WhipTail Tech announced that UHS-Pruitt Corporation, a Southeast regional leader in long-term health care, has selected two 12TB WhipTail solid-state XLR8r arrays to support the 20,000 IOPS (and growing) required for its Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop farm.

Since its inception in 1969 as the Toccoa Nursing Center, the UHS-Pruitt community of services has grown to encapsulate more than 70 post-acute, skilled nursing and assisted living locations, as well as an array of supplementary resources including home health care, end-of-life care, rehabilitation, veteran care and consultative pharmaceutical services. UHS-Pruitt employs more than 15,000 people and services communities in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina.

"We needed a solution that would immediately support the 20,000 IOPS required for our existing Citrix farm and provide 100 percent growth every six months to a year. We also wanted to maintain complete redundancy with the hardware supporting this Citrix farm. Rather than invest in the existing centralized storage environment for what equates to virtual desktops, which could impact the applications it supports, we wanted to isolate this VDI performance bottleneck. We were looking for a single solution vendor that could do that and fit the budget," said Rich Bailey, Executive Director, Infrastructure Operations, for UHS-Pruitt. "WhipTail provides an integrated solid state appliance approach, while alternative solutions required another vendor to provide software or hardware. The XLR8r has given us the flexibility to add an additional storage tier without the performance and capital costs we would have incurred with other options."

The WhipTail XLR8r is an SSD array that supports up to 12 TB of MLC flash in an industry standard rack-mounted 2U form factor. The XLR8r's patent-pending design overcomes the write performance and longevity challenges typically associated with cost-effective MLC flash technology. A recent Lab Validation Report developed by Enterprise Strategy Group, which explores the benefits of the XLR8r in more detail, may be downloaded here.

"What Rich and UHS-Pruitt experienced is prevalent across the industry: clients of all shapes and sizes are anxious to realize the value of broad adoption of virtualized applications and desktops, yet are confronted with an overwhelming performance challenge. How do they expand when the storage costs are punitive? As with our previous clients who have deployed tens of thousands of virtualized users in production on the XLR8r, UHS-Pruitt is leveraging the speed, performance and compelling TCO that it provides," said Brian Feller, CMO and VP Strategic Alliances at WhipTail. "With the XLR8r, we provide our customers with super fast storage at a cost point that leaves plenty of monies left in the budget to be utilized elsewhere."