Tegile’s Customers Appreciate In-Line De-Dupe

Tegile Systems, Inc. announced that consistent customer feedback is proving that In-Line De-duplication is a must-have capability in VDI storage environments.

A major part of what has kept VDI projects in the Proof of Concept (POC) lab is the cost and complexity of storage.
 
"With traditional storage systems, upwards of 40% of a virtual desktop implementation’s acquisition cost are wrapped up in storage," said Rob Commins, VP of marketing, Tegile. "Our customers are happy to find that they can reduce storage costs by 75%, which comes out to about $20 per desktop."
 
The Capacity Benefits
of In-Line De-duplication for VDI
De-duplication is effective in VDI environments. The capacity savings are obvious. Any redundant data from OSs, applications or user data is shrunk down to a single instance. The capacity savings in a persistent (one in which a user will be able to keep all the configurations and personalisation they have created from session to session) desktop environment are staggering. Persistent desktops could potentially become an administrative nightmare. The amount of disk space needed to maintain this setting will grow and datacentre storage doesn’t come cheap. Patching and upgrades are now necessary for each persistent image and this can eat up tons of man-hours, which usually occur after hours.
 
With in-line de-duplication, a simple physical to virtual (P to V) migration can be done without the complexities and capacity management challenges traditionally found with persistent desktops. Enterprises with knowledge workers demand all of their applications and personalisation intact in order to have the least amount of interference in the users’ work environment.
 
"With a multitude of VDI pools for our many different types of desktop users, the capacity savings of single-instance storage is incredible. The tests we ran in our environment showed that de-duplication saved an incredible 90% storage usage reduction versus systems with compression only. In fact, at this point I can say our VDI implementation is essentially free from a storage point of view, because the de-duplication reduction is so great. The speed we are able to get from our disk intensive 3D Building Information Modelling CAD systems has been significant as well," said Jim Nonn, CIO at Egan Company, a commercial construction specialty contractor delivering mechanical, electrical, and building systems.
 
The Counterintuitive Performance Benefits
of In-Line De-duplication for VDI
The performance implications of running in-line de-duplication algorithms in applications requiring high performance and low latencies has kept it out of these use cases – until now. Tegile’s patent pending Metadata Accelerated Storage Systems (MASS) have eliminated the performance barrier associated with de-duplication and actually turned it into a function that boosts performance up to 7X that of legacy systems. Coupled with a DRAM and SSD based cache, MASS shrinks down the footprint of data in cache, resulting in higher cache hit ratios, thus users see performance improvements from running in-line de-duplication.
 
Jef McCreery, director of core systems at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, VA, saw a seven-fold increase in VDI performance while reducing capacity consumption by 70% in his VDI platform. "Upgrading even the controllers for our existing HP gear would have been equal to, if not double the cost of the entire Tegile solution," said McCreery, who also looked at comparable solutions from Dell EqualLogic and EMC/Data Domain. "Tegile provided the best performance for the lowest overall cost."
 
Commins also commented: "By removing the tension between $/GB and $/IOP, Tegile customers are able to move their VDI projects forward with a very cost effective approach that actually improves their end user experience. Leveraging MASS and Tegile’s caching architecture, hundreds of end users can concurrently boot their persistent desktops in less than 10 seconds."