All-flash storage: the answer to accelerating VDI adoption in 2013

The decision to implement VDI cannot be taken lightly though as it is often a complex process. Initial set-up costs can be high and the return on investment can take a long time if not planned properly. Critical to the deployment success is the server, network and storage infrastructure that is at the core of any virtual desktop infrastructure. VDI workloads are more dynamic and come with a different set of components to consider such as IOPS, user profiles, OS streaming and application virtualisation.

The Achilles heel
One of the biggest challenges to VDI adoption has been the huge storage costs associated with it. As a result VDI has been perceived as an expensive project to undertake with the costs potentially outweighing the benefits, dettering many organisations from deploying this technology. VMware’s CEO Pat Gelsinger was recently quoted as saying that storage accounts for around 40-50 percent, on average, of the total VDI deployment costs.

To further exacerbate the issue, legacy spinning disk storage systems are unable to cope with the key storage requirements necessary to create a scalable VDI environment that doesn’t experience any bottlenecks. Not only does it need high capacity that can be easily expanded as the number of virtual desktops increase, but it also requires low latency in order for it to operate seamlessly. Many argue that it boils down to I/O operations per seconds (IOPS: the number of data reads and writes to disks), however, it is latency that is the real issue.

This is often the Achilles heel of VDI, stopping deployment in its tracks. Without a solid high-performing storage infrastructure, VDI users are plagued with slow application response times and often experience what is more commonly known as ‘boot storm’ – slow performance that can occur when a lot of users log into the system at the same time typically first thing in the morning.

Almost from the get go the IT department will be inundated with complaints from unhappy users experiencing extreme slowness and a denial-of-service. Not to mention the slowdown experienced when an anti-virus scan is running!
As a result, IT administrators find they need to dedicate an entire disk storage array to VDI to even achieve mediocre performance and use flash cache to handle the huge spikes in performance.

The result is often architecture that is slow and expensive. It’s no surprise that this storage conundrum has been dissuading businesses from adopting VDI.
The flash future of VDI
The answer lies in all-flash storage arrays. Today’s all-flash storage is capable of accelerating the adoption of VDI as it tackles these challenges head-on. The ideal storage environment for VDI consists of an all-flash storage array that can easily tackle the common performance and scale issued of VDI. Sophisticated inline deduplication and compression features empower businesses to keep costs down, resulting in an all-flash solution that costs less than disk.
All-flash has been traditionally perceived to be only affordable by large companies, typically costing more than disk to buy and operate. Admittedly, all-flash can be more expensive than disk to buy raw, although there are solutions that offer hardened consumer grade flash at a much lower price point, providing the levels of performance, reliability and availability required by a virtual environment.
Sophisticated data reduction techniques in the form of inline deduplication and compression can provide a >10-to-1 data reduction, resulting in an expenditure of less than $100 per desktop. When combined with the total cost of ownership savings, all-flash proves to be a more cost-effective storage infrastructure than disk.
Using all-flash storage also enables businesses to seamlessly scale-up the deployment to 1,000s of users without exceeding the I/O capabilities and requiring additional storage purchases.

All-flash solutions that support virtualisation can offer simple management tools designed specifically for virtual machine administrators, removing the need for constant configuration and fine tuning to ensure the virtual environment runs smoothly. In most cases businesses can share the all-flash storage across multiple workloads without dedicating a whole storage array purely to VDI.
An all-flash storage array can dramatically improve the end-user experience, providing unrivalled performance that enables quick access to data, ultimately resulting in a much happier work force. High availability, essential to a VDI environment, ensures business continuity and maximum staff productivity.

Today’s all-flash storage arrays developed from the ground up have built-in HA, snapshots, replication and other data management features ensuring non-disruptive upgrades and resiliency.
With storage being one of the biggest inhibitors to widespread VDI adoption, all-flash based storage will be the key driver for VDI deployment in 2013.