In order to deploy traditional VDI with the equivalent performance of a physical PC, IT organizations must make massive upfront capital expenditures to purchase storage, which can represent up to 80% of the total CAPEX costs for VDI. The root cause of the VDI storage problem is that the Microsoft Windows Operating System is designed for a dedicated low latency PC hard drive and is extremely inefficient when that hard drive is replaced with a high latency storage system shared by many virtual desktops. As a result, to achieve the equivalent performance of a physical PC, VDI requires an enormous amount of storage to support the many IO intensive tasks required by Windows – storage that is used to service OS and application requests rather than store user data. With Atlantis ILIO, virtual desktops use storage efficiently by consolidating duplicate information contained in virtual desktop images in real-time before they hit storage, which both reduces the storage capacity required and the number of input/outputs per second (IOPS). The result is that Atlantis ILIO reduces VDI CAPEX by 50-75% based on reducing storage, increasing the number of desktop per server and reducing the amount of costly network and datacenter infrastructure required for VDI.

Increase Storage Density: Virtual Desktops Per Disk

When VDI desktops using the Microsoft windows operating system perform routine tasks such as boot/logon, running productivity applications and performing security and management operations, they generate Input/Outputs per second (IOPS) that must be serviced by VDI storage. When there are too many virtual desktops per physical storage disk, the number of IOPS available per virtual desktop drops and performance degrades. A typical SAN/NAS disk, can only handle a few virtual desktops running a typical Windows 7 desktop workload with anti-virus running. Because the Windows operating system generates so many IOPS, IT organizations must normally buy many more storage disks and controllers than would be required for VDI based on storage capacity requirements. The result is that the cost of VDI storage per desktop to achieve the equivalent performance of a physical PC can be $1,000 or more per desktop. Atlantis ILIO increases the number of virtual desktops that can be run per disk as much as 10 times by intelligently optimizing virtual desktop IO traffic.

Reduce Storage Capacity

Atlantis ILIO consolidates the storage of duplicate information contained in virtual desktop images by reusing shared desktop image components such as the operating system and common applications. The result is a decrease of up to 20 times in the amount of storage capacity required for virtual desktops. For example, with a 1,000 user VDI deployment consuming 30GB of storage per desktop, Atlantis ILIO can reduce the physical storage requirements from 30TB to 1.5TB.

Increase Storage Choices

In additional to reducing storage capacity and increasing the number of virtual desktops per disk, Atlantis ILIO makes it possible to use less expensive storage options. Atlantis ILIO offloads IO traffic from storage, optimizes IO to make storage more efficient and provides an NFS front-end, giving IT organization the option to use local disk (SATA, SAS, SSD), NAS or SAN.