International alternative assets advisory firm, MVision, has deployed Tintri VMstore, developed by Time Inc., to support its virtual desktop infrastructure.
MVision is said to be benefiting from faster remote access to the company network for its highly mobile workforce, as well as greater performance and centralised maintenance.
MVision implemented Tintri as part of a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) project, replacing Windows 2008 Terminal Services to improve performance, reduce complexity and provide a more efficient remote working solution.
MVision's business needs necessitate staff to work on very large and graphics-heavy documents and applications. Also, many of the employees frequently travel, accessing and working on these documents remotely. The existing solution using terminal services became unproductive and inconsistent.
With sites in London, New York, Hong Kong and Sydney, time zone differences were also making it difficult to perform maintenance tasks without disrupting business in at least one office.
IT director at MVision, George Kyriazis, said: "We decided in summer 2012 to move away from distributed terminal services on four continents and implement a modern virtual desktop architecture while centralising the infrastructure in London. As we started looking into VDI, we realised the important role storage played in implementing a high performance virtual desktop infrastructure. We brought in Tintri for a POC which quickly validated our plan for a centralised architecture."
The VDI solution with Tintri is said to provide MVision staff with easier and faster remote connectivity to their desktop VMs. What could previously take up to 10 minutes to remotely access business applications now takes few seconds. It users can benefit from rapid application launch and handling of very large files due to Tintri's flash-first architecture. Tintri also helped consolidate virtual desktops and server VMs on the same storage, increasing operational efficiency, and was key in halving the execution time of complex CRM database queries.
Kyriazis added: "VDI solution with Tintri has been successful for both end users and IT staff managing the solution. VDI solution with Tintri provided high performance and excellent responsiveness to end users even under heavy usage greatly increasing user productivity. Centralising the infrastructure has provided economy of data and resource utilisation and allowed IT staff to carry out database and network maintenance even during business hours without disrupting service at any of our sites."
Geoff Stedman, VP of marketing at Tintri, commented: "VDI is an increasingly popular option for IT departments seeking to simplify desktop management tasks and centralise security and data protection, while supporting a mobile workforce that prefer using tablets to laptops. VDI projects often stall or even fail altogether due to storage costs, management complexity and user limitations. It has become abundantly clear that modern virtualised infrastructure requires a modern approach to storage."