One of Italy's largest universities deployed a Syneto EXTREME Series all-SSD array to run a complex VDI environment — reaching 250,000 IOPS with instant provisioning, low TCO and end-to-end data integrity.
The University of Milan is a public teaching and research university with 31 departments and a teaching staff of 2,000 professors, distinguished by a wide variety of disciplinary fields. A leading institute in Italy and Europe for scientific productivity, it is the largest university in the Lombardy region, with approximately 64,000 students. Its Information Systems division maintains the university's information systems, designs and develops new applications, and provides the hardware and software needed to support the university's users.
The university was searching for a storage solution that could support a complex virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) without over-provisioning and with a reduced TCO. The infrastructure had to be easy to manage, highly scalable and built to handle the write-intensive nature of VDI. It also needed to protect VDI data against the silent data corruption that can occur at the block level.
VDI projects often demand heavy management effort and large budgets, with over-provisioning inflating storage footprint, power and cooling. The university wanted a system configurable in minutes rather than days.
VM density is the single most important aspect of any VDI deployment: the more VMs a storage can handle, the lower the price per desktop. Thin Provisioning and per-VM space control were required.
VDI produces small, random, write-intensive I/O in steady state and large bursts during peaks — patterns that legacy arrays handle poorly. Hybrid storage with SSD read-cache is not sufficient; an affordable pure-SSD array was needed.
Scalability is hard to predict: a project starting at 50 VMs must be able to grow to a 500-seat environment. The solution had to expand virtual disks almost instantly, clone VMs fast, and guard against silent data corruption end to end.
The University of Milan opted for a Syneto EXTREME Series, a pure-SSD array that reaches 250,000 IOPS and can host thousands of virtual desktops based on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) for servers and desktops. Built specifically for VDI, it delivers high throughput and very low latency and absorbs I/O bursts during peak workloads without slowing down the whole system.
Syneto Storage OS instantly provisions new space by transparently growing virtual disks with no downtime. VXClone technology creates VDI clones almost instantly, letting the university deploy hundreds of persistent virtual desktops in seconds.
Syneto Storage OS applies in-line Deduplication and Compression to VDI writes so no duplicate blocks are stored, while Thin Provisioning distributes space efficiently between VMs — achieving much lower space consumption and a friendly, automated management layer.
The pure-SSD EXTREME Series array is designed to handle the write-intensive nature of VDI without the performance lag of disk-based storage, scaling smoothly as virtual desktops come online.
Each block written is checksummed, with the checksum kept in the pointer to that block and validated all the way up the filesystem hierarchy. On a mismatch, a self-healing mechanism repairs the data — guarding VDI data against bit rot, phantom writes and DMA parity errors.
The solution was provided by TECHNE in partnership with SIELCO for the University of Milan, pairing Syneto's storage platform with local integration expertise.
The Syneto EXTREME Series performed as expected. In a load test that created and prepared the data pool for 100 virtual machines, the array reached over 250,000 IOPS, nearly saturating the gigabit interface — confirming it can host hundreds of virtual desktops with instant provisioning and room to scale.
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Public teaching and research university running a Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) VDI environment on a Syneto EXTREME Series pure-SSD array. Covers the VDI storage challenge, the deployed solution and the validated results. Delivered with TECHNE and SIELCO.
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