Case Study: Waterstones achieves 20x faster desktop performance and 90% more storage capacity with Atlantis Computing

Atlantis halts costly and disruptive downtime at high street retailer

Waterstones, the UK bookshop chain, was suffering frequent VDI performance problems and daily downtime—5–15 minutes for more than 100 users—caused by storage bottlenecks. Its Citrix farm was also running at 90–95% I/O capacity, preventing additional users or virtual servers and constraining growth.

Waterstones deployed Atlantis USX software-defined storage alongside its NetApp infrastructure with no user impact. The move delivered 20x faster desktop performance, latency under 1 ms, a drop in helpdesk calls, and freed roughly 85–90% of NetApp capacity (reported as a 90% increase in available storage), allowing the Citrix farm to shrink from 70 to 50 servers and provide scalable headroom for future growth.

Waterstones

Mike Burtoft

Senior Infrastructure Analyst