VDI IO Workloads

Caching is an essential technology for reducing  loading on data center storage services. However conventional caching technologies are often only effective with read transactions. VDI workloads, especially during peak activities such as startup and logon, tend to be up to 80% write-based and thus receive little benefit from read-caching services. In addition, traditional SAN/NAS storage systems use simple block-based caching techniques that lack the NTFS file system awareness that is needed to efficiently determine what data should be cached and how it should be written to disk. Furthermore, SAN/NAS-based caches are located directly on the storage system, remote from the virtual infrastructure hosting the VDI environment. In summary, while conventional caching technology can improve read performance, it can do little for write performance, and even the fastest cache will still be subject to significant latency when compared to that of a desktop PC’s hard disk controller.

Processing IO at the Windows NTFS Protocol Layer

Atlantis ILIO uses patent pending virtualized data format called Flocks (File and Block IO) that has awareness of the windows NTFS file system, file information and storage of block data. This technology enables Atlantis ILIO to extract the state of IO in real-time, making it highly efficient at optimizing IO and intelligently process IO traffic locally in memory. As a software virtual appliance, Atlantis ILIO can be easily deployed to cache data in memory on the same hypervisor instances responsible for hosting every virtual desktop. As a result, Atlantis ILIO can eliminate up to 90% of IO at the source, removing the need to send it over a network or write it to disk. The type of performance and efficiency of this approach is simply not possible when using storage caching technologies.