Case Study: Hawaii Medical Service Association achieves 73% lower cost per desktop and 7x VDI performance with Atlantis Computing's ILIO

HMSA - Customer Case Study

Hawaii Medical Service Association (HMSA), the state’s largest health insurer with about 1,700 employees, faced rising HIPAA data‑loss prevention and desktop migration challenges while trying to escape the high cost and heavy IT burden of managing physical PCs. Traditional SAN/NAS storage to support virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) would have driven projected storage costs to about $1,755 per desktop and risked poor user experience due to extreme, write‑intensive desktop I/O spikes.

HMSA deployed persistent VMware desktops using Fusion‑io ioDrive flash cards combined with Atlantis ILIO in‑memory storage, which cut desktop storage footprints by up to 95% and raised density to ~300 desktops per 1.2TB card. The 1,700‑desktop rollout delivered roughly 1,000+ IOPS per desktop, 7‑second boot times and sub‑1‑second Office launches, while lowering storage cost per desktop to $480 (a 73% reduction) and preserving VDI’s security, mobility and administrative benefits.

HMSA

Stuart Shirai

Manager of Network and Telecom Information Systems