From a storage perspective, VDI is tough duty. The Virtual Desktop Infrastructure sees I/O patterns that are highly random and highly concentrated, which can bring a storage system to its knees. But there’s a risk here too, that infrastructure must be able to provide a user experience that’s as good or better than the legacy hardware it’s replacing, or risk their dissatisfaction. This risk leads many IT planners to consider a dedicated VDI storage system.
The Right VDI Solution
Dedicating even an affordable solution to VDI introduces another risk, wasting resources. What if the right VDI storage solution was one that could be used for other high performance applications as well? A system that can do more than just VDI lowers the total cost of ownership of VDI storage.
Covering the storage bases for a virtual desktop implementation means having enough capacity and performance to meet today’s needs and the ability to scale to meet those of tomorrow. For many users a hybrid architecture is the best fit, merging the performance of PCIe flash with the cost efficient capacity of spinning disk drives in a scale-up configuration.
Quality of Service
Being able to handle more than just one workload (VDI) requires more than just putting flash into the storage system. It has to be used intelligently. In other words, there needs to be a mechanism in place to assure that certain workloads receive the resources they need, a quality of service (QoS) function.
Administrators don’t have the time to manually manage flash and hard drive tiers, but instead need a ‘set it and forget it’ capability that will allow the IOPS, throughput and latency performance to be hard-set for specific workloads, applications or volumes.
Instead of accepting that VDI is too tough for a shared storage solution or that it requires a dedicated shared storage solution, IT organizations should raise their expectations and get more from their VDI solution. The intelligent use of flash via QoS is a logical way to meet those new expectations. For more information join Storage Switzerland and Fusion-io for the live webinar event, “Avoid the Waste of a VDI-only Storage Solution” and learn how the right VDI solution can support VDI and other application workloads on the same storage system.
Those who pre-register for this webinar will receive an exclusive, advanced copy of Storage Switzerland’s latest white paper “VDI Storage Should do More than Just VDI” emailed right after they sign up. In addition, all registrants will be able to access Storage Switzerland’s extensive library of on-demand webinars, many with exclusive white papers, without having to re-register.
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Fusion-io is a client of Storage Switzerland
Eric is an Analyst with Storage Switzerland and has over 25 years experience in high-technology industries. He’s held technical, management and marketing positions in the computer storage, instrumentation, digital imaging and test equipment fields. He has spent the past 15 years in the data storage field, with storage hardware manufacturers and as a national storage integrator, designing and implementing open systems storage solutions for companies in the Western United States. Eric earned degrees in electrical/computer engineering from the University of Colorado and marketing from California State University, Humboldt. He and his wife live in Colorado and have twins in college.
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