NEW - vSphere 5.x certified for SAN and NAS - VMware Compatibility List

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Virtual Desktops

Client computing is a crucial component of your employee productivity and is subject to an ever changing landscape of devices. Thin clients, personal computers, tablets and cell phones are all key tools for employees to consume and create the information that power your business. With an explosion of devices and access points, management of client computing has become more and more of a challenge and now the BOD (Bring your own device) phenomenon is complicating it even more. Research indicates that 80% of IT organizations have deployed or are looking at deploying virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Demand for storage solutions to effectively handle VDI workloads is on the rise.

VDI promises to enable IT to gain more control over their client computing environment, improve data security & management, reduce operational expenses and improve overall business productivity. However, the unique requirements of VDI workloads create significant implementation barriers to adoption for many organizations and one of the key areas of concern has been storage.

For VDI solutions to be cost effective storage, solutions must require flexible capacity on demand and optimized performance for VDI workloads while efficiently managing the virtual desktop environment. Traditional storage architectures have been challenged in handling the unique requirements of VDI workloads cost effectively requiring lots of memory, disk drives and ongoing management resources.

VDI demands that client disk drives are consolidated into a shared storage solution that then supports the performance, capacity and security needs of many client devices. This is challenging because VDI workloads tend to be highly variable and change patterns throughout the day, placing significant demands on the I/O of the storage infrastructure.

I/O storms are one of the most demanding aspects of a VDI infrastructure. When many users try to access large amounts of data simultaneously they place heavy demands on the storage infrastructure. One of the most common causes of this is the “Boot Storm”. This occurs when everybody arrives in the office in the morning and turns on their client device and needs to access their operating system, applications and data. Another example of VDI IO storms is a ticketing agency when a popular performing artist tickets go on sale and heavy demands are placed on a the transaction application and storage system. If the storage system cannot cope, latency is introduced and users experience delays and productivity drops.

Starboard Storage for VDI

Starboard Storage AC Series storage systems are flash-enabled hybrid storage systems that were designed to provide the best possible blend of solid state and hard disk drives. The Starboard AC45 and AC72 enable storage consolidation providing both NAS, SAN, Fibre Channel and iSCSI functionality within a single easy to manage platform. The Starboard AC Series ships standard with a SSD Accelerator Tier, optimized for both reads and writes, and the hard disk drives are managed by a dynamic pooling architecture that eliminates the complexities and inefficiencies of RAID groups and RAID group management.

What does that all mean for VDI? You get the best balance of capacity and performance and hot workloads like I/O storms are automatically accelerated on demand. Starboard Storage simply makes VDI cost effective and manageable.

VDI offers a compelling value proposition if you can cost-effectively solve the storage challenges associated with implementation. Only Starboard Storage Systems offer the combination of solid state and hard disk drives along with the simplicity and flexibility of dynamic storage pooling and full multi-protocol support built-in to address the key requirements of a VDI infrastructure affordably and efficiently. VDI solutions such as VMware View and Citrix XenDesktop are supported and certified.

The Starboard Storage AC45 and AC72 not only offer ground breaking performance and manageability for VDI but also enable consolidation of other virtualized, structured and unstructured workloads so IT organizations achieve better outcomes for each and every application, every time.