ABS selects Expand and VMware

Peter Dinham
Tuesday, 23 June 2009 15:22

Business IT - Technology

The Australian Bureau of Statistics has completed its implementation of an organisation-wide virtualisation strategy with the selection of Expand Networks to deploy its WAN optimisation technology.

Expand Networks said today the deployment would complete the ABS virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) implementation.

ABS, servers, systems and storage manager, Bruce Buckham, said the Expand Networks system would be deployed in the datacentre as a virtual image on existing VMware ESX Hypervisor, with Expand’s virtual accelerators enabling the rollout by ABS to migrate employees across the country to VDI.

“Accelerating the delivery of traffic over the WAN by over 300%, the implementation is intended to bring users across seven regional offices into virtual proximity of their applications and datacentre services.

“After investing heavily in a server virtualisation project, we are keen to complete our strategy by deploying a virtual desktop infrastructure. However, for the users in the regional offices who will receive their entire desktop over the WAN, we need to accelerate the data transfer to make it a workable experience,” Buckham added.

Buckham said leveraging existing virtual infrastructure in the datacentre, Expand’s WAN optimisation technology was deployed as a “virtual image”.

“Without Expand’s virtual accelerator, our virtual desktop plans would have stalled.  The accelerators will help us realise our virtual investment, and being virtual, they fit perfectly with our strategy.”
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