About Dell Compellent
The Dell Compellent Storage Center SAN provides a dynamic, high-performance virtualized storage platform for VDI environments. Leveraging its Fluid Data architecture, the system manages enterprise data at a more granular level. Block level information is captured in real-time, enabling advanced Dell Compellent software to intelligently manage, migrate and protect data throughout its lifecycle.
This granularity enables Dell Compellent to virtualize storage inside the volume, creating a pool of resources shared by all VMs and virtual desktops. The storage pool is presented simply as disk capacity, regardless of disk type, RAID level or server connectivity. And with read/write operations spread across all drives, multiple application requests can be processed in parallel. Dell Compellent storage solutions help companies reduce their total cost of ownership, increase business agility and continuity, enable anywhere access, and improve security and compliance.
VDI Storage Challenges
The Microsoft Windows desktop operating systems and the applications and services that run on them were designed to operate with dedicated and low latency hard drive. In a VDI environment, the operating system runs on a centralized storage fabric (SAN or NAS), constantly consuming IO throughput (IOPS) for tasks that have nothing to do with storing unique user data. As a result, unpredictable and volatile virtual desktop workloads consume storage inefficiently. SAN/NAS storage systems can only deliver the data throughput (IOPS) needed to support VDI by increasing the number of storage drives and controllers well beyond that needed to deliver the required disk space. Consequently, the cost of VDI storage per desktop to achieve the equivalent performance of a physical PC can be double that of a physical PC. In order for VDI to scale to thousands of users, IT organizations need to take a new approach to storage for VDI that dramatically lowers storage costs and improves performance.
On Each Server Deployment
Dell Compellent Storage
Atlantis ILIO: Dell Compellent Performance Acceleration and Storage Scalability
Atlantis ILIO integrates with the Dell Compellent Fluid Data storage architecture to accelerate virtual desktop performance and dramatically increase storage scalability. With Atlantis ILIO, virtual desktops use storage efficiently by consolidating duplicate information contained in virtual desktop images in real-time before they hit storage. This has the combined benefit of dramatically reducing storage capacity and storage throughput required by up to 90%. As a result, the number of virtual desktops supported by a storage system can increase by up to 5 to 10 times.
Atlantis ILIO and Dell Compellent Automated Tiered Storage
Dell Compellent Fluid Data storage dynamically moves enterprise data to the optimal tier based on actual use. The most active blocks reside on high-performance SSD, Fibre Channel or SAS drives, while infrequently accessed data migrates to lower-cost, high-capacity SAS or SATA drives. With Atlantis ILIO, Dell Compellent automated tiered storage enables the Atlantis ILIO data to store its most active blocks on high-performance SSD, with less frequently accessed data residing on lower tiers. The combination of Atlantis ILIO VDI storage optimization and Dell Compellent automated tiered storage delivers consistently high performance virtual desktops with 5 to 10 times the scalability of a conventional storage array.
Integrating Atlantis ILIO into a Dell Compellent VDI Deployment
The Atlantis ILIO software virtual appliance may be deployed either “On Each Server” hosting virtual desktops or in a “Top-of-Rack” configuration where multiple virtual desktop hosts connect to a single Atlantis ILIO virtual appliance. Atlantis ILIO scales out easily to add more desktop capacity by adding either an Atlantis ILIO virtual appliance to each virtual desktop host or an additional server appliance with every server rack that is deployed. When deployed with Dell Compellent storage arrays, Atlantis ILIO deduplicates operating system, application and user data before it is written to storage. All unique data is stored on the Dell Compellent storage array.
For more information on Atlantis ILIO Deployment Options, visit the Deployment Options Page
