Shrink Storage, Save Money

Storage is the single biggest cost barrier to VDI adoption. Microsoft Windows and common applications such as Microsoft Office are often the biggest consumers of desktop disk space. When you have to move hundreds or thousands of copies of these images from physical PCs to data center storage, it's hard to cost-justify your VDI project.

Our innovative desktop layering technology eliminates this duplication automatically by storing only a single instance of these common images. When combined with our ability to thin-provision desktop layers, you can achieve up to 70% reduction in VDI storage, without the unpleasant side effects of other storage reduction approaches in the VDI world.

Traditional Approaches for VDI Storage Reduction Require Tradeoffs

In an attempt to reduce VDI storage costs, IT organizations often consider:

Cloning - This block-based, shared image approach enables you to create a single virtual parent image for many desktops. Whenever users modify their profiles, save documents, or install their own applications, the changes are captured in each desktop's redo log so that the differences can be reapplied upon reboot. This approach works well as long as the original parent image stays intact. If you have to patch or upgrade the parent image, which happens frequently in Windows-based environments (for example, Patch Tuesday), the redo logs become invalid, and all user personalization is lost. For this reason, IT managers use profile management tools, which reapply some personalization, and folder redirection, which saves documents on a separate network share, in conjunction with cloning. But these solutions add significant cost and complexity. They also fail to solve the big problem of sustaining user-installed applications, SID's, GUID's, plug-ins, Microsoft Excel macros, locally saved Microsoft Outlook PST files, and other deep personalization through Microsoft Windows patches and updates.

Deduplication - Originally designed to make network backups faster and more economical, storage deduplication is also a way to eliminate redundant copies of Windows and applications in VDI environments. However, these systems are expensive, and require you to first over-provision storage to support your VDI implementation so that you can later deduplicate the duplication.

Unidesk blog: Is Storage deduplication an oxymoron? It is for VDI!

Unidesk Provides Storage Reduction Without Compromises

Unidesk provides the storage savings of cloning and deduplication technology - without losing any user personalization. And you won't have to over-provision storage, either. Our desktop layering technology eliminates duplication of Windows and application images before it ever happens. We store only a single instance of the operating system and applications, and rely upon Unidesk CacheCloud™ image delivery technology to cache local copies on our CachePoint virtual appliances so that multiple VDI desktops can access them.

Our ability to thin-provision personalization layers further reduces VDI storage requirements. For example, if you allocate 10GB of user space for each VDI desktop, but only 1GB is in use, 1GB is all the storage you'll need to make available.

We even address the storage performance challenges common in VDI environments. By replicating and caching the single instances of your Windows and application images as necessary to virtual appliances that use commodity-class storage, you can cost-effectively eliminate boot storms and 8am login problems. With these problems out of the way, you can scale your VDI deployment with greater confidence.

VDI Success Triangle

You've learned about Storage. See how Unidesk delivers the other two must-have requirements for VDI Success:

Personalization | Management | Storage