Atlantis ILIO Persistent VDI 4.0 Accelerates VDI Adoption

Atlantis Computing, Inc. announced ILIO Persistent VDI 4.0.

The release is a solution that enables Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View customers to run persistent virtual desktops In-Memory using RAM as primary storage, making persistent virtual desktops cheaper and faster than physical PCs.

The solution delivers a better-than-PC user experience at an infrastructure cost that is less than $300 per desktop, while at the same time fully automating the deployment for thousands of users.

Most IT organizations would prefer to deploy persistent virtual desktops because that deployment model is the least disruptive to an IT organization. It uses the same desktop images already deployed on PCs, as well as the existing tools and processes already in place, and perfected over the last several years, to maintain and upgrade those images. However, without ILIO, persistent desktops require so much storage to achieve the same level of performance as a PC that most organization cannot afford to deploy. The cost of storage typically drives up the combined CAPEX and OPEX cost of the infrastructure (server, storage and network) to $1,000-$2,000 per desktop in order to deliver equal-to-PC performance.

"The downside with VDI is that it has been expensive, complicated and prone to failure because of the cost and complexity of delivering sufficient storage IOPS to the desktop with traditional SAN or NAS," said Mark Bowker, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "The Atlantis ILIO Persistent VDI approach of using local server RAM as storage provides a significant boost in IOPS per desktop and removes the complexities associated with traditional storage and network infrastructure."

ILIO Persistent VDI 4.0 is an In-Memory VDI storage solution that enables organizations to deliver persistent virtual desktops that run completely using server RAM as storage. ILIO In-Memory storage technology delivers the performance of local server RAM, while at the same time maintaining a real-time optimized backup using a small amount of shared SAN/NAS storage to ensure data protection and availability. ILIO Center provides push-button, fully automated, deployment to operationalize multiple racks of servers for thousands of users in hours, addressing many of the deployment risks of desktop virtualization.

"After we delivered Atlantis ILIO Diskless VDI and won the Best of VMworld US and EMEA, as well as the Best of Citrix Synergy awards in 2012, our customers fell in love with the user experience, simplicity, and deployment automation of that solution and asked for a similar product for persistent deployments," said Bernard Harguindeguy, CEO, Atlantis Computing. "With this release, we have rounded out our product offering to deliver all desktop virtualization models using our In-Memory solution to boost performance, simplify architectures, and automate persistent VDI, stateless VDI, and virtualized Citrix XenApp deployments."

ILIO Persistent VDI 4.0 Features:

In-Memory VDI – Unlike traditional storage, ILIO In-Memory storage decouples desktop performance from the traditional limitations of disk-based storage by running all session directly on RAM – as primary storage – to provide unparalleled desktop performance including 12 second boot time, near-instant application launches, and desktop search results that appear immediately.
ILIO Fast Replication: Technology maintains a real-time optimized backup on shared SAN/NAS storage to preserve the state of all persistent virtual desktops to deliver data protection and recovery.
Automated Deployment – ILIO Center, the management system for ILIO software, provides push-button automated installation, configuration, sizing and datastore creation for thousands of virtual desktops across multiple racks of servers. ILIO VMs are automatically created and registered as NFS data stores that are ready to use by Citrix XenDesktop or VMware View provisioning tools, or by ILIO Fast Clone, to complete the desktop provisioning process.
ILIO Fast Clone – ILIO Fast Clone can create new full clones of persistent virtual desktops in as little as 5 seconds per desktop. Unlike other storage cloning, ILIO Fast Clone creates new virtual desktops without generating storage traffic.

ILIO software uses patent-pending context-aware
storage optimization technologies including:

Analysing and Processing IO Traffic – ILIO performs context-aware processing of IO operations in real-time at the NTFS file system and block levels to significantly reduce the amount of traffic sent to storage.
Inline Deduplication – ILIO performs inline deduplication in real-time on-the-wire, eliminating up to 95% of the blocks before reaching storage.
Compression – ILIO compresses the optimized blocks before writing them to memory.
Coalescing (IO Blender Fix) – ILIO converts small random blocks generated by the Windows OSs and hypervisors (often referred to as the IO blender affect) into larger sequential blocks, improving efficiency.