County expands VDI environment with 'flash first' hybrid storage array

When Bartholomew County, Ind. expanded its virtual desktop infrastructure, IT Director Jim Hartsook acquired a Tintri VMstore T540 hybrid storage array that mixes solid-state drives and hard disk drives for better performance and easier management, instead of expanding his legacy HDD array.

Hartsook's department supports more than 455 users in 10 geographically dispersed offices. In the summer of 2011, the department decided to expand its VMware View deployment from a 50-seat mobile training operation to more general use; it now supports around 200 users.

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Dell boosts Foglight's virtual storage management support

Dell Inc. updated its Foglight virtualization management platform this week, adding support for more SAN arrays and improved monitoring tools to Foglight for Storage Management.

Along with Foglight for Storage Management, Dell's Foglight platform includes Foglight for Virtualization Enterprise Edition and Foglight for Virtualization Standard Edition. Dell acquired the Foglight platform when it purchased Quest Software for $2.4 billion in June 2012. Dell changed the entire platform's name to Foglight in February.

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Flash storage arrays take center stage at Storage Decisions

Solid-state storage was a hot topic at the Storage Decisions Conference in Chicago last week, as expert presenters explained its benefits while warning attendees not to go overboard in deploying expensive flash storage arrays.

Presenters suggested instead using flash as a tool in a sound, economical storage strategy that also includes spinning hard disk drives, tape archiving and cloud services.

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Atlantis Computing handles virtual desktops' persistent data in RAM

Atlantis Computing this week launched a version of its virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) software that speeds performance and reduces storage requirements for persistent virtual desktops.

Atlantis ILIO Persistent VDI 4.0 runs as a virtual machine (VM) inside local server memory, and creates and delivers persistent desktops within that server RAM. The ILIO virtual desktops are registered and created as network file system, or NFS, data stores for provisioning by Citrix Systems Inc.'s XenDesktop and VMware Inc.'s View desktop virtualization platforms.

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Tegile hybrid SAN SSD solves contractor's VDI performance issues

Despite his initial skepticism that a change in storage systems would make a difference, Egan Company CIO Jim Nonn said a Tegile Systems Zebi hybrid SAN array significantly improved his sluggish 220-seat virtual desktop infrastructure setup.

Nonn said the switch to the combination solid-state and hard drive system reduced response times and capacity requirements for the Brooklyn Park, Mich.-based construction contractor.

Egan has about 20 computer-aided design (CAD) workers and 200 general knowledge workers using VMware Inc. View 5.1 virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) software. Nonn said his legacy 50 TB Dell Inc. Compellent storage array wasn't providing the performance his VDI environment required. VMware View Client boot times were taking more than five minutes, and performance was sluggish.

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Virtual storage 2012: VDI, VM-aware and software dominate news

The biggest news stories of 2012 about storage for virtual environments and storage virtualization involved using storage better for virtual desktops and servers. Software, particularly for virtual appliances, was also big news, but old-fashioned storage virtualization systems have stuck around too.

Here are the major news stories and trends in this category in 2012.

1. VDI storage problems solved

At many companies, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technology went from the test and development phase to successful implementations this year, largely because those companies solved their VDI storage problems.

Storage vendors are offering reference architectures and benchmarks for VDI deployments using their products alongside those of computing and networking partners. Increased use of solid-state storage is also improving user acceptance of VDI.

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Nimble Storage hybrid array improves law firm's VDI performance

When traditional spinning disk arrays came up short on performance for its virtual desktop infrastructure, Minneapolis-based law firm Lindquist & Vennum switched to a hybrid array from Nimble Storage Inc.

The Nimble Storage hybrid array's solid-state drives (SSDs) provide enough performance for the company's 350 persistent virtual desktops, as well as other applications.

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Nimble, GlassHouse each deliver VDI reference architecture

With storage vendors paying close attention to virtual desktop infrastructure deployments, array vendor Nimble Storage and consultancy GlassHouse Technologies Inc. recently published reference architectures for configuring virtual desktops with VMware View.

The VDI reference architectures include guidelines for the required computing, server virtualization, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) software and storage infrastructure. The companies tested and validated the VDI systems for simplified and accelerated virtual desktop deployments.

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Pivot3 pivots more toward VDI, View

Pivot3 is continuing its push in the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) space by working closer with VMware.

Last week, Pivot3 announced that its virtual storage and compute (vSTAC) line of appliances for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments for SMBs now support VMware’s View 5.1 virtual desktop system as part of the Pivot3’s participation in VMware’s Rapid Desktop Program.

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Control VDI costs for storage by careful configuration planning

Whether or not a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) requires a SAN is open to debate, but experts and administrators agree that if you do opt for a SAN for VDI storage, you’ll need to do a good deal of research and planning to find the right balance between performance and VDI costs.

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VDI implementation without boot storms for Ohio DoDD

The Ohio Department of Developmental Disabilities (DoDD) faced a big decision about its PC infrastructure 18 months ago. It either had to replace 80% of the agency’s desktops because they were between 4 and 7 years old, or move to VDI. Brian Brothers, DoDD’s network administrator manager, found a VDI implementation would be cheaper, and he went with VMware View because it is a VMware shop.

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