Kent Selects Load Balancing Solution To Support VDI

Kent County Council has opted for load-balancing equipment to support its virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) project.

The local authority is now equipped with a Kemp Technologies load-balancing solution in its two datacentres located in Maidstone and a shared facility with Medway Council.

The council hopes that using Kemp alongside its virtualised infrastructure will lead to high availability, scalability and performance.

The VDI programme is used by 6500 users across around 300 locations and forms part of Kent’s plan to reduce costs but also create greater efficiency and flexibility for data services.

“Kemp offered an intuitive, cost-effective solution that provided all the functionality and scalability we needed, and most importantly, delivered this natively on the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS), which was the platform we chose to host the VMware virtualised infrastructure,” claimed Glen Larkin, Kent’s lead technical architect.

“Rollout Running Smoothly So Far”

The new VDI solution has already been rolled out to around 150 users, with the complete migration due for completion in April 2015.

“The deployment has been going very smoothly. Our new virtual, well-balanced environment will provide a flexible and scalable platform for the council’s future needs and means that we no longer have to support thousands of desktop PCs, which allows us to use our time and resources to greater effect,” added Larkin.

To deploy the Kemp solution, Kent worked closely with service provider Phoenix Software, which also helped the council deliver its virtual environment via VMware Horizon view.

This allows the authority access to more than 300 business applications such as Oracle E-Business Suite and Microsoft Exchange 2010.

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