in its market to pioneer new technologies like electronic banking, Internet banking and mobile banking. Its VDI initiative’s initial rollout included 80 virtualized desktops running VMware View hosted on NetApp arrays. But users experienced slowdowns when branch activity peaked, and the storage performance could not keep up.

The bank chose Tegile over NetApp, HP and Nimble Storage, and installed two Tegile Zebi HA2100EP arrays that leverage the performance of flash storage and the cost and capacity of hard disk drives. Tegile’s Zebi arrays intelligently integrate DRAM, flash and hard disk storage to create an optimized hybrid storage appliance with best in class data protection features and user-friendly interface.

However, despite Tegile’s vastly better value proposition, Vincent Lo, the bank’s vice president, applications and support, remained skeptical of Tegile’s data deduplication and compression claims, and purchased more capacity than Tegile recommended. The bank calculated it would need about 8TB to support 100 VDI instances and other applications, but after the Zebi arrays performed capacity optimization, 160 virtual desktops and other data consumed just 3TB of the 32TB total capacity the bank purchased, leaving ample headroom for expansion.

“Their data reduction claims were accurate and then some, we just didn’t believe them,” Lo said. “The price/performance value was much higher with Tegile. It just doesn’t happen for people to deliver at their level of service. I’ve been in the IT business for 25 years and this is the strongest customer support I have seen.”

Instead of using the more common linked-clones VDI scheme, Bank of Stockton uses persistent desktop images, introducing a higher I/O load on SAN storage in a VDI install. Tegile delivered more than six times the performance of the bank’s previous storage: it now averages 20,000 IOPS for the VDI environment, with a peak of 40,000 IOPS.

“The search for a storage upgrade that could deliver the IOPS to keep up with their VDI requirements sent Bank of Stockton to a number of strong solutions, but in the end, only Zebi arrays delivered the holy grail of storage – high performance, high capacity and high reliability at low cost,” said Rob Commins, vice president of marketing, Tegile Systems.