Server virtualisation and storage virtualisation is a vehicle that many companies have adopted as the leading strategy to help them accomplish more with less resources. At the endpoints, desktop virtualisation is also turning corners now and CIOs are building strategies around centralising data, applications and desktop operating systems, while realising that the savings span across multiple lines of business. However, there are many challenges associated with virtual desktop environments, which is why Symantec have announced VirtualStore.
No one will argue that desktop virtualisation comes with a significant upfront investment, but the clear goal is to reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) per employee.
With a centrally hosted desktop solution, IT administrators can:
- Reduce data loss due to downtime or lost disks.
- Reduce administrative overhead of maintaining 1000s of desktops.
- Reduce OPEX helpdesk costs
- Increase security of corporate data.
Today, a majority of VMware customers use block based Fibre Channel of iSCSI storage for their VMware virtual machine images, but there has been a noticeable shift with customers asking whether Network File Systems (NFS) may be a better fit.
The result of centralising all of your servers is that managing storage for virtual machines becomes one of the biggest challenges in the data centre. Now not only do VMware administrators have to worry about managing virtual desktops and virtual servers, they have to worry about managing the storage demands underneath as well. As an example, storage demands have become one of the biggest costs for deploying virtual desktop environments. Information growth is on the rise, IT budgets remain flat and organisations need to find a way to leverage the power of virtualisation while at the same time dealing with the complex issues around managing storage in these environments.
To solve the storage challenges associated with virtual desktop environments, Symantec is introducing VirtualStore, a highly scalable, clustered NAS solution based on the industry leading Storage Foundation Cluster File System from Symantec for VMware virtual machines.
It does this in a number of ways:
- It can help administrators deploy a scalable and highly available NAS solution for a fraction of the cost of traditional NAS solutions.
- It reduces storage costs associated with virtual machine sprawl.
- It resolves storage challenges associated with deploying large virtual desktop environments.
- It improves the performance of virtual infrastructure with built in acceleration for serving up VMware virtual machines.
VirtualStore enables customers to not just leverage their existing SAN investments, but also extend the storage efficiency across different tiers of storage, and avoid getting locked into a single storage vendor. This means storage costs per virtual machine continue to drop further.
Apart from helping reduce the storage costs associated with virtual machines, and virtual desktops in particular, another problem associated with VDI environments is the user experience. As more virtual desktops are added, the amount of storage I/O increases greatly. This can cause performance bottlenecks which directly translate to poor user experience; often referred to as boot-storm, login-storm or anti-virus (AV) update problems. VirtualStore uses an efficient FileSnap technology along with patented cache optimisation solutions to pack more virtual machines into a single NAS head while delivering the response times desktop users are used to.
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