How HPE SimpliVity Is Helping a Systems Analyst Do the Work He Cares About

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4 min readMay 22, 2018

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by Adam Borecki, Systems Analyst at Guelph Hydro Electrical Systems Inc

At Guelph Hydro, all of our infrastructure equipment was coming to the end of its life. We scoped out what it would take to replace all the SANs, ESX hosts and rebuild the environment. We were moving to a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environment — thin clients on the desks that in the backend go to centralized servers. For three years, we were trying to get it to the point where people didn’t know if they had a desktop or thin client on their desk.

We were trying to find the product that could help us get to that point, but also save us money and space in the server room.

We needed to make this switch because of the impact it was having on our end users. They would complain about the unresponsiveness of the environment. Users would try to open Outlook or try to put in call notes and the PC would just hang. They would have to wait two to three minutes at a time, and this would happen 20 times a day. That adds up to a lot of time lost. Not only is it frustrating, but it’s time taken away from doing their jobs.

Small time losses for your end users add up to big time losses. Find ways to make their lives easier.

On the cost savings side, being in the industry that we’re in, we’re heavily regulated. We have finite budgets to work with. If we go over budget, then we’re penalized by the regulating body. It’s important to be able to save that money because that’s less money we have to pass on to our customers. People don’t want to feel like their rates are going up because we decided to buy more equipment.

But moving to this VDI environment would also mean having less equipment, resulting in a smaller environmental footprint.

The Search Begins

Considering all of those factors, we needed to think long term when purchasing anything. We needed to think about what was going to cost us the least amount of money over time.

In our search for the right solution, we looked at another environment that was exactly the same as what we had, just with newer boxes. It was having the network SAN by the network switch, that connected to your ESX host to the SAN and the newer ESX boxes. We looked at that option, but the price was rather extravagant.

At the time, the buzz word in our industry was hyperconvergence: everything all in one box. This would allow everything to be managed as a single system, which was attractive to us. We looked at two hyperconvergence solutions: Nutanix and HPE SimpliVity. The issue with Nutanix was that it couldn’t support the NVIDIA GRID GPU card, which is what we were trying to use for our VDI environment since we have a lot of users that use AutoCAD. That meant that Nutanix wasn’t even an option for us.

We had HPE SimpliVity come in and it just worked. It was a night and day difference from what we had before. We had them set up a proof of concept, which was so crucial because we could see it physically working in front of us. We weren’t talking to a sales guy who says he could give us the sun, moon, and stars; I was seeing it for myself — and it was actually true. It really helped me make the decision.

After the purchase, the roll out phase was pretty seamless for us, because HPE SimpliVity did a pre-setup. We only had to rack it and turn it on, with just a minor configuration. We started at 9 a.m. and by noon we were live with the new boxes.

We thought this process was going to take at least a week, maybe two, so it was pretty incredible to have it done in less than one day. For us, that meant that we could hit the ground running with our new system.

Peace of Mind

Now that we are using HPE SimpliVity, we are finally able to backup our VMs, which is something we’ve never done before. Without proper backups, if something happened it meant taking three to four hours to clean up the PC, or even scrapping it and having to build a brand new PC for the end user, which would cost us an entire day.

With the backups, it’s as simple as going back to earlier in the morning and right-clicking Restore from Backup. And within five minutes, the user is up and running.

Being prepared with backups means if the worst happens, it’s an inconvenience, not a disaster.

Last year, we got hit with CryptoLocker and those backups really saved us. It happened at 1 p.m.…

Read the full story here.

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