Case Study: Starkey Mortgage achieves dramatic XenApp virtual desktop performance gains and reduced infrastructure costs with SanDisk Fusion ioMemory ioDrive cards

Starkey Mortgage Wins Green Lender Award For Virtualized Desktop Deployment

Starkey Mortgage, a retail-focused mortgage originator with over 400 employees across 13 states, had already virtualized its desktop environment using Citrix XenApp on VMware to cut costs and simplify IT. As the company grew, its SAN became an I/O bottleneck during peak loads and compliance tasks, degrading user experience and increasing support calls—so CIO Bill Burke’s team needed a way to boost virtual desktop performance without adding servers, power, or complexity.

They deployed SanDisk Fusion ioMemory ioDrive cards in ESXi hosts to serve XenApp workloads locally, which dramatically reduced latency and increased IOPS (from ~1,100 to ~2,700 in testing), eliminated “boot storms,” and virtually removed write latency even under heavy load. The change lowered sustained CPU utilization (~30% to ~12%), cut performance-related help desk tickets, reduced SAN and network load, and scaled user performance without increasing infrastructure or energy costs.

Starkey Mortgage

Bill Burke

Chief Information Officer