Data Storage for Virtual Desktops (VDI)

Do you know John Martin? If the name doesn't ring a bell then allow me to introduce you to John. He's worked for a number of storage vendors in his 25 year career including Legato, Veritas, StorageTek, EMC, and NetApp. His blog, Storage Without Borders, is a fantastic resource for those looking to understand the technical differences between NetApp and Traditional Legacy Storage Array architectures.

I'd like to highlight some of John's recent work, his 'Data Storage for VDI' series is top shelf. It informs the reader as to limits found with all traditional storage hardware and how NetApp engineering has implemented intelligence specific to the array which is optimized for virtual infrastructures and cloud deployments.

Trust me on this one; there's nothing more difficult than for a storage array to provide a high level of data protection, can meet the mass burst-ability requirements associated with VDI, and is cost effective. If it were easy, VDI would be common place on traditional storage arrays.

I encourage you to read John's posts. I promise you, you will understand how NetApp is making VDI a reality in many massive deployments. It'll also provide you with some insight as to how customers can leverage NetApp storage to provide virtual desktops at $25 a user per month (more on this in a future post).

We have many 5 figure deployments (in terms of seat-counts) with one soon about to surpass 6 figures (or greater than 100,000 seats).

Data Storage for VDI – Part 1 – A Personal View
Data Storage for VDI – Part 2 – Disk Latencies
Data Storage for VDI – Part 3 – Read and Write Caching
Data Storage for VDI – Part 4 – The impact of RAID on performance
Data Storage for VDI – Part 5 – RAID-DP + WAFL The ultimate write accelerator
Data Storage for VDI – Part 6 – Data ONTAP Improving Read Performance
Data Storage for VDI – Part 7 – 1000 heavy users on 18 spindles
Data Storage for VDI – Part 8 – Misalignment
Data Storage for VDI – Part 9 – Capex and SAN vs DAS

Comments

[John Martin]

Thanks for promoting my blog here Vaughn.

I've added a couple more entries since then on VDI and have a bunch more in the pipeline.

It wasnt until I really started getting deep into the guts of this that I realised how much better we are for VDI than anyone else. Not only do we dedup capacity, we also dedup random write I/O. When you add the fact that our Capex costs are lower than DAS, and that we have the best management tools, its hard to see how you could justify implemeting VDI without NetApp.

[Ben Di Qual]

Vaughn, I think you are doing a great job on the blog and with your work with customers and partners to really help sell the netapp story!
Still owe you a lunch by the way!