Case Study: City of Davenport achieves low-latency, high-performance VDI with Pure Storage FlashArray

VDI Deployment Success with Low Latency Pure Storage Flasharray

The City of Davenport, Iowa sought to move hundreds of employees to virtual desktops (VDI) but discovered its mechanical disk array couldn’t handle the randomized I/O of a VDI pilot—causing high latency and risking project failure. The existing array’s performance bottleneck prevented successful deployment and made linked-clone workflows impractical.

Davenport replaced the HDD array with a Pure Storage FlashArray alongside VMware vSphere ESX 5.0 and linked clones, starting with a 150-desktop pilot. Results: write latency fell from 20 ms to 1 ms and read latency from 17 ms to 0.5 ms, linked-clone replication dropped from 45 to 2 minutes, data shrank from 10 TB to 2.7 TB (6.5:1), and virtual desktops now outperform physical machines—enabling planned expansion to 500+ VDI seats and payback within the existing budget.

City of Davenport

Cory Smith

Network Administrator, City of Davenport