1. Storage in a VDI Ecosystem
Peter Selin
Principal Architect
X-IO Technologies

2. Flexible desktop environment Better/easier desktop management
Benefits of VDI
Flexible desktop environment
Better/easier desktop management
Desktop by template
Security and compliance
BYOD support
M&A
Secure outsourcing

3. Not performance –vs- capacity Reliability and redundancy
Risks of VDI
Not performance –vs- capacity
Reliability and redundancy
Deploying and expanding desktop pools
Redefining “steady-state” operations

4. Virtual Desktop Performance Requirements
Client
Devices
Sequential I/O Processing
20 – 100 IOPS ea
Aggregate IO
Not Hundreds of IOPS
Not Thousands of IOPS
10’s of Thousands of IOPS
Random I/O Processing
Storage

5. The Storage Bottleneck
Database, BI, VDI and Server Virtualization
and ultimately Cloud Computing all face a major performance bottleneck that must be broken
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The Imbalance in the Data Center
The storage
performance
gap
CPU performance has increased over 2 million times since 1987
Disk drive performance has only increased 11 times
This creates a huge bottleneck in the data center
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7. Virtual Desktop with Citrix PVS
Server
Boot Files, Read Only
Write Cache
8GB/Desktop
≈100% Writes
Image Storage
~100% Read

8. The Games Vendors Play for VDI Sizing
Beware, each vendor will conceal its performance weakness in workload assumptions. Here are a couple of comparisons to consider:
How many persistent VDI user connections can the POD support?
Some Vendors assumes 500 max and 1500 non-persistent while X-IO assumes all users are persistent users
What is your estimate for the average number of IOPS per VDI user?
Some Vendors assumes 8 IOPS per VDI user while X-IO uses 20 IOPS per VDI
What is your estimate for the max VDI user storage footprint?
Some Vendors assumes 2GB per VDI users while X-IO uses 20GB
How many simultaneous VDI boots can your system support?
If access to the VDI solution is disrupted and then restored, what is the POD RTO (return to operations) time frame. This is an important question to ask, Some Vendors do not provide an answer
What are the tuning parameters for workload management?
Each X-IO ISE is independent and scales linearly with additional units

9. Data Requirements for Configuration
Desktop Write Cache File Area
User Data Files Area
≈42GB/Desktop
8GB/
Desktop
50%/50% Read/Write (Est)
File Share Latency
≈100% Write IO
Latency Sensitive

10. Object Storage, CDN, deploy images, Backup/Archive
What Data are you going to store? Distribution of Capacity vs Performance
Increasing Performance Requirements (IOPS/TB)
Small enough to fit in today’s capacity SSDs economically (and fast)
(>18,000 IOPS/TB)
Data with small capacity requirements, and large performance requirements
WebCaching Servers, Memcached, In-Memory Datasets, etc
Data with large capacity requirements, and low performance requirements
+6TB HDDs make storing large amounts of data economical (and SLOW)
(<16-30 IOPS/TB)
Object Storage, CDN, deploy images, Backup/Archive
Increasing Capacity Requirements (Bigger = Cheaper $/TB)

11. What Data are you going to store
What Data are you going to store? Distribution of Capacity vs Performance
Increasing Performance Requirements (IOPS/TB)
Small enough to fit in today’s capacity SSDs economically (and fast)
(>18,000 IOPS/TB)
Data with small capacity requirements, and large performance requirements
WebCaching Servers, Memcached, In-Memory Datasets, etc
Bus. Intelligence
SQL
Oracle
Data with large capacity requirements, and low performance requirements
SharePoint
EOM Processing
XenDesktop
Virtual HaDoop
+4TB HDDs make storing large amounts of data economical (and SLOW)
(<16-30 IOPS/TB)
Web Server
XenApp
Security
Active Directory
Test/Dev
File Servers
Applications Server
Exchange
Authentication Server
Data Warehouse
Object Storage, CDN, deploy images, Backup/Archive
Increasing Capacity Requirements (Bigger = Cheaper $/TB)

12. SSD/HDD
What Data are you going to store? Tier 1 Applications are in the middle
Increasing Performance Requirements (IOPS/TB)
Hybrid
HDD
Increasing Capacity Requirements (Bigger = Cheaper $/TB)

13. ISE, The Middle of the Pyramid

14. The Intelligent Storage Element
Exceptional Airflow and Vibration Dampening
Fabric Connectivity
2x8Gbps Min (16Gbps) (FC)
8x8Gbps Max (64Gbps) (FC)
2x 10Gbps or 2x 40Gbps Min (iSCSI)
4x 10Gbps or 4x 40Gbps Max (iSCSI)
SSD/HDD Hybrid Datapac
All HDD Datapac or
X-IO TECHNOLOGIES CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION

15. ISE: The Advantage of Modular Scale
Storage Controllers:………………..
Storage Cache:…………..…………
Number of HDDs:…………………..
Usable Space:………………………
Total IOPS Potential:……………….
Total Kwatts/Hr & (Amps) Req:……
Total Rackspace:…………………… 6
18 GB
120
84 TB
~27,000
2.1 & 10.8 9u 8
24 GB
160
112 TB
~36,000
2.8 & 14.4
12u 4
12 GB 80
56 TB
~18,000
1.4 & 7.2 6u 12
36 GB
230x HDD & 10x SSD
160 TB
+100,000
4.2 & 21.6
18u 10
30 GB
200
140 TB
~45,000
3.5 & 18
15u 2
6 GB 40
28 TB
~9,000
.700 & 3.6 3u
Adding Drives does nothing for the Storage Array “Head’s” Performance
(…until you add another one…)
New Technology Integration?
Bandwidth
Bandwidth
Bandwidth
Bandwidth
ISE 700 Series
Array Controller
Array Controller

16. The trouble with traditional storage?
Blue=Throughput
Yellow=Access Time
…A full disk is a slow disk.

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Perpetual Performance
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18. Write Cache Files
100% Write IOPS

19. ISE Manager Suite
ISE Pool Management
ISE Performance
ISE Health

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Fast Forever
High performance even at 100% capacity utilization
Substantially less impact by users or applications when running internal operations
RAID rebuilds
Mirroring
Hardware is optimized and architected to maintain performance over the life of the system
Low vibration
Efficient cooling
Self-healing drives
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Value You Can Measure
Maximum Usable Storage Capacity
100% storage capacity use with virtually NO performance degradation felt by applications or users
30% - 70% more in useable capacity than competition
NO short-stroking drive, NO vendor holdbacks
Industry Leading Performance
More performance with less hardware
SSD-like performance at the cost of HDD.
Up to 300,000 IOPS
Response times less than 2 ms
Half the Ongoing Cost
100 times more reliable than ANY other storage system
Self-Healing technology at the HDD level
Five-year hardware warranty at ZERO COST
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22. = $ Summary http://www.x-io.com/vdi-er
Warranty costs can dramatically increase the cost of the system
ISE Systems include a 5-Yr Hardware warranty for free
= $
ISE maintains performance as capacity is consumed, requiring less hardware

23. Reference Architecture

24. Reference Architecture

25. References
X-IO Xchange Marketplace -
X-IO Virtual Desktop Solutions -
X-IO 750-Seat Citrix VDI Reference Architecture -

26. Value Proposition and Use Cases

27. ISE In Virtualized Environments
Hyper ISE = up to 300,000 IOPS with 3U 14.4 TB
Less than 2ms Response Times
Reduce database query times up to 20X
Increase virtual server consolidation by 5X
Enable virtual desktop deployments supporting thousands of VDIs on a single Hyper ISE
Price/Performance/Capacity Leader
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28. The ISE In Virtualized Environments
“It took the students 40 minutes after typing their password to have the My Computer icon appear on their desktop. The class was almost over by the time the login finally completed”
“X-IO was the only vendor who was stressing the importance of IOPS, everyone else kept avoiding the subject and focused on capacity”
“Once we hit about 100 users logging in at one time, the system would completely freeze and no one else could log in.”
“Now it’s a minute”
“Now we have our virtual desktops configured to log in on boot up. All 270 systems across all campuses are up and running in less than four minutes. We set up the LUNs, added the VMs and really haven’t touched our Hyper ISE since.”
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29. The ISE In Virtualized Environments
“We were driving the servers to the max but we were barely putting a dent in the Hyper ISE. It seems the more we threw at it, the faster it got. XIO has become one of my top tier solutions. ”
David Hayes
Senior Director, Microsoft Partner Solutions Center
3 Win2K8 Servers
32 Cores
128 GB
90 VMs
Test Run includes:
All 90 VMs starting up
Random SQL IO
Sequential SQL IO
VM Teardown
Repeat randomly per VM
90 VM Boot Storm
X-IO “Storage Hot Spot Analyzer” Screen Image
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30. Industry Recognition
“The Hybrid ISE wins the coveted Breakthrough Product of the Year thanks to its patented Continuous Adaptive Data Placement (CADP) feature, which moves data from hard disk to SSD on an as-needed basis, avoiding hot spots and providing unprecedented performance.”
Jason Bovberg, Senior Editor for Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Magazine
"Microsoft Partner Solutions Center hardware-testing projects are designed to put maximum stress on systems so that customers can have the utmost confidence in deploying them in support of business-critical functions. In such a demanding context, XIO Hyper ISE performed beyond our wildest expectations. We estimate it would take an increase of workload by a factor of 10 to push the Hyper ISE we tested to its actual performance threshold.“
David Hayes, Director of the Microsoft Partner Solutions Center:
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31. Magic Quadrant Visionary
XIO has pioneered what comes after the SAN controller:
Pooled Storage Arrays
for enterprise applications
We are the only privately-held company with visionary status
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32. Thank you
Peter Selin
(312)