In my last column I posited that advances in storage technology — mostly innovative use of memory-based storage — is making virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) projects more likely to generate a return on investment beyond just an operational one.
Moving beyond operational VDI project justification is critical for the large-scale deployment of VDI projects. It is simply easier to justify to non-IT decision makers something that will save the organization dollars than it is to rationalize something that will save IT department time or increase security.
I see three key areas where flash and DRAM (as storage) are being used to significantly increase virtual desktop density (which saves money and improves user acceptance by increasing performance): server-side storage memory, network caching and shared SSD appliances/arrays. In this column I’ll discuss server-side storage memory, and I’ll cover the other methods later.
I’m avoiding the use of server-side flash intentionally. Much of the innovation we are seeing involves the use of DRAM as the first tier of caching for virtual desktop images. VDI typically has a very mixed read/write workload, and because DRAM is ideal for writes it is a perfect complement to VDI.