News

Greenbytes Improves on VDI Scalability, Performance, Cost

Greenbytes promises to bring the "personal" experience to the virtual desktop.

• By Christa Ayer
• 12/11/2013

Organizations faced with sluggish virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) implementations might want to take a look at the latest version of Greenbytes' desktop virtualization storage optimization software. Available through channel partners that supply Greenbytes' vIO virtual storage appliance or IO Offload engine, Greenbytes v4.1 promises to solve the performance and latency problems that so often plague VDI implementations through its ability to divert OS and swap disk activity away from primary storage.

The new version offers site recovery and rapid configuration capabilities, a browser-based operations console, and the company claims it is able to clone full desktop images via NFS in less than 30 seconds. In terms of scalability and performance, v4.1 promises converged infrastructure hosting of full persistent desktops with as few as three 200GB SSDs. A four-blade configuration coupled with shared RAID-protected storage supports more than 400 users, and supplies more than 100 write IOPS per user. This feature requires as few as 4 vCPUs and 16GB of RAM on a single blade, which still provides high availability blade fail-over capabilities using VMware DRS and HA.

Greenbytes is also promoting cost as a major benefit of this new version: fully personalized virtual desktops for as low as $80 per user, and less than $60 per user in converged infrastructure designs.