Case Study: Sinclair Oil achieves 20× faster virtual-desktop performance and reclaims ~100,000 hours/year with NetApp All Flash FAS

Sinclair Oil - Customer Case Study

Sinclair Oil, which runs refineries that process 4 million gallons of crude daily and operates hotels and ski resorts, relied on VMware Horizon virtual desktops for refinery and corporate staff. As the primary Wyoming refinery approached 400 VDI users, storage contention caused virtual desktop latencies of 6–20 ms, degrading performance and threatening productivity and secure access to critical refining applications.

Sinclair evaluated vendors and deployed NetApp All Flash FAS (AFF8040 at the refinery and AFF8060 at corporate) with clustered Data ONTAP, FlashEssentials, deduplication/compression, and FlexClone, integrating with VMware over NFS. The move delivered submillisecond latency and up to 20× faster desktop response, saved roughly 90% of VDI capacity, reclaimed about one hour per day for 400 employees (~100,000 hours/year), and enabled migration of SQL/Exchange and other critical applications to the all‑flash platform.

Sinclair Oil

Nathan Larsen

Director of IT