Case Study: Beijing Normal University achieves fast VDI deployment and lower TCO with NexentaStor (Nexenta)

Nexenta Delivers Storage for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

Beijing Normal University’s Zhuhai campus faced growing student numbers and rising demands for computer-aided teaching that strained its traditional desktops: a complex multi‑OS environment, patching and backup challenges, limited budget, and increasing security risks made management slow and costly. The university needed scalable, high‑performance backend storage to support a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) rollout that would simplify administration and improve end‑user experience.

Nexenta deployed NexentaStor on Supermicro servers with VMware (vSphere and Horizon) to provision 120 virtual desktops (60 per site), using about 10 TB of storage and enterprise SSD/SAS drives. The VDI delivers higher performance, centralized management, and lower TCO—60 desktops can be cloned in under ten minutes—eliminating local disk bottlenecks, reducing maintenance overhead, improving security, and enabling fast, centralized app deployment to meet daily teaching needs.

Beijing Normal University