360is Brings VDI To UK's Innovation-Lead Companies

Cambridge Display Technology is a UK-founded company that is leading the development of display technology based on polymer organic light emitting diodes. Their technology is used in mobile devices, screens and lighting. The company employs hundreds of scientists, engineers, and supporting staff around the world.

The company needed a high performance desktop virtualisation solution that would make supporting a distributed workforce easier. Constraints were space, power, CAPEX and a lack of availability of shared storage. End users were running a mixture of office automation and scientific applications.

A 64-bit Operating System was required in order to support the 6GB RAM desktops demanded by end users. Each hypervisor node was to support between 40 and 80 of those users. The only way to achieve the user-density required while meeting the constraints, was to use dedicated Virtualisation Appliances. The platform chosen provided an integrated IOPS sink, continuous performance and heath monitoring, and a redundant N+1 configuration. The solution was designed to support expansion, including applications that require virtualised GPU capability.

Where once only basic "office" desktops could be supported in any number, and the hardware (in particular shared storage) required to do so was prohibitively expensive, it is now possible to support far more specialised classes of user and application. Furthermore, such users can be supported at high-densities without the necessity of expensive shared storage, thanks to the in-bult IOPS sink and performance management features of Virtualisation Appliances.