Network Computing is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

FalconStor VDI Solution: Economics And Performance: Page 2 of 2

Eventually, while Lee was working on a telecommuting solution with CISCO and FalconStor (for high availability), he learned of FalconStor's NSS SAN Accelerator for VMware virtual desktop environments. After a number of test-runs with the FalconStor solution in a VDI environment, his analogy was that the storage I/O performance "was similar to having Fusion I/O solid state devices in the server. It was really fast. The storage I/O results realized with the FalconStor solution were around 70,000 IOPs with a 50/50 read-to-write ratio at a 4K block size on 4GB fixed block LUNs," Lee stated.

Now Lee is testing a VDI environment with the FalconStor NSS SAN Accelerator with SSD that supplies approximately 4GB's per user, linked clones, regular refreshes (daily, weekly, monthly) with user persistent disks. He is testing 320 virtual machines and sees minimal impact on Windows boot times and is continuing to see low latency for storage I/O. He believes he can now provide the data-value tiering and storage economics that make sense for an overall enterprise class VDI solution. Lee says, "The FalconStor ability to automatically move data from disk to SSD and back to disk at critical time periods is a huge value and also offers the storage economics needed." Sam Lee has leveraged his experience and developed a reference architecture white paper which can be found here at the Force 3 website.

The deployment of virtual machine environments continues to climb at an explosive rate and virtualizing the desktop makes sense if the economics are attractive and desktop users remain ecstatic with their overall experience. Solutions such as the FalconStor NSS SAN Accelerator for VMware View help advance IT automation and reduce overall costs.

Are you considering implementing a virtual desktop environment? If so, I would like to hear from you and understand your experiences to date and your plans for implementation.  Are you considering the use of SSD?  Has storage pricing been a prohibitive factor?