Case Study: Queensland University of Technology achieves 10x faster desktop boot times with SanDisk

Fusion Iomemory Solution Speeds Queensland University Of Technology's (Qut) Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), a large Australian university with about 40,000 students and 5,000 staff, needed a way to deliver virtual desktops without the long log‑ons, protracted restarts, and high costs of physical HPC workstations. Student lab log‑ons were taking up to five minutes, patch restarts over 15 minutes, and researchers faced expensive I/O‑intensive workstation costs; executives also needed secure, reliable access from multiple devices.

QUT deployed HP’s VMware View VDI reference architecture with SanDisk Fusion ioMemory (ioDrive) cards to accelerate local VM storage. The pilot cut desktop boot times from ~5 minutes to under 30 seconds (10x faster), doubled the number of HPC workstations supported per ESX server, enabled secure multi‑device executive access, eliminated restart delays, and reduced SAN load to extend existing storage investments.

Queensland University of Technology

Mohammad Hassan

Information Technology Services