A while back, during an early internal briefing on our new vIO (pronounced VEE-O) virtual storage appliance, one of the engineers muttered, “You are releasing primary dedupe on the world.” Someone across the room asked him what he said, and as he repeated it, everyone got quiet as it really started to sink in. Just think about it. The Holy Grail of deduping virtual storage and swap memory with no latency, and economics that cost 33 times less by reducing the required storage by 97% today is a reality. In SOFTWARE! Sorry for yelling.
Now, let me explain why it was astonishing even to us sitting around the table as you may not be aware of the pedigree at GreenBytes. This technology was introduced last July with our IO Offload Engine external virtual desktop infrastructure appliance, and before that, in a long line of storage systems dating back to 2007. So dedupe and efficiency isn’t something new to us.
So, now the world knows we have it. What to do with it? Well, here are a few use cases.
Standard Server Hardware
Think of a standard commodity dual socket server with 16 cores – nothing extremely expensive or unique – and throw in a good amount of RAM. Pick your favorite VMware HCL vendor and you should be able to get this for a very reasonable price.
Use Cases
Internal SSD
By simply using internal SSD presented to the vIO, you’ve got VDI in a box. And there are plenty of cost effective SSD configurations to choose from, priced to meet your performance and redundancy criteria. A single enterprise SSD is capable of producing over 60,000 IOPS. Taking into account the vIO processing requirements and 10 users per core, this configuration can easily support 100 users with outstanding response.
PCI Flash
The next step up for faster IO, drop in a PCI flash card. Share the storage with other VMware servers and you’ve built a shared storage appliance. A 400Gb PCI flash card can serve up to 500 desktops. By squeezing every byte out, it all comes together.
External Flash Storage
This is one of the most exciting use cases. There are many options here with varying configurations and budgets. All will have the IOPS required for VDI, but without dedupe, they become ridiculously expensive to deploy at scale. Using the vIO in front of the storage and being able to dedupe, you can get up to 33 times the storage you purchased — with no drop in speed! Unbelievable! Go ahead – purchase that super-fast, all-flash storage array you’ve been drooling over and get 33 times more storage. That’s a 97% return in hard cash. Woo Hoo!
Now put the vIO in an ESX cluster. Configure HA and DRS and, viola! A HA load balancing act with the IOPS necessary for ultrafast desktops.
Full (fat) Clients
And, continuing with our legacy, for the first time, not only are we releasing primary dedupe to the world, we are also setting a standard in VDI. Historically, to get the IOPS and performance necessary for at-scale deployments, IT managers and VDI vendors have had to resort to linked clones or other technology, locking you into using their technology. Even VMware says that linked clones are not the fastest. (1) And with persistent virtual desktops, you get your unique desktop that’s all your own.
Yesterday, even for us, it required a hardware component to fulfill this desire, but now we can all have what we want and need for successful deployments with a simple, extremely cost effective, easy to deploy and scale software appliance.
Scale
GreenBytes has you covered, ranging from a virtual desktop deployment of hundreds using the vIO to hundreds of thousands with our highly available IO Offload Engine external shared flash appliance, or by deploying multiple vIO instances. We can help you grow your virtual deployment using the same technology, management and infrastructure already in place.
Secret Sauce
This is all possible thanks to GreenBytes’ multiple-patented, award-winning technology.
Wow! What an announcement, and I can’t wait to start chalking up the deployments. So be a part of the GreenBytes solution and save yourself money, time and energy.
There is more to the story. I hope that I piqued your interest and you select to read the full announcement as well.
VMware partners, I hope to see you at VMware PEX Booth 808 Feb 25-28 in Las Vegas.
(1) http://www.vmware.com/support/ws55/doc/ws_clone_overview.html
