By Michael Letschin, Director of Products, Nexenta
VDI has moved from an IT administrator’s pet project into a de facto standard for many enterprises, regardless of size, scale, or vertical industry. This acceptance might not have been the case previously, unless of course the IT admin was one of the early zealots and adopters who found that the security, reliability, and efficiencies gained were worth the early pain. Unlike in so many other industries, the consumer has been heard, and, in August, VMware announced EVO: RAIL, a hyper-converged platform built with full backing and automation to go from zero to virtualization in 15 minutes with an interface like the latest Smart TV. Alongside the EVO: RAIL release came NexentaConnect for VMware Virtual SAN, a full-featured file-service solution, integrated with the vCenter Web Interface and using the storage profiles of Virtual SAN for both SMB and NFS shares on top of the scale-out VMDK storage on either standard Virtual SAN or EVO: RAIL.
So how did this help make VDI suitable for the masses? That is simple, and the just-released VMware-Nexenta solution brief combining EVO: RAIL with Horizon and NexentaConnect for Virtual SAN gives details on how to deploy to 250 users along with their persona storage in just a 2U rack-mount package.
Not only does the EVO: RAIL solution maintain a small footprint, but when combined with NexentaConnect, you can also improve the storage utilization by over 80% so you do not have any real lost capacity. Utilizing the remainder of the 13.1 TB that comes in each EVO: RAIL appliance is optimal, when for VDI the primary use will be replicas and some snapshots, for 250 users not nearly the 13.1 TB. Add in the compression and you can see over a 300% improvement of your resources, and this is just an estimate of normal file-server compression performance. This is the epitome of cost-effectiveness and one of the benefits of a software-defined VDI architecture.
VDI is now cost-effective and easy to deploy and implement with the validated solution of NexentaConnect and EVO: RAIL with Horizon .
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