Case Study: Muskegon County achieves sub-millisecond VDI performance and 8:1 data reduction with Pure Storage FlashArray

County VDI Deployment Comes Alive with Pure Storage

Muskegon County, Michigan, set out to modernize a fleet of aging desktops with a VDI rollout but ran into severe storage-related instability. Their VDI appliance repeatedly crashed—producing VMkernel errors and outages every few days—stalling the project, eroding user confidence, and preventing the county from moving past 40% desktop virtualization.

The county deployed Pure Storage FlashArray with VMware Horizon View 5.1 to replace the failing appliance, initially supporting 500 virtual desktops with plans for up to 800. The FlashArray eliminated crashes and VMkernel errors, cut latency from about 2–4 ms to 0.4 ms, sustained 10k–25k IOPS, and achieved an 8:1 data reduction (leaving deployed desktops using ~15% of disk), while offering simple management and highly responsive support.

Muskegon County

Heath Kaplan

Finance and Management Services Director