Simplify VDI Deployments

Many businesses are looking towards VDI to realize the benefits of centralized deployment and management of their desktop environment.  The benefits of VDI include lowering desktop management costs, delivering a more efficient IT organization and increasing business agility through rapid provisioning of computing resources to end users, anywhere in the world. However,  it can be complex to transition from a physical to a virtual desktop based infrastructure and change all of the desktop management, user profile management and application delivery processes at the same time.

Non-persistent virtual desktops

In an attempt to reduce the size and cost of data center storage requirements, VDI systems support the use of non-persistent virtual desktops, where many desktops share a common boot image.  This approach does reduce storage capacity, but does not address storage throughput requirements. Because Storage IO is already the bottleneck, using a non-persistent desktop to reduce storage capacity does not reduce the cost of VDI storage. In addition, using non-persistent desktops requires additional implementation time to virtualize applications, deploy profile virtualization and rethink critical desktop management processes such as patching.

Atlantis ILIO enables organizations to deploy non-persistent desktop with up to 90% less storage and any type of storage including local disk (SATA,SAS, SSD), SAN or NAS. By offloading up to 90% of IOPS from VDI storage, Atlantis ILIO enables customers to use less expensive local disk storage such as SATA or SAS that is already installed in the VDI server for the boot image and then store only unique user data in a shared SAN/NAS storage system, dramatically reducing the cost and complexity of deploying VDI.

Persistent virtual desktops

For some organizations, the pragmatic path to getting started with VDI is to deploy persistent virtual desktops, where each user gets their own unique virtual desktop image.  This approach eliminates the need to implement additional VDI components such as OS streaming, application virtualization and profile virtualization. In traditional VDI environments, persistent virtual desktops require massive amounts of storage capacity to maintain a 20-30GB or virtual desktop for each user.  With Atlantis ILIO inline deduplication, implementing persistent virtual desktops not only simplifies deployment, but also makes VDI affordable by reducing the amount of storage required by up to 90%.

Application Virtualization

Enterprise IT organizations considering application virtualization solutions, such as Microsoft App-V or VMware ThinApp, for use in conjunction with VDI, face a dual challenge with both application performance and managing the workload of repackaging applications for deployment through application virtualization.  Atlantis ILIO offers a pragmatic fast track to VDI, without the capital cost of conventional VDI storage solutions, enabling deployment in advance of completion of any application repackaging activities. Then when the organization is ready to implement application virtualization, Atlantis ILIO’s performance acceleration can ensure that both pre-cached and streamed application virtualization packages perform as if locally installed.

User Installed Applications

In some situations providing users with the means to install their own applications offers significant advantages.  However, supporting this requirement can be a challenge with non-persistent virtual desktops. Atlantis ILIO enables IT organizations to support user installed applications on persistent virtual desktops without incurring the high capital cost of the additional storage infrastructure needed to support persistent virtual.

Persistent virtual desktops

The pragmatic path towards implementing desktop virtualization is to avoid the complexity of non-persistent virtual desktops and the delays of application virtualization, by deploying persistent virtual desktops, where each user gets their own unique virtual desktop image.  However, in traditional VDI environments this requires massive amounts of storage capacity.  Atlantis ILIO in-line data deduplication and IOPS offload, makes implementing persistent virtual desktops not only pragmatic, but affordable.