SimpliVity Supercharges VDI With OmniStack

Just as it did for the primary data center infrastructure, SimpliVity Corporation is changing the infrastructure for virtual desktops with a new set of VDI solutions that leverage the value of its OmniStack technology and now make VDI viable for every use case and every customer environment, as part of and under same management, protection and capabilities of tier one IT.

Omnicube for VDI

Throughout 2013, SimpliVity, in globally federated, converged IT infrastructure, has been simplifying data centers globally by replacing the legacy stack of infrastructure and delivering 3X cost reduction with OmniCube – a single, globally scalable platform that delivers the core data center infrastructure functionality required at a fraction of the cost and management.

With its new solutions which include partnership agreements with specialized hardware’s companies for VDI, NVIDIA Corp. and Teradici Corp., the company  is extending the value of its data architecture for VDI deployments, giving customers the ability to virtualize any end-user computing environment – from small call center operations through large scale, compute-intensive engineering organizations.

SimpliVity’s VDI solution elevates VDI to a position of an ‘equal citizen’ among other IT applications. Customers are looking for robust VDI solutions, but current legacy and interim solutions have fallen short on delivering functionally and economically viable solutions. Many VDI deployments have failed because customers have had to make compromises relating to scalability, performance, end-user experience, efficiency, data protection and DR for VDI desktops due to budget constraints. Existing VDI solutions are expensive and have forced customers to forgo standard enterprise functionality and protection, in order to make it viable. SimpliVity eliminates the compromises that customers have to make, and now can economically treat VDI like a first class application.

Specifically for VDI market, OmniCube addresses following requirements:

Data architecture for all data at creation

• Inline deduplication for saving IO/s
• Support for optimized full clones
• Support for efficient (1-to-1) persistent desktops

Enable VDI as ‘equal citizen’ within IT

• Makes VDI an integral part of IT
• VM-centric backup and DR delivers tier one data protection for all desktops
• Efficient VDI VM Backups, offsite DR and fast recovery

Support for 3rd party servers in VDI deployments

• Flexible deployment scenarios and enables compute scaling
• Leverage customers’ existing infrastructure
• Support for elastic, scale out design

Customers deploying VDI are leveraging all of the strengths of OmniCube, powered by OmniStack technology, to achieve rapid deployments, performance, simplified management, massive yet simplified scalability, and simplified and efficient data protection including remote site DR-all at a fraction of the cost of traditional infrastructure.

Combining the power, performance, scalability and simplicity of OmniCube with NVIDIA and Teradici technology now extends this value across a spectrum of users including task workers, knowledge workers and compute intensive power user environments, such as CAD/CAM engineering organization, or graphic design and animation environments.

SimpliVity’s OmniCube is an assimilated, all-in-one, globally scalable IT infrastructure platform that delivers storage, compute, networking, hypervisor, cache accelerated performance, native VM-centric backup and replication for DR, and public cloud integration.

It delivers efficiency and data mobility based on its data architecture, which is centered on its data virtualization engine, which delivers performance accelerated, inline deduplication, compression, and optimization on all data within the OmniCube Federation. OmniCube includes global data management, data protection and DR capabilities. When deployed as the infrastructure for a VDI environment, it enables customers to achieve performance for all workloads with inline deduplication and compression.

Historically, customers have had challenges using traditional IT infrastructure for VDI deployments. Customers looking to stand-up new VDI or refresh legacy deployments can benefit from OmniCube’s elastic, scale-out design and novel data architecture. As more OmniCube appliances are dynamically added to a Federation, the more compute, storage, processing and performance scales.

The OmniCube scale-out model is easier to deploy and less complex than using legacy SAN technology. The data architecture with inline deduplication on all data reduces IO/s and is suited for improving VDI performance workloads including boot storms.

Inline deduplication is about saving IO/s, and alternative, post processing methods for deduplication do not work. Because all data is inline deduplicated at inception when all data is created, customers can choose to create full clones without extra capacity overhead, complexity or performance impact. Customers can also benefit from the policy-based data protection and DR features included with OmniCube for protecting and recovering VDI desktops.

Additionally it supports vSphere VAAI for offloading storage operations such as cloning from the ESXi host which benefits VDI deployments. Also SimpliVity has been certified with Citrix XenDesktop and VMware Horizon View.

SimpliVity, leveraging the x86 architecture of OmniCube, has plans to provide solutions and reference architectures for new optimized, graphics and compute intensive VDI application workloads and cloud infrastructures.

Key partners for these optimized OmniCube solutions include technology providers, NVIDIA and Teradici, the developer of the PCoIP protocol. By leveraging SimpliVity OmniCube with NVIDIA GRID technology, users can experience the same interactive graphics performance they have at their desk-side computer. With the addition of PCoIP Hardware Accelerator (APEX) for processing image encoding tasks over the network, CPU cycles are freed up for computationally demanding work. Together these solutions mean customers can benefit from a new hyperconverged offering focused at complex virtual desktop workloads.

“Combining SimpliVity OmniCube and NVIDIA GRID technology is a game changer for customers deploying virtualized desktops that demand performance, stability and compatibility of hardware-accelerated graphics,” says Justin Boitano, director of product marketing for GRID, NVIDIA.

“The partnership with SimpliVity offers great potential for the growing VDI market, and customers stand to benefit from Teradici’s PCoIP protocol optimization combined with the OmniCube hyperconverged, globally federated IT infrastructure,” adds Olivier Favre, director of product management, Teradici.

“Our customers are gaining tremendous benefit and IT simplification with their virtualized deployments running core applications on OmniCube. Now the market wants to leverage the unique OmniCube hyperconverged platform architecture and novel data architecture for new application delivery including VDI,” states Doron Kempel, SimpliVity CEO. “SimpliVity offers the economics that finally makes efficient, robust VDI a reality.”

David Floyer, CTO and founder, Wikibon, comments: “Today’s CIOs are looking for VDI solutions that allow the business to be agile while simplifying operations. SimpliVity OmniCube is well positioned to meet a broad spectrum of VDI use cases with a comprehensive, unique offering that otherwise would require the integration of many different products.”

End-user computing expert, Brian Madden, comments: “We always argued that VDI had to be about persistent ‘1-to-1’ disk images, but doing so with traditional server storage was prohibitively expensive. This is why most VDI deployments have focused on non-persistent ‘shared’ images, and why VDI adoption remained marginal. But now there are several vendors offering block-level, single-instance primary storage for VDI. These improvements in storage and graphics capabilities mean that VDI is now applicable in far more situations than it was before.”

SimpliVity is a vendor implementing single-instance for primary storage with a novel data architecture including ‘at data creation’ inline deduplication, compression, optimization at the foundation of OmniCube and OmniStack.