By James E. Bagley
Senior Analyst, Storage Strategies NOW
The reason that many virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) implementations have been stalled is the enormous impact of storage costs and user dissatisfaction with poor performance. There are a number of vendors working on addressing this problem from a storage throughput standpoint, who are typically using solid state appliances (Whiptail, Violin and V3 Systems, among them) and major storage manufacturers pushing expensive hybrid SSD and HDD arrays. Atlantis, based in Mountain View, Calif., has a very different approach.
First, let’s look at the motivating factors for VDI. The primary lure of VDI is reduced operating costs of managing a big fleet of client computers. The solution has been well served by ultra-thin client products consisting of a screen, a keyboard and a network interface that have been available for several years. These ultra-thin clients get rid of the hardware that tends to create management problems, including disk drives and batteries. With the addition of tablet computers and smart phones to the client fleet, the opportunities for cost savings and ease of management have multiplied the reason for VDI deployment. The one thing that all client deployments have in common is the lack of an attached disk drive. The problem is that Windows, the most prevalent client operating system, was designed to have a locally attached disk drive. Getting rid of local disks helps the management issue, but creates a huge problem. Enterprises found that they were replacing cheap client drives that are now just $100 per terabyte with networked enterprise drives that cost close to $5,000 per terabyte or more. And that is just storage at the byte level. The real problem is input output operations. Since Windows expects to have a local drive, and operational reliability is simplified by writing information frequently to that local drive, the operating system has increased its use of the local drive with each new version. In fact, Windows 7 roughly doubles the amount of disk IOs over the venerable Windows XP operating system.
Atlantis took an approach at the software level. Much of the IO performed by Windows is unnecessary in a virtualized environment. The Atlantis ILIO 2.0 virtual storage appliance, unveiled this week by Atlantis, interfaces with the NTFS file system and eliminates unnecessary IOs. In addition, by using virtual machine-aware de-duplication, the amount of storage needed for virtual images is reduced by 90%. This takes a very intimate knowledge of the disk access required by Windows, but yields dramatic advantages over the brute force approach involving the application of expensive and exotic storage systems to solve the problem.
Because Atlantis’ software appliance that supports the major VDI systems including Citrix Xen Desktop, VMware View, Quest and other VDI systems, the ILIO appliance can be deployed either on each server or in a top-of-rack implementation. One large financial services company for example, has deployed 30,000 clients operating from 1,000 low cost ‘pizza box’ servers. This configuration has nice features for failover and simple scalability, and minimizes the impact of a single point of failure. The top-of-rack implementation is ideal for sharing existing SAN or NAS systems across networked servers and clients. Since the interface is at the NTFS layer, any type of storage, be it HDD, SSD, DAS, NAS, or SAN can be deployed.
Atlantis has assembled a solid team and impressive backing. ILIO represents a giant leap towards the long awaited promises of massive VDI deployments.
Pricing for Atlantis ILIO starts at $150 per desktop.
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