About IBM Smart Business Desktop Cloud
IBM Smart Business Desktop Cloud (SBDC) computing services helps you provide "anytime, anywhere" access to virtual desktops, applications and information.
For organizations that need to provide simplified, secure access to information and reduce IT cost, complexity and energy consumption, IBM offers desktop virtualization solutions using cloud computing that centralize a distributed client environment, help safeguard data and applications, and help increase business flexibility. IBM desktop virtualization solutions help reduce the cost of desktop hardware and management, and integrate hardware, software and services. With comprehensive services including assessment and planning, design and implementation, managed services, and a subscription-based hosting service, SBDC can help save up to 15 to 40 percent of total end-user support (desk-side support, security, power and more) with virtual desktops hosted in the data center and accessed anywhere. Typical payback is between 8 and 18 months.
The Cloud Desktop Storage and Performance Challenge
Cloud-based desktops execute on hypervisors in a compute cloud and generate IO traffic to a storage cloud. The latency between the compute cloud and the storage cloud is a critical factor in achieving a high performance virtual desktop experience. Today’s operating systems and applications are designed to operate with a low latency dedicated local disk for every desktop. For example, the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems is dependent on performing IO intensive tasks such as file layout optimization, background defragmentation, antivirus scanning and virtual memory paging. However, in a cloud desktop environment, these tasks result in placing a heavy tax on the storage cloud as each user, application and desktop compete for limited IO throughput (measured in input/output operations per second-IOPS). Without adequate storage capacity, throughput (IOPS) and low latency, virtual desktops take longer to boot and applications respond sluggishly.
Atlantis ILIO: Cutting Storage Costs and Boosting Performance for the Cloud
Atlantis ILIO integrates with IBM SBDC 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 5 to 10 times.
Integrating Atlantis ILIO into an IBM SBDC VDI Deployment
The Atlantis ILIO software virtual appliance is installed inline between the hypervisor (VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer or Microsoft Hyper-V) and IBM Storage array to deduplicate operating system, application and user data before it is written to storage. All unique data is stored on the IBM Storage array. Atlantis ILIO 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.
