Solid state drives are pervading new areas these days. While traditionally used to accelerate IO between servers and storage, they are now being used in virtual desktop implementations, which promises tremendous advantages for organizations that require a large number of workstations.
Storage smackdown: Hard drives vs. SSDs
Universities, hospitals, financial and insurance institutions have all examined the benefits of lowered capital expenditures and operating expenses associated with ultra-thin clients. But there is a big problem: the performance of storage systems in the virtual desktop environment nosedives to unacceptable levels after a relatively small number of clients are deployed. WhipTail has been building an all solid state drive (SSD) storage area network (SAN) appliance since 2008 and has focused recent performance improvements around optimization for the virtual desktop environment.
WhipTail CTO James Candeleria pointed out two important data points regarding virtual desktops. First, each thin client demands from 20 to 40 Input-Outputs per second (IOPs). The fastest hard disk drive (HDD) tops out at below 200 IOPs. As a result, each drive can only handle 10 or fewer users. Organizations looking to support thousands of thin clients immediately run into a brick wall in terms of storage costs.
The second important data point is that each thin client requires from 1GB to 2GB for the virtual image. This creates an ideal application for the WhipTail 2U SSD appliance that can support up to 6TB of data and yields 150,000 IOPs. Based on these metrics, the WhipTail Racerunner Virtual Desktop XLR8r appliance can support upwards of 7,500 thin clients. The virtualized images can be retained in SSD and hard disk drives can handle the rest of the database applications. In addition to saving money on the number of HDDs needed to support the systems, the power requirement of the appliance, at 180 watts, is a tiny fraction of that of a large HDD array.
The Racerunner Virtual Desktop XLR8r appliance is immediately.
