Virtual Machines (VMs) are proliferating at an exponential rate and with it are the costs of acquiring and maintaining expensive and complex storage infrastructure. When IT organizations try to address the problem by adding more hardware, networking or storage, VDI quickly uses up the additional capacity without solving the problem. IT organization have also tried to apply Copy on Write (COW), thin provisioning and data deduplication to minimize storage requirements for desktop VMs but find that the storage reduction is not as straightforward as adding capacity. In order for VDI to scale to thousands of users, IT organizations need to take a new approach to storage for VDI that dramatically lowers storage costs and improves scalability.

Atlantis ILIO makes VDI affordable by intelligently and transparently adding massive IOPS capacity, reducing the physical storage capacity required for VDI and enabling customers to choose less expensive storage.

Increase in IOPS Capacity

By placing the ILIO appliance on each VDI server rack, the appliance acts as front end to the storage system, providing the equivalent IOPS capacity of 500 fiber channel disks (50,000 IOPS) to support up to 1,000 virtual desktops. With a guaranteed 30–50 input/output per second (IOPS) per desktop and bursts up to 550 IOPS per desktop, desktops will boot in 7 seconds, user logons will take less than 1 minute and application such as Microsoft Outlook will load in 30 seconds, even during peak usage times.

Physical Storage Consolidation

Atlantis ILIO eliminates the storage of duplicate information contained in virtual machine desktop images by reusing shared desktop image components such as the operating system and IT installed applications. For example, with a 1,000 user VDI deployment consuming 30GB of storage per desktop, ILIO would reduce the physical storage requirements from 30TB to 1.5TB. The amount of physical storage consolidation depends on the ILIO license options purchased. Without Image Management, Atlantis ILIO consolidates physical storage by approximately 10 times (90% reduction). With Image Management activated (licensed separately), Atlantis ILIO consolidates physical storage further by deduplicating more virtual desktop image components, resulting in approximately 20 times less storage (95% reduction).

Increase Storage Choices

Atlantis ILIO enables IT organization to use high-end SAN storage with fiber channel connections or less expensive SAN/NAS servers with Gb Ethernet, further reducing the storage costs for VDI deployments. With Atlantis ILIO, IT organizations have the flexibility to distribute VDI desktops across multiple storage locations and types, re-purposing existing excess storage capacity.

Whiteboard: VDI Storage Reduction

Chetan Venkatesh, Founder and CEO of Atlantis Computing,
explains why SAN “thin provisioning” doesn't solve the VDI storage problem.