Harlingen WaterWorks System transforms VDI performance and reliability

With 27,000 customers and a major emphasis on the effectiveness and availability of its 24/7 consumer billing and support services, HWWS was looking to solve a range of VDI performance and service challenges. The company now runs 52 virtual machines across three Scale Computing HC3 appliances, using them to deliver a range of mission-critical applications. These include financials, utility billing, cash receipts, inventory and a number of other operational functions, such as general ledger and human resources.

With an IT team of just four people, HWWS has seen major efficiency gains, with infrastructure management time reduced by 30 percent over their previous solution. In addition, HWWS carries out synthetic backups every night and takes a snapshot of their environment on the Scale Computing HC3 once per hour. With the utility sector a frequent target of criminal malware attacks, this capability has become extremely significant to the business in protecting against technology failure and the potential risk of ransomware. 

“We run a 24/7 environment and downtime is not an option for us,” explained John McKenna, IT director at Harlingen WaterWorks System. “We take payments over the Internet, via kiosks and IVR phone payments, so if we are down even for a short time, it impacts our customers tremendously. With Scale Computing, we are at a huge advantage with their exceptional reliability. It’s not even a thought in our mind as to whether or not we’re going to have our computing assets available or not, since with Scale Computing, it’s easy to expand as our business does, and that’s a major benefit.”

Scale Computing has streamlined VDI for the distributed enterprise, and all those for whom VDI was unaffordable or unrealistic in the past. With their combined expertise of Scale Computing HC3, in combination with Leostream and Liquidware technology, provides a complete VDI solution that is simple to set up, easy to manage, cost-effective, while still offering all the same great features you'll find from a legacy VDI solution.

“IT teams know the necessity of having a highly reliable, high performing IT infrastructure. Specifically, the HWWS team, who delivers an absolutely critical set of IT services, needed a technology and support solution that is strong in all areas,” commented Jeff Ready, CEO and co-founder, Scale Computing. “By working with Scale Computing, Leostream and Liquidware, they have a solution which meets perhaps the most sought after, but under-achieved objective in the technology industry – it just works, extremely well.”