Army PEO Aviation expands virtual desktops
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The Army Program Executive Office Aviation has expanded its virtual desktop infrastructure with Nutanix appliances to better support handling Army aircraft systems.
The Army Program Executive Office Aviation has expanded its virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to better support its responsibility for handling its helicopter, fixed-wing aircraft and unmanned aircraft systems.
PEO Aviation currently maintains 400 virtual desktops for roughly 250 users. With the addition of Nutanix NX-3050 and NX-7110 appliances, which converge compute and storage into a single tier, PEO Aviation can increase its VDI environment by up to 500 additional virtual desktops.
The additional capacity will also enable the Army group to deliver graphically intensive, 3D applications in its virtual desktop environment.
“Our VDI program has been hugely successful in terms of our ability to provide enhanced functionality and performance to our end users,” said Alan Marett, server/network team lead for PEO Aviation. “We have also significantly decreased our technology footprint, and the converged approach enables us to scale as required.”
PEO Aviation first started adding Nutanix blocks in late 2012 in a VDI infrastructure upgrade.
Nutanix’s approach to converged infrastructure provides modular, “building block” scaling that lets agencies start small and grow incrementally, resulting in cost savings, efficiency and near immediate return on investment, the company said.
The platform installs quickly, requires little to no operation or management intervention and performs dramatically faster compared to legacy infrastructures, the company added.
“Web-scale is a unique approach to designing, building and managing datacenter infrastructure,” said Chris Howard, vice president, federal, Nutanix. “It offers predictability in terms of scalability, a lower total cost of ownership and is agile to easily respond to changing demands.:
Howard called the approach “a perfect fit for government agencies that are pursuing consolidation, cloud or mobile initiatives in a budget-conscious environment.”
Earlier this month, the company announced two additions to its virtual computing platform. The NX-9000 appliance is an all-flash hyper-converged platform, delivering scale-out storage for applications that demand exceptionally fast performance. The second, Metro Availability, is a technology that enables continuous availability across different sites by synchronously writing data across the sites and enabling near 100 percent uptime during an entire site failure.
The NX-9000 appliance is built to run applications with large working sets, such as databases supporting online transaction processing (OLTP). These applications need exceptionally fast storage performance, but also demand predictable and consistent l/O latency that flash can deliver.
Flash capacity is optimized using Nutanix’s scale-out compression and deduplication technologies that take advantage of unused compute resources across all nodes in the cluster, avoiding performance bottlenecks common in both traditional storage and all-flash arrays that depend on dual-controller designs.
With Metro Availability, Nutanix delivers continuous data protection across multiple data centers located up to 400km apart. All functionality is natively integrated into Nutanix software and supported across all Nutanix platforms with no hardware changes.
Metro Availabiltiy allows enterprise IT teams to maintain application availability during planned and unplanned site downtime. And virtualization teams can migrate virtual machines between sites during planned maintenance events, providing continuous data protection, Nutanix said.
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