Company Overview
The client for this virtualization assessment and solution is a private investment management company headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. Founded in 2007 by accomplished Wall Street veterans, the company offers services in the areas of private wealth management, investment banking and institutional fixed income.
Business Challenge
In March 2007, the client engaged Northridge to provide a set of virtualization recommendations and solutions upon which to run their enterprise. The client was currently utilizing a presentation virtualization solution that was not performing up to their expectations and suffered frequent service disruptions.
Solution Approach
After analyzing the client’s current environment and capturing their vision, goals and requirements, Northridge recommended a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) built on a clustered pair of Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 servers and Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 virtual machines. Thin client terminals running Windows XP embedded with RDP 6.0 provided the multi-monitor presentation experience that the client required.
Results Delivered
The client immediately recognized the benefits of the new virtual desktop infrastructure. Each user had a dedicated virtual machine with 1GB of RAM, vastly improving the user experience over the previous implementation. All applications, data and preferences are redirected to back-end storage making provisioning, hot machine swapping and data protection a simple reality. By the end of the 2008, Northridge will replace Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 with Microsoft Hyper-V and upgrade the virtual machines to Windows XP Service Pack 3. Additionally, Microsoft Data Center Protection Manager will be implemented to provide second site data storage and redundancy.