Pure Storage Delivers All-Flash VDI Reference Architecture

Pure Storage, Inc. is bringing the performance and efficiency of all-flash storage to VDI deployments for less than $100/seat with its new VMware-certified VDI Reference Architectures and All-Flash VDI Starter Kit.

As a production-hardened, all-flash enterprise array to drive the cost of all-flash storage below the price of spinning disk, FlashArray makes it affordable for every enterprise to offer their users all-flash VDI experience.

VDI environments enable companies to provide more reliable, flexible and secure desktop systems, which increase productivity and simplify IT administration. Moreover, VDI is evolving from simple call center and task worker deployments (stateless desktops with low performance requirements), to broader rollouts for productivity users and executives, where it is enabling secure mobile computing and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) models.

"Many early enterprise VDI deployments failed due to the cost and complexity associated with meeting the demands of desktop workloads on data center storage. Based on spinning disk architectures, these early deployments saw storage costs in excess of $500 per desktop and failed to scale past hundreds of users without introducing unacceptable performance problems," said Simon Bramfitt, founder and principal analyst at Entelechy Associates. "Flash storage has shown that those performance challenges are readily addressable, but the high cost of flash has prevented its broad adoption until now. Pure Storage addresses the flash affordability challenge by delivering inline data reduction that reduces storage consumption by 5-10x. With the power, performance and cost-efficiency delivered by the Pure Storage FlashArray, enterprises can now more readily reap the benefits of VDI."

Traditional VDI architectures based on spinning disk often cost $300-$500/desktop, rely heavily on stateless images to constrain storage growth, fail to scale past 100s of users and ultimately eliminate the overall ROI of VDI due to exorbitant storage costs. Flash storage is the key to making VDI scale and meet user performance expectations, however the high cost associated with flash storage has prevented its broad adoption until now. Pure Storage addresses the flash affordability conundrum by delivering inline data reduction (deduplication and compression) that reduces storage consumption by 5-10x, lowering the cost of all-flash storage for VDI to less than the price of disk.

How Pure Storage Solves
the Five Key Storage Challenges of VDI:

1. Problem: Storage costs of $200-300/desktop
break the VDI ROI case.
Inline data reduction enables All-Flash VDI for <$100/desktop, less expensive than putting an SSD in a user’s laptop.

2. Problem: Companies abandon VDI projects
because of end-user complaints of poor performance.
All-Flash VDI delivers better performance than local laptops with SSDs, without the performance risk and variability of tiered flash/disk solutions relying on caching.

3. Problem: VDI deployments fail to scale
from pilot (100s of user) to rollout (1,000s of users).
New VDI Starter Kit enables a low-cost pilot for 100s of users, and can be incrementally expanded without downtime to our largest configuration for 5,000+ users.

4. Problem: Next-generation VDI requires
stateless and persistent desktops, but persistent desktops
consume too much storage to be economic
on traditional arrays.
The FlashArray’s inline deduplication reduces both stateless and persistent desktops, enabling organizations to leverage any mixture of the two deployment models.

5. Problem: Traditional enterprise storage is too difficult
to manage for VDI environments.
Installing in 15 minutes with zero fine-tuning and fully manageable with the VMware vSphere use interface.

All-Flash VDI Reference Architecture
Pure Storage has performed lab and customer testing with both VMware View and Citrix XenDesktop solutions to create a set of All-Flash VDI Reference Architectures. Its architectures offer a set of validated solutions, enabling customers to deploy VMware or Citrix VDI on FlashArray. Configurations range from 100s of desktops to 1,000s of desktops, and can be incrementally expanded as VDI deployments grow. The FlashArray Reference Architectures are now listed as compatible with VMware View 5 and the FlashArray is an approved Rapid Desktop solution.

Expandable VDI Starter Kit
Available, the VDI Starter Kit is a lower-cost, lower-capacity version of the FlashArray that is suited to VDI pilot deployments. Available in both HA and non-HA versions, the kit can host up to 10TBs worth of VDI data with the same performance and features of a full FlashArray solution. It enables customers to run low-cost VDI pilot deployments that can scale to the largest FlashArray configuration for an enterprise-wide VDI rollout without downtime or a costly ‘rip-and-replace’ effort.

"We looked at many mainstream storage solutions, including the traditional mechanical disk arrays as well as hybrids, but none of them could match Pure Storage for overall performance, space and consistency. Pure Storage gave us the performance we needed to make our vision for a VDI-enabled student community possible. Now, we are more responsive to our clients, can upgrade software packages in the middle of a semester, and will enable the campus to begin moving towards a BYOD environment," said Erik VanLaecken, CIO at STI.

"Organizations across the globe recognize the inherent benefits of virtual desktop infrastructures, however, their existing storage environments cannot meet the performance-intensive requirements for VDI, or they have to buy so much of it that it becomes cost-prohibitive," said Matt Kixmoeller, VP, products at Pure Storage. "With the VDI Starter Kit, Pure Storage is now able to deliver the performance benefits of flash to organizations of any size and support the deployment of VDI for higher security, lower administration costs and a better end-user experience at an unprecedentedly low point of entry that easily fits within existing IT budgets."

Price and Availability
The All-Flash VDI Reference Architecture is available for download. The FlashArray VDI Starter Kit is available for purchase from Pure Storage resellers, with configurations available for under the street price of $100K, depending on configuration.