The Microsoft Windows desktop operating systems and the applications and services that run on them were designed to operate with dedicated physical hardware including CPU, memory and a high-performance, low latency hard drive. Server virtualization technologies are now sufficiently mature to address the CPU and Memory needs of hosting large numbers of concurrent virtual desktop workloads. However, the storage requirements associated with all but the smallest virtual desktop deployments can only be addressed through costly shared SAN/NAS storage fabric.

Furthermore, the storage requirements of desktop virtualization workloads are significant in terms both throughput (measured in IOPS) and capacity. Considering that a distributed desktop environment might use 40 GB of local storage per desktop and need a throughput of up to 120 Peak IOPS per desktop to deliver better-than-PC performance during desktop startup and logon periods; a mid-size project to deploy 10,000 desktops would require storage equivalent to 400 TB and 1.2 million IOPS to deliver a directly comparable storage infrastructure. While using non-persistent desktops can reduce some of the capacity required for VDI storage, VDI still requires the same number of IOPS to achieve acceptable desktop performance. Over 90% of the IOPS consume by the Windows operating system have nothing to do with storing unique data. Rather, 90% or more of the IOPS are used to service Windows operating system and application IO traffic, wasting costly IOPS. Conventional storage solutions can only deliver improved IOPS performance through increasing the number of disk spindles to process the data in parallel, increasing both the capital and operating cost of any solution.

While there are existing storage technologies such as SSDs, post-process deduplication and block-based caching, none of these existing solutions solves the VDI storage problem because aren’t designed for VDI and don’t provide inline deduplication and Windows NTFS protocol layer procession of IO. Atlantis ILIO offers unique storage optimization technologies that a specifically designed to eliminate the VDI storage bottleneck, lower the cost of VDI and accelerate desktop performance.