Deliver Exceptional Performance

When implementing any major change to a desktop computing environment, maintaining user expectations must be considered a critical success factor. Although VDI can deliver significant operational benefits, increasing business agility and improving overall system availability; end-user concerns are more frequently expressed in terms of desktop performance. If performance of virtual desktops is poor, or degrades as more users are added to the VDI deployment, users will reject VDI in favor of retaining their existing physical PCs. The primary performance challenge faced when implementing a VDI environment is maintaining disk performance.

Microsoft Windows was designed with the assumption that it would run on a PC with its own processor, memory and exclusive access to a high throughput, low latency hard drive. Replacing a dedicated hard drive with a shared storage infrastructure can create significant performance problems in VDI environments. As more desktops are added to the VDI deployment, storage contention issues arise as desktops compete for the same pool of resources.  By offloading IO intensive operations from the shared storage infrastructure, Atlantis ILIO make it possible to provide a virtual desktop that is faster than a physical PC, converting users from resisting virtual desktops to demanding virtual desktops.

Consistent performance from pilot to production

Many IT organizations have delivered successful VDI pilot projects, only to fail during the production rollout.  During the pilot, the shared storage infrastructure delivers more than adequate throughput, providing excellent desktop performance.  However, as the pilot transitions to production rollout, storage infrastructure IO performance degrades as each virtual desktop makes requests of the storage infrastructure without any regard (or awareness) of the activities of other virtual desktops.  At the same time, the storage infrastructure IO resources must be shared between ever increasing numbers of virtual desktops.  The result is poor overall desktop and application performance and increasing dissatisfaction with the virtual desktop infrastructure. With conventional VDI environments, the only way to address this degraded performance is to spread the virtual desktop load over more and more drives and storage controllers, increasing the cost of VDI beyond expectations.

Deliver Better Than PC Performance

Atlantis ILIO accelerates virtual desktop performance without investing in storage infrastructure by transparently processing IO locally, optimizing IO traffic and offloading IO intensive Windows operations from storage. The Atlantis ILIO virtual appliance provides real-time inline deduplication of IO traffic, maximizing the IOPS available to each virtual desktop and delivering desktop performance greater than that of a typical physical PC. The impact of Atlantis ILIO on performance is similar to replacing a physical PC’s standard SATA drive with a Solid State Drive (SSD).