Storage

Watchung Hills Regional High Deploys Software-Defined Storage for Virtualization

• By Leila Meyer
• 03/11/15

Watchung Hills Regional High School (WHRHS) in New Jersey has implemented a software-defined storage (SDS) system to support its VMware Horizon virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

The school has a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) environment and provides a wireless network to let students, teachers and staff connect their personal devices to the network. The school was also a beta site for the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) online assessments. The district implemented a VDI infrastructure to preserve device independence while conforming to PARCC's security requirements. The school started off slowly with its VDI implementation in 2012, beginning with only 10 users and gradually adding more, but within six months the storage input-output became a bottleneck, and they had to halt their VDI expansion.

The school began looking for a solution to its storage bottleneck and compared traditional storage vendors with the Atlantis USX VDI storage solution from Atlantis Computing. According to Andy Bohl, IT manager at WHRHS, the traditional storage systems wouldn't scale as easily. "With Atlantis, we were able to expand from 10 to thousands of desktops without any additional hardware," he said in a prepared statement.

According to information from the company, WHRHS chose Atlantis for its scalability, performance and management capabilities. Atlantis USX can support up to 1,000 concurrent virtual desktops using existing attached storage, and the company claims it can provide "faster-than-PC performance, near-instant application launch, and fast login times." Students and teachers now have secure access to their Windows desktops from anywhere, and the school's PARCC online assessments can perform smoothly.