LSI and Supermicro deliver hyper-converged appliance for VMware virtual desktops

LSI Corporation has collaborated with EMC, Mellanox and Supermicro to offer a high-performance virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) appliance for VMware Horizon View™ deployments.

The appliance combines storage, compute and networking hardware in a single box to deliver a scalable hyper-converged system to meet the growing customer demand for desktop virtualisation. The solution is designed to provide customers starting out with a few servers and a few hundred desktops with the ability to simply and efficiently scale-out VDI environments to meet changing business requirements.

The joint solution features LSI Nytro™ 3.2TB PCIe® flash accelerator cards, Mellanox’s end-to-end 40GbE interconnect solution, and Supermicro servers powered by EMC ScaleIO software. Together, they create an affordable hyper-converged appliance that allows for simple linear expansion of both capacity and performance. The appliance is designed to accelerate VDI deployments, increase desktop performance and maximise VDI density per node at a fraction of the cost and complexity associated with traditional SAN-based storage infrastructures.

To demonstrate the benefits of the solution, the widely accepted Login VSI benchmark was used to create the actual workload of simulated users. Internal test results showed key customer benefits, including:
· Ultrabook-like user experience – support for 1,000 desktops with average user response times of <1 second
· Rapid desktop provisioning – deployment of 1,000 virtual desktops in 1 hour, 28 minutes
· High performance – simultaneously boots 1,000 virtual desktops in 12 minutes
· Linear scalability and easy sizing – supports up to 167 desktops per server node
· Affordable flash solution – price per desktop of an entry-level business PC
· Reduced TCO – low-cost project implementation and efficient management and maintenance

“VDI is a demanding environment for storage, and LSI Nytro flash cards are the perfect answer,” said Jas Tremblay, vice president of marketing, Datacenter Solutions Group, LSI. “By combining these leading products, we are able to achieve a record-setting performance solution for VDI implementations. We’re excited to be working closely with industry leaders EMC, Mellanox and Supermicro to bring this solution to market.”