Gridstore, a leader in hyper-converged all flash infrastructure for the Microsoft Cloud-Inspired Data Center today announced that Affymetrix, a pioneer in microarray technology and genomics analysis, has chosen the Gridstore HyperConverged All-Flash Appliances to address their need for a solution that would provide greater agility and lower TCO in supporting the organization's short and long-term IT development projects.

The Affymetrix data center, until recently, had very limited virtualization. They were burdened by a custom application development process that required physical hardware to be deployed for each project, requiring extensive investment and manpower. They needed greater agility, flexibility, and better use of system and people resources.

To address their challenges, Affymetrix's plan was to virtualize and to support the organization's demand for IT support of various dev/test projects with VDI. Initially they deployed a high-performance HP solution but it was dismissed for lack of performance and high availability. Advised to investigate Gridstore's HyperConverged Appliances (HCA), they deployed Gridstore's HCA with three HyperConverged nodes, each with six SSDs. They are now supporting both short and long-term application development projects using a Gridstore platform with VDI and meeting their delivery, performance, and TCO requirements.

"Typically it would take 2 ½ hours per individual desktop to configure the hardware and deploy it," said Anthony Luciany, technical support specialist, Affymetrix. "With Gridstore's HCA, we can deploy the equivalent of 10 systems using VDI in only 90 minutes."

The Gridstore HCA for VDI has provided much needed flexibility, agility, and cost savings to the IT department. To perform an upgrade of their financial system they estimated they would have needed to acquire, set up, and deploy up to 40 desktops to complete the project. Instead, with the Gridstore HCA and Hyper-V, all of those physical desktops are now virtual.

By using VDI, Affymetrix has significantly reduced hardware costs as well as increased flexibility and agility of deployment and redeployment of resources. Groups that need temporary infrastructure for specific projects now are satisfied with the performance of Virtual Infrastructure, saving time and money. Deployments can expand or contract quickly and easily in tandem with the projects underway.