Citrix are working on a new capability of XenServer called Intellicache, which is supposed to be a greate enabler for Desktop Virtualisation and potentially do away with products to enhance the IOPs available to XenDesktop.
Storage is a big bottleneck in regards to desktop virtualisation. High speed centralised storage (SAN) is expensive, but eases complexity. Local storage is cheap and fast, but increases complexity. The ideal solution would be a marriage of cheaper centralised storage (NAS) with local storage for eased complexity and fast desktop performance. This is the goal of Citrix’s IntelliCache feature. IntelliCache basically uses centralised storage to store desktop image and caches the image on the local storage of the XenServer. Subsequent requests for the image will be retrieved from local storage instead of traversing the LAN. IntelliCache will be part of XenServer 5.6 SP1.