There is a tug of war that occurs when designing storage for a virtual desktop infrastructure. Flash solves a lot of problems and provides users with an excellent desktop experience, but it can also upset the delicate price per desktop equation needed to justify the VDI project in the first place. In our latest paper, “Cost Justifying Flash For VDI Storage”, available to on demand viewers of the webinar “What’s best for VDI, Hybrid or All-Flash Storage?” we discussed how to design a VDI storage architecture so that the investment in flash more than pays for itself.
If the virtual desktop experience is not personal and does not perform at least as well as the prior physical desktop experience, then users will be resistant to accepting the project. Without user acceptance, all the hope for operational and security gains of VDI will be lost. Flash delivers the performance that they need while providing capabilities that enable features like persistent desktops.
The challenge is, of course, that flash based storage systems are more expensive than traditional hard drive based systems. The fear in using flash for VDI is that the price per desktop will be too high.
In this paper, we detail how to design the architecture so that flash can deliver the performance and personalization that users want, while lowering the number of physical hosts and reducing the number of storage systems while optimizing its capacity so that the flash investment actually lowers not only price for virtual desktop, it lowers the overall storage cost in the data center.
Again, the paper is available exclusively to on demand viewers of the webinar “What’s best for VDI, Hybrid or All-Flash Storage?” and is available for downloading immediately after registration.
In the webinar we discussed: the Storage Challenges Caused when VDI administrators try to meet user’s performance expectations and drive down costs, how flash based storage addresses those challenges, how to address both the virtual image storage demand and the user’s data needs in a single system, and how to choose between All-Flash and Hybrid for your VDI implementation.
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George Crump is the Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO, the leader in Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Prior to VergeIO he was Chief Product Strategist at StorONE. Before assuming roles with innovative technology vendors, George spent almost 14 years as the founder and lead analyst at Storage Switzerland. In his spare time, he continues to write blogs on Storage Switzerland to educate IT professionals on all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought-after public speaker. With over 30 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS, SAN, Virtualization, Cloud, and Enterprise Flash. Before founding Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators, where he was in charge of technology testing, integration, and product selection.
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