Case Study: Colt Technology Services achieves 10,000‑user cloud DaaS and 61% lower storage costs with Atlantis Computing

Colt Builds Cloud-Hosted Desktop as a Service Offering for 10,000 Users with Atlantis

Colt, a leading European network and cloud services provider and premier VMware partner, needed a scalable desktop virtualization offering that delivered a better-than‑PC user experience without prohibitive storage CAPEX and OPEX. A VDI pilot showed traditional storage costs and operational complexity would make high-performance desktops too expensive to deliver at scale.

Colt deployed Atlantis ILIO Diskless VDI on Cisco UCS and VCE Vblock, using server RAM as primary storage and Atlantis ILIO Center plus VMware View to automate provisioning. The solution eliminated traditional storage, reduced total cost per desktop by 61% (23% OPEX reduction), increased user density by 40%, and scaled to 10,000 virtual desktops with faster‑than‑PC performance (0.53s average response); a customer deployment for Hammersmith & Fulham delivered 20–25% seat cost savings, 80% lower power and a 33% TCO reduction.

Colt Technology Services

Chris Hewetson

CIO, Colt Technology Services