MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA and LAS VEGAS, NV — (Marketwire) — 02/26/13 — Today at VMware Partner Exchange (PEX) 2013, Atlantis Computing, the award-winning leader in data center storage optimization solutions, released Atlantis ILIO Persistent VDI 4.0. The new release is the first 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.
Today Atlantis Computing also announced it tripled its customer base and sold more than a quarter of a million licenses to date:
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 Atlantis ILIO, persistent desktops require so much storage to achieve the same level of performance as a PC that most organizations cannot afford to deploy them. 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.
According to Gartner, “storage is the No. 1 challenge most IT organizations face when considering virtual desktop (server-hosted virtual desktop or virtual desktop infrastructure) projects. Persistent storage is the easiest solution to deploy, but can result in significantly higher back-end storage costs because every user is assigned a dedicated virtual desktop image.”(1) Moreover, “with an average cost per virtual desktop of over $1,000, the typical cost of storage is $400 to $600 per desktop. I/O acceleration software can support diskless, DAS or other storage configurations and has been proven at scale above 10,000 virtual desktops.”(2)
“We have an existing persistent VDI user base that we plan to keep growing because desktop management is simple and the user experience is similar to a PC,” said Christopher Green, Vice President, IT Infrastructure Systems, Washington Trust Bank. “We have been using Atlantis ILIO software since 2011 to optimize storage performance for our VDI environment, which has improved desktop performance and the efficiency of our SAN storage. With the new Atlantis ILIO Persistent VDI 4.0, the entire virtual desktop runs in server RAM, making it much faster than a physical PC.”
Atlantis ILIO Persistent VDI 4.0 is the first In-Memory VDI storage solution that enables organizations to deliver persistent virtual desktops that run completely using server RAM as storage. Atlantis 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. Atlantis ILIO Center provides a 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.
To see a demonstration of the desktop user experience with Atlantis ILIO Persistent VDI 4.0, visit:
“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.”
“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.”
– Unlike traditional storage, ILIO In-Memory storage decouples desktop performance from the traditional limitations of disk-based storage by running all sessions directly on server 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. In addition, because all desktops run on RAM, the amount of storage traffic sent on the network is drastically reduced, addressing one of VDI-s key deployment risks.
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.
– Atlantis ILIO Center, the management system for Atlantis ILIO software, provides push-button automated installation, configuration, sizing and datastore creation for thousands of virtual desktops across multiple racks of servers. Atlantis ILIO virtual machines are automatically created and registered as NFS data stores that are ready to use by Citrix XenDesktop or VMware View provisioning tools, or by Atlantis ILIO Fast Clone, to complete the desktop provisioning process.
– Atlantis ILIO Fast Clone can create new full clones of persistent virtual desktops in as little as 5 seconds per desktop. Unlike other storage cloning, Atlantis ILIO Fast Clone creates new virtual desktops without generating storage traffic.
Atlantis ILIO software uses patent-pending context-aware storage optimization technologies including:
– Atlantis 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.
– Atlantis ILIO performs “on the wire” inline deduplication in real-time, eliminating up to 95% of the blocks before reaching storage.
– Atlantis ILIO compresses the optimized blocks before writing them to memory.
– Atlantis ILIO converts all small random blocks generated by the Windows operating systems and hypervisor — often referred to as the IO blender affect — into larger sequential blocks, greatly improving efficiency.
Atlantis Computing, winner of “Best of VMworld” and “Best of Citrix Synergy” awards, addresses the challenges of storage-intensive virtualized and cloud applications: performance, cost and the ability to scale-out on demand. Atlantis ILIO complements existing virtualization solutions from Citrix, Microsoft and VMware and enables the most efficient use of data center storage by any virtual machine, fully automates deployments and lowers implementation risks. Atlantis Computing is privately held and funded by Cisco Systems, El Dorado Ventures and Partech International with headquarters in Mountain View, California and offices in Europe. For more information, visit: .
Atlantis Computing, Atlantis ILIO and Atlantis ILIO Diskless VDI, In-Memory VDI, Atlantis ILIO for XenApp, Atlantis ILIO FlexCloud and Atlantis ILIO Persistent VDI are trademarks of Atlantis Computing, Inc. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
(1) Gartner “Storage Design Alternatives for Virtual Desktop Deployments” report published 30 January 2013
(2) Gartner “How to Implement Storage for Virtual Desktop Deployments” report published 14 January 2013
Amber Rowland
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