Xtium LLC
Date
:
8/1/2010
Customers are enjoying services that are making them more efficient and providing new opportunities for revenue. And the new Dell EqualLogic firmware enables us to grow dynamically, so it’s a win-win.
— Tim Vogel, chief technology officer, Xtium LLC, the United States
Challenge
Xtium needed to deliver SAP test drive environments complete with Microsoft® SQL Server® databases to enable SAP customers to try and buy software, while meeting Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) expectations of swift installation and delivery. To meet SAP’s requirements, it needed to fully provision these customers within 24 hours.Solution
Xtium upgraded to Dell™ EqualLogic™ firmware 5.0 to enable the use of thin clones — thin-provisioned, writable copies of data volumes — and leverage direct integration with their VMware® vSphere™ 4.1 environment with vStorage™ application programming interfaces (APIs). The company is now able to make copies of golden images for SAP customers as well as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) projects with unprecedented speed and efficiency using optimized disk space.Benefits
- 30 times faster provisioning of clones for SAP test drive environments (two minutes versus one hour)
- 5 times faster copies using Xcopy for single instances of SAP test drives and virtual desktops
- 75 percent reduction of CPU utilization and 95 percent reduction in storage area network (SAN) traffic for copy process using Xcopy
- 90 percent savings in disk space with the use of thin clones
- 70 percent more hosted virtual machines (VMs) on fewer physical resources with atomic locking
- 50 percent fewer volumes to manage
- 72 percent less time moving VMs between physical servers with the use of VMotion™
- 76 percent less time to boot multiple virtual desktops, improving customer service
