Renowned Visual Arts University Relies on Sonnet to Support New Mac Pro-Based Virtual Environment

The Ecole cantonale dart de Lausanne , a top-ranked visual communication, art, and design university in Switzerland, has installed Sonnets RackMac Pro rackmount enclosures and Twin 10G Dual-Port 10 Gigabit Ethernet Thunderbolt 2 adapters to support its new Mac Pro -based virtual environment.

After we squeezed all the useful life out of our Apple Xserve machines, we began migrating our virtualized workflow to a server platform based on Mac Pro cylinders. The next step was to find a solution for rackmounting and connecting them to our Cisco Nexus 10Gb network infrastructure, said David Tschudi, information services manager at ECAL. Although the Mac Pro looks cool, the cylinder shape doesnt exactly lend itself to rackmounting. Sonnet Technologies offered the ideal solution. In fact, the migration has been so successful that were now looking at replacing our HP virtual servers with the Mac Pro configuration, supported by the Sonnet gear.

ECAL purchased four new Mac Pro 6.1 cylinders and is using the Sonnet RackMac Pro, in tandem with the Sonnet Twin 10G adapters, to support the infrastructure. The duo version of the RackMac Pro lets ECAL securely mount two Mac Pros horizontally in a compact 4U enclosure. Mounted inside the RackMac Pro is a Twin 10G Thunderbolt adapter for each computer, providing lightning-fast connectivity to ECALs 10Gb network. ECAL is planning to completely phase out its six Xserve servers and start using the other two Mac Pros in the RackMac Pro/Twin 10G configuration.

ECAL had long been operating in a virtualized environment under VMwares vSphere , which until recently managed ECALs cluster of six Apple Xserve enterprise servers running an OS X virtual machine server. ECAL also runs a cluster of four HP servers managed by Windows Server VM. Thanks to the Sonnet support platform, not only was vSpheres ESXi hypervisor easy to install on the new Mac Pros, but the configuration of the servers offered savings by requiring only four VMware licenses (compared with the 12 licenses of the previous Xserve cluster). ECAL can run Linux, Windows , or OS X virtual machines all on one vSphere ESXi cluster and can take advantage of the Mac Pros superior 128GB of virtualized RAM.

ECAL has a rich heritage going all the way back to 1821 and is one of the top art and design universities in the world. Naturally, the school supports its students with the most advanced technology available, and were honored to be a part of the system that helps these students reach their full potential, said Greg LaPorte, vice president of sales and marketing, Sonnet Technologies. Now, with a professional, high-performance platform that properly rackmounts two Mac Pros in a 4U rack space and extends 10Gb Ethernet connectivity, ECAL is able to reap maximum efficiencies and benefits from its new Mac Pro-based virtual environment.

More information on Sonnet and its other products is available at www.sonnettech.com.

About Sonnet Technologies

Sonnet Technologies Inc. is a leading provider of Thunderbolt 2-to-PCIe card expansion systems; pro media readers; RAID storage systems; and storage, network, and other interface cards for pro users in the audio, video, and broadcast industries. Sonnets Thunderbolt expansion products enable the use of pro audio I/O and DSP cards, pro video capture and transcoding cards, network and storage interface cards, and other high-performance PCIe cards with Thunderbolt technology-enabled computers. For nearly 30 years Sonnet has pioneered and brought to market innovative and award-winning products that enhance the performance and connectivity of Mac , Windows , and other industry-standard computers. More information is available at www.sonnettech.com.

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