For every $1 spent on VDI deployments, anywhere from $3-$7 is spent on storage. Enterprise storage now accounts for more than 40% of total IT spending.

Consolidating hundreds of desktops onto one server can result in high IOPS demand, boot storm issues, and performance drawbacks. Normally, legacy storage presents a fairly sequential load and a read / write ratio of about 80/20. When many desktops are combined with VDI, the pattern shifts from sequential to random, with read / write ratios of 50/50 or worse. Performance degrades, costs rise, businesses suffer.

To meet the increasing demand for scaling storage capacity and I/O performance, Nexenta’s VDI offering — NexentaVSA for View — uses ZFS, an open storage file system that effectively counters the high cost, poor performance, and high management complexity of traditional VDI storage. In addition, VDI implementations, as with all Nexenta solutions, are hardware agnostic, eliminating costly vendor lock-in.

As the leading open storage provider, Nexenta’s VDI storage solutions deliver a fully supported, out-of-the-box, hardware independent, commercial software package that runs on industry standard x86 servers. Nexenta overcomes the limitations of conventional legacy VDI storage solutions by:

• Dramatically minimizing random IOPS through:
  • ZFS functionality to buffer write operations
  • Inline compression of data
• Managing initial log-on boot storm issues through separate SSD caching of read / write operations
• Providing image management and provisioning with unlimited cloning capabilities
• Creating comprehensive back-up and recovery with unlimited snapshots
• Minimizing amount of needed storage through inline deduplication

Nexenta offers a lower TCO, with no vendor lock-in, thereby maximizing existing storage resources. Additionally, software features, such as unlimited clones or snapshots, are part of Nexenta Enterprise Edition and come with no extra charge. With a user base that is growing rapidly, especially in the area of VDI solutions, Nexenta can help reduce VDI storage costs by as much as 75% over traditional legacy storage solutions.