NetApp - The Virtual Storage Guy

Attention CEOs: Pay $75 per Virtual Desktop for Storage

Recently both NetApp and EMC published VDI whitepapers with our mutual partners VMware and Cisco. Both papers are very solid and should result in robust infrastructures; however, the solutions are far from equal and I’d like to take 5 minutes of your time to share with you some interesting points of comparison.

Sure the EMC paper focuses on UCS platform while the NetApp paper focuses on a Nexus infrastrucutre, but that’s not what I want to discuss. Yes, the EMC architecture running on Fibre Channel over Ethernet and the NetApp solution is leveraging NFS, but that’s not what I’d like you to consider either.

The level of differentiation I want to highlight is the cost per desktop in both of these solutions. Why cost? Simple, it is the number one hindrance to virtual desktop adoption.

A New Era for Virtual Desktops

We are entering into an interesting time in the industry witnessed by the release of VMware View. View Manager, View Composer, Thin App, and Offline Desktop are well positioned to accelerate the adoption of virtual desktops in datacenters and to remote access devices.

Today I’d like to share some thoughts specific to reducing storage costs with VDI or View.  A major component in VMware View Composer is Linked Clones, which provides the ability to deploy hundreds of virtual desktops from a single desktop image.  In addition to storage savings, customers will be able to update deployed desktops deployed with View Composer by patching the master desktop image.

Recently I have received a number of inquiries as to how View Composer and Linked Clones integrate with NetApp’s storage saving Dedupe and zero cost provisioning FlexClone technologies.  I’d like to take this time to discuss this topic and how VMware and NetApp are engineering the best of breed virtual desktop solutions.

I will caution you in advance, this post is a bit lengthy because we have much to share and discuss.

Need more on VDI, stay tuned…

I want to thank everyone who has contributed to the conversation around VDI. Wow, for a blog which was posted at 8:00 PM EDT on a Friday evening, to attract this much attention in 24 hours, I believe that I may have struck a nerve.

At present time, it appears that my friends at EMC are a bit perplexed as to the capabilities and integration of NetApp technologies with VMware VDI. I noticed in his most recent post that Chad has begun to turn this discussion towards performance. I’m not the least bit surprised that when the conversation around functionality falters the dialog turns to speeds and feeds.

I bring this up because I don’t think we are done with the conversation around manageability and administration of VDI environments. I’d really like to share more with you right now, unfortunately I will have to defer until after we present the NetApp breakout session on VDI Thursday morning (session ID VD2387 @ 9:30 AM PDT).

Adjust your VMworld schedule if seats still remain… looks like we might need a bigger room.

The used car salesman approach

Ever feel like someone is telling you everything you want to hear while their true raison d'être is for their own gain?

Maybe I’m off base here, so I‘ll ask you to help me decide

I believe we all agree that a few of the core goals with implementing VMware are simplifying operations, and to drive down infrastructure costs.  So am I missing something with this post from Chad?

The Challenge of VDI

VDI is a great means to drive down the operational cost associated with providing and servicing an end user environment.  The challenge to VDI is that the environments are very large.  I mean moderate installations are commonly 1,500 seats and at the high end we have customers looking at 50,000 – 100,000 seats.  At this scale it is easy to understand why the storage infrastructure cost can be a large hurdle facing an organization considering the adoption of VDI.