Traditional deduplication is performed as a post-process activity, applied to storage volumes after data has been committed to it. While data deduplication significantly reduces the data storage requirements of a virtual desktop environment, it does nothing to reduce the IOPS load on the storage infrastructure, meaning that all data must be written to the storage fabric before deduplication is performed. Post-process deduplication actually increases the number of storage disks required for VDI because the deduplication process itself consumes IOPS when running. Because storage IOPS is the primary bottleneck in a VDI implementation, post-process deduplication exacerbates the IOPS problem rather than improving it.

Inline Deduplication

Atlantis ILIO performs deduplication in real-time on-the-wire, before any IO transactions reach the storage fabric. By eliminating up to 90% of IO traffic, the IOPS requirement for the storage infrastructure decreases by a similar percentage. At the same time, because no duplicate data is written to disk, post-process deduplication is not required, and the associated IOPS cost is never incurred.