03 March 2017

Instead of integrating costly SAN, NAS or all-flash array storage with servers, Atlantis Computing says HyperScale delivers a hyperconverged solution pre-integrated with compute, enterprise-class all-flash storage and virtualisation.

Calor Gas has now gone live with a virtualisation project that is said to have delivered a 35 per cent end-user performance improvement over its existing storage system. The solution, running on Citrix XenApp with Atlantis Computing’s HyperScale appliance and USX software storage, is also claimed to be 28 per cent cheaper.

Described as the UK’s leading LPG supplier, Calor Gas has more than 900 office-based employees and remote workers. High performance and solid reliability are therefore critical for its core business operations.

But when it first trialled virtualisation based on Citrix XenDesktop, it discovered significant performance issues with its existing SAN. What the firm needed was a VDI solution to support resource-intensive applications and specialist software on a regular basis for remote development and external contractors.

But this would have required extending the SAN, but expanding the existing storage wasn’t considered a cost-effective solution for the firm. The entire VDI project was therefore put on hold until a more affordable answer could be found. This came in the form of Atlantis’ HyperScale appliances. These combine compute and storage into a single platform, developed, supported and maintained by a single vendor.

Calor Gas installed a second HyperScale for its new virtual desktops to support the heavy workloads of power users.

Atlantis also provides a fully redundant storage solution for the company. Through continual replication of both HyperScale appliances to the USX virtual platform, it’s claimed the company has a “highly effective” disaster recovery and business continuity solution along with high performing and reliable VDI.