Technology
The Problem: File-Based vs. Block-Based VDI Disk Images
Traditional datacenter storage systems (Block-based SAN, File-based NAS) designed to store data for server virtualization are not optimized to handle virtual desktop workloads, which are random and write intensive (80% write, 20% read). These storage systems don’t understand the IO characteristics of the Microsoft Windows operating systems and NTFS file system and suffer from inherent performance, duplication and latency limitations when used as primary storage for VDI. These storage limitations are caused by the inability of SAN/NAS storage to handle frequent write intensive input/output (IO) operations with low enough latency for thousands of Virtual Machine (VM) operating systems running concurrently. The result of deploying VDI with traditional SAN/NAS storage is poor desktop performance and high storage costs.
Atlantis Computing I/O Virtualization Overview
Atlantis ILIO IO Virtualization technology solves the VDI disk image problem by analyzing IO flow at the file system level (NTFS) and intelligently shaping VDI IO into file-based and block-based disk image components (Flocks), de-duplicating shared operating system and application components and caching up to 95% of IO on the Atlantis ILIO appliances to reduce the number of input/outputs operations per second (IOPS) that are serviced by the SAN/NAS storage system.