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VDI's Holy Grail?

Via its ILIO product, Atlantis Computing initially made a name for itself by slashing I/Ops ten-fold--dramatically decreasing the need for expensive SAN storage--reducing client boot times from an average of 126 seconds to 24 seconds, and de-duplicating storage, enabling the creation of persistent clients that used no more storage than their non-persistent counterparts.

Now, with the recent introduction of Atlantis ILIO Diskless VDI, the company seems within reach of the Holy Grail of VDI: the elimination of all storage-related CAPEX and OPEX, and a further decrease in desktop boot times to 12 seconds. The new product is also said to be the first solution to eliminate storage for Citrix and VMware virtual desktop images.

As the company is quick to note, with existing VDI solutions, virtual desktop images are stored on either shared SAN/NAS storage or local SAS/SSD disks, which are bogged down by limited I/Ops for VDI workloads, and tend to have brief lifespans and warranties--all of which can be deal-breakers for less affluent users.

Atlantis ILIO Diskless VDI software comes to the rescue by performing NTFS traffic processing and inline deduplication of images to run all desktops from local server memory, meaning the days of crippling disk failures are gone along with exorbitant storage requirements for rack space, power and cooling. The company claims that diskless VDI produces response times that exceed even those of the most expensive local SSD drives (MLC or SLC), while slashing VDI CAPEX to less than $200 per desktop.

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 02/01/2012 at 3:58 PM


Reader Comments:

Fri, Feb 3, 2012 Seth Knox

@Kevin W. Cisco did not buy Atlantis Computing. In fact, our products are resold by IBM and Dell in addition to being recommended by Cisco as part of the Cisco VXI partner program. We also have many customers using HP servers including one of our largest public success stories at CBRE. bit.ly/cbrearchitecture The reason that there has been so much press coverage of Atlantis ILIO that included Cisco is that we announced Atlantis ILIO Diskless VDI and the press release included a quote from a customer that used Cisco UCS blades to deploy Diskless VDI and Cisco did testing with their servers and published a whitepaper on Diskless VDI that was referenced in the press release. You can read the whitepaper here: bit.ly/ciscoatlantisdisklessvdi Atlantis ILIO Diskless VDI will work on your HP servers provided that it meets the system requirements and has sufficient memory. You can request an evaluation version at this link if you want to try it on your HP servers. atlantiscomputing.com/FreeTrial With regard to the previous comment, storage can consume anywhere from 30-80% of the total cost of VDI and the ongoing OPEX of that storage can cost 2-4x the upfront purchase price of the storage. So, eliminating the storage from the VDI architecture can reduce to total cost by up to 75% and make VDI cost less than a physical PC. the whitepaper done by Cisco has a detailed analysis of the infrastructure cost per desktop for Diskless VDI compared to other architectures with Atlantis ILIO and more traditional architecture with shared storage and local disks. bit.ly/ciscoatlantisdisklessvdi To address your question about where the data is stored with Diskless VDI, it is important to understand that Diskless VDI is only used for a stateless desktop. Our other versions of Atlantis ILIO would be used for persistent desktops. With Diskless VDI, it is ONLY the virtual desktop images (i.e. linked clones, PVS write cache...) and NOT the user data that is stored in memory. In a stateless VDI deployment, the user profile data or persona contain the user's documents and settings is separated from the virtual desktop images using tools like roaming user profiles, View Persona, Citrix profile, AppSense or RES.

Thu, Feb 2, 2012

Even reducing the storage costs completely (although I'm not sure where the data is stored then) still leaves the initial and ongoing expense for a large number of servers in the data center -- not too mention SA or VDA for Microsoft.

Thu, Feb 2, 2012 Kevin W.

Recently it seems that every time I read about Atlantis the word "Cisco" is in the same sentance. Cisco must have bought Atlantis? We use HP and my server / storage group will not look at Atlantis because of this.

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