Case Study: National Specialty Alloys achieves 61% sustained storage offload and faster VDI performance with Infinio

National Specialty Alloys puts the pedal to the metal for VDI performance

National Specialty Alloys, a premium stainless-steel and nickel-alloy supplier with regional warehouses in Texas, California, Georgia, Oklahoma and Mexico, moved to a VMware View VDI model to improve responsiveness across about 60 Windows desktops (with plans to grow to 90+). Their ZFS NAS (20 TB usable, VDI using ~2 TB) was at risk of becoming an IOPS bottleneck, threatening the performance needed for real‑time inventory, same‑day shipping and customer service.

NSA installed Infinio’s server‑side pooled, deduplicated cache on the VDI ESXi cluster with no downtime or datastore changes. The simple, low‑cost deployment immediately improved responsiveness, producing an initial 10–20% IOPS offload with only a dozen desktops and a sustained 61% offload (peaks of 70–80%) as deployment scaled—reducing latency, cutting service complaints and avoiding additional hardware spend.

National Specialty Alloys

Nigel Hickey

Infrastructure Administrator at NSA