The new performance results were enabled by the new Microsoft SMB Direct protocol implemented in Windows Server 2012 Beta. SMB Direct takes advantage of Mellanox’s RDMA interconnect technology to provide for greater performance and reduced CPU overhead in enterprise data center applications. Mellanox’s RDMA-based interconnect technologies include the company’s FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand and 40GbE with RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) interconnect products.

“A highlight of Windows Server 2012 is its great improvement in storage performance, as demonstrated by the preliminary benchmark results that SMB Direct has achieved,” said Mike Schutz, Senior Director, Windows Server and Virtualization, at Microsoft. “With this new technology, customers can access storage over the network at the speed of local storage. As a result, a virtualized server infrastructure can utilize shared JBOD storage through the use of RDMA-enabled network interface cards (RNICs). This approach significantly increases data center efficiency.”

“Data demand continues to exceed the capabilities of traditional spinning media, more and more businesses are seeking out ways to make their critical applications perform with the lowest-possible latency data throughput,” said Tyler Smith, Vice President of Alliances, Fusion-io. “We are pleased to work with esteemed partners like Mellanox and Microsoft to bring end-to-end solutions into the marketplace that address the enterprise need for performance and efficiency while supporting the latest applications with ultra-low latency access to the data that supplies them.”

“The increasing demand for business-critical information and rich content analytics within enterprises continues to shape data center application needs,” said Gilad Shainer, vice president for market development at Mellanox Technologies. “Using SMB Direct over Mellanox’s RDMA-enabled interconnect solutions provides a highly efficient data center infrastructure for storage file system, delivering the highest of performance at a lower cost.”

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Dell EqualLogic Overview
Dell EqualLogic PS Series arrays are intelligent storage arrays that are designed to provide simple management and seamless expansion using innovative Dell Fluid Data™ technology. All PS Series storage arrays include SAN configuration features and capabilities that sense network connections, automatically build RAID sets, and conduct system health checks to help ensure that all components are fully functional.

EqualLogic PS Series arrays are based on a virtualized modular storage architecture that enables IT managers to purchase only the storage they need—when they need it—to help prevent both underutilization and over-provisioning. Using innovative Fluid Data technology, all EqualLogic PS Series arrays in a SAN work together to automatically manage data, load balance across all resources, and expand to meet growing storage needs.

Unidesk VDI Management Software
Unidesk, a strategic Dell partner, is offered by Dell as a validated virtual desktop management option for Dell Desktop Virtualization Solutions (DVS) Enterprise Infrastructure and DVS Virtual Labs. By replacing block-based cloning, image management, application virtualization, and profile management point tools with a more complete, unified solution, Unidesk makes it easier for IT organizations to package and deliver applications, and create, patch, and support fully personalized desktops hosted on VMware vSphere®. Unidesk’s patent-pending desktop layering technology integrates with Citrix® XenDesktop®, VMware View™, and other brokering solutions to enable enterprises to expand VDI to more users, reduce desktop operations costs up and cutting VDI storage capacity upwards of 70%.

Title:	Overcoming the Storage Challenges of Persistent Virtual Desktops with Dell EqualLogic Hybrid Arrays and Unidesk
Date:	2012-05-14
File Type:	pdf
File Size:	564.1 kB
Hits:	6
Category:	Whitepapers
Download Link:	Overcoming the Storage Challenges of Persistent Virtual Desktops with Dell EqualLogic Hybrid Arrays and Unidesk

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• PCIe-based 400GB and 800GB Intel SSD 910 Series provides extreme performance, endurance and reliability for rigorous data center demands.
• Intel SSD 910 Series offers easy-to-install, seamless post-deployment server storage upgrade with no changes to existing server design.
• Using Intel High Endurance Technology, Intel SSD 910 offers 10 full drive writes a day for 5 years for 30x endurance.*

The Intel SSD 910 Series delivers accelerated storage performance, endurance and reliability critical to today’s data center performance applications. It includes Intel High Endurance Technology and optimized multi-level cell (MLC) 25-nanometer NAND flash memory, that allows up to 10 full drive writes a day for 5 years, or a 30x endurance improvement* over its standard MLC-based flash products, for a cost-effective storage solution.

The Intel SSD 910 is PCIe-based and offers an easy-to-install, seamless post-deployment server storage upgrade that requires no changes to existing server design. It can be used in storage tiering and caching of hot files for high-performance processing and access to mission-critical data. One Intel 910 SSD can replace multiple 15K rpm hard disk drives (HDDs) to not only save on space and power consumption, but also improve sequential performance and storage scalability and reduce latencies. It is built using an Intel controller and Intel SSD management firmware. The firmware is optimized for less wear and includes NAND error reduction and system error management.

“The Intel SSD 910 Series is a complete solution that delivers on all fronts: high performance, endurance and reliability, making it ideal for replacing I/O-intensive HDDs,” said Roger Peene, director of data center SSD marketing for the Intel Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group. “As a leader in SSD technology, data center IT professionals can have confidence in a tier-one, easy-to-install SSD solution backed by Intel quality, reliability and technical support.”

“Supermicro works closely with leading technology companies so we can offer our customers Data Center Optimized (DCO) server solutions with the highest performance and highest efficiency,” said Tau Leng, general manager of High Performance Computing at Super Micro Computer Inc. “With the Intel SSD 910, server systems can achieve higher levels of CPU utilization to take advantage of increased processing power from advanced products like the Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2600 Series. This is yet another example of working with Intel to test and qualify products, so we can lower our customers’ total cost of ownership and reduce their time-to-market.”

The Intel SSD 910 Series expands Intel’s offerings for data center applications with its first entry in the 900 family of its highest-performing, PCIe-based SSDs. The Intel SSD 900 Family joins Intel’s other high-volume SSD solutions for the data center including the Intel 700 SSD Family of SATA-based SSDs with High Endurance Technology and the Intel SSD 300 Family of SATA SSDs for a broad range of server and storage applications.

Performance measures of the Intel SSD 910 Series 800GB drive include 2 gigabytes-per-second (GB/s) sustained sequential reads and 1GB/s sequential writes; up to 180,000 4K random read Input-Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) and 75,000 4K random write IOPS. It comes in 400GB and 800GB capacities. Samples are now available for data center customers to begin quality and validation cycles. General production availability is scheduled for mid-2012.

Pricing for the Intel SSD 910 Series is $1,929 for the 400GB capacity and $3,859 for 800GB. It comes with a 5-year limited warranty. See full warranty details at: www.intel.com/support/ssdc/hpssd/sb/CS-029645.htm

*Based on 8K random writes and comparing Intel HET SSD solutions to SSD solutions based on standard Intel MLC NAND flash memory.

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Storage networks provide several unique benefits over direct attached storage including:

• Increased throughput
• Improved flexibility
• Greater scalability
• Centralized management
• Multi-host clustering

While storage networking – the use of a shared storage and communications infrastructure – has been around for some time, it became increasingly popular with the advent of the Fibre Channel (FC) standard in the early to mid-1990s. Since then FC has been the predominant shared storage network protocol in use… that is, until the IP SCSI (iSCSI) storage networking protocol was developed in the early 2000’s.

The FC and iSCSI protocols both use an updated version of the original SCSI protocol adopted in the mid 1980’s for directly attaching storage devices to individual computing resources. Even so, both Storage Area Networking (SAN) standards use different methods of transmitting these SCSI commands between the computing resources and the storage resources. This paper provides an overview of the iSCSI protocol and concepts, as they pertain to the Dell EqualLogic PS Series of virtual storage arrays, for storage administrators with FC storage experience.

Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is another storage protocol for carrying SCSI commands, and has features similar to both FC and iSCSI. However, FCoE requires additional features such as Data Center Bridging (DCB) and 10 Gb Ethernet to properly support it and detailed discussion of these concepts are outside of the scope of this paper. This paper will focus on the similarities and differences between FC and EqualLogic iSCSI  SAN concepts.

While some of the concepts are similar for both FC and iSCSI protocols, there are differences in terminology and capability that must be understood to successfully design and manage an iSCSI solution such as the Dell EqualLogic PS Series SAN. The goal of this paper is not necessarily to convince anyone that is well entrenched in a FC storage environment into migrating to iSCSI, but simply to help those that are considering the move, or have already made that decision, and to enable a smooth adoption of EqualLogic iSCSI.

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The RamSan-80 is Texas Memory Systems’ first integrated solution combining RamSan hardware and application server software released as the result of a recent partnership between TMS and NEVEX, a Toronto-based developer of application optimized caching software. The eMLC-based PCIe Flash is an affordable card that can be used with a wide range of servers. It offers organizations a fast, direct connection to memory resources that minimizes latency issues caused by disk or RAID controllers, network protocols, switches, as well as additional hardware and software involved in both NAS and SAN topologies. NEVEX CacheWorks optimizes virtual application performance and leverages the Windows memory cache to make better use of existing storage capacity, allowing I/O-intense applications to run up to 5X faster.

“Test results clearly demonstrated that this new hardware-software combination was able to supercharge the performance of VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual applications with impressive IOPS and sustain throughput for even the most data-intense business environments,” said Steven Lamb, NEVEX CEO. “We were pleased to work with TMS to develop an integrated solution that enables organizations to reduce their storage latency with Flash performance and avoid the costs traditionally associated with such systems. Caching to Flash on the server is a revolutionary approach to the way data is stored.”

“The RamSan-80 is an eMLC alternative to SLC Flash, designed for applications that do not require the same write endurance. It operates at industry-leading low latency (~30 µs), similar to the SLC-based RamSan-70 PCIe card but at a fraction of the cost per capacity. It’s an ideal solution that delivers leading-edge business value at an incredible ROI,” said Dan Scheel, President of Texas Memory Systems. “By integrating NEVEX’s application optimization cache software we are able to offer organizations fast performance and solid reliability that ensures applications do not face the latency issues inherent with other Flash and disk-based storage products on the market today. The RamSan-80 is a winning combination for our customers.”

According to George Crump, founder of Storage Switzerland, “The RamSan-80 brings a new level of reliability and speed to market with the RamSan eMLC card and the NEVEX application optimized software for virtualization. This bundle answers the demand we hear constantly from users when it comes to Flash implementation -- bring down the price and complexity.”

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3. VDI: Client- vs Server-side VDI

Founded in 1977, WattMaster has established itself as a leader in electronic controllers, growing its product line to include energy management systems and complete building automation systems along with OEM controls for many major HVAC manufacturers and industrial automation companies. With their rapid business expansion, the amount of digital files and corporate data has skyrocketed along with the increased requirement for data protection and disaster recovery.

“Our business has expanded dramatically over the past ten years, and as such, our digital assets have grown exponentially,” said WattMaster CEO Michael Hobbs. “To accelerate the development of new product lines while managing our business more efficiently, we needed to find a better way to protect our intellectual property data without squandering critical IT resources. Fortunately, we discovered the Actifio PAS platform – which carefully safeguards our data while more than doubling the productivity of our IT team and significantly reducing overall data management costs.”

WattMaster installed the Actifio PAS platform and within a few short weeks completely eliminated their backup software and the associated backup and restore windows while also implementing data replication for disaster recovery. This enabled WattMaster to solve three data management challenges with a single turnkey solution.

“With Actifio PAS installed, I can sleep better at night knowing that our data can be restored and brought back online quickly and efficiently,” said Carlo Vasalle, senior IT manager, WattMaster. “With its intuitive user interface, the PAS platform is so easy to use that any one of my technicians can easily restore and bring data back online within minutes or a few short hours at the most. It is a highly versatile appliance that solves multiple data management challenges simultaneously.”

The Actifio PAS platform is optimized for managing copies of production data, eliminating redundant silos of infrastructure and data management applications. By virtualizing the management and retention of data, Actifio transforms the need for multiple data silos and point tools deployed for backup, disaster recovery, business continuity, compliance, analytics and test and development into one SLA-driven, virtualized Protection and Availability storage device.

“Backup software as we know it, is dead – obsolete,” said Ash Ashutosh, founder and CEO of Actifio. “With organizations virtualizing servers in the data center, it is time to revisit the arcane practices of backup, disaster recovery and business continuity. By getting rid of the complex, expensive and inflexible collection of multiple point tools, organizations like WattMaster are rapidly embracing Actifio PAS to achieve the benefits of virtualization – enhanced business availability, vendor independence and improved utilization, all at a significantly lower cost.”

About WattMaster Controls, Inc.
WattMaster Controls, Inc. was founded in 1977, primarily to build electronic controllers for Tempmaster Corporation’s line of air distribution equipment and systems. The Company continued to expand its product line to include energy management systems, and later, complete building automation systems. WattMaster has also been very involved in the design and production of OEM controls for many major HVAC manufacturers and industrial automation companies. WattMaster continues to grow and expand its product lines to meet the demands of the rapidly changing HVAC industry.

About Actifio
Actifio, the Protection and Availability Storage (PAS) platform company, pioneered the industry’s first storage system optimized for managing copies of production data, eliminating redundant silos of IT infrastructure and data management applications. By introducing virtualization into data management, Actifio delivers an application-centric, SLA-driven solution that decouples the management of data from storage, network and server infrastructure and reduces costs by 10X. Actifio has helped liberate IT organizations and service providers of all sizes from vendor lock-in and the management challenges associated with exploding data growth.

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Highlights of the fast-start program include rapid configuration wizards and guides to simplify product installation and deployment, accompanied by new interfaces for value-add integrations. New sales playbooks have also been developed to help partners open new accounts and quickly ramp up their business. Additionally, DataCore has put the right people and organizational components in place to make the program a success. This includes a newly created centralized Business Development Team that helps guide, support, and work with larger system integrators, server and SSD vendors, and system builders looking to incorporate a storage hypervisor into their solution portfolio.

Organizations can realize tremendous value from virtualizing storage and achieving maximum use of existing investments, including direct-attached storage (DAS), storage area network (SAN) and SSDs. The new DataCore™ initiatives makes it simple for partners to use the SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor to add value to and leverage existing infrastructure, including popular server hardware made by Dell, Intel, Super Micro, Fujitsu, IBM, HP, and new SSD and flash memory devices.

DataCore is committed to working with partners to build an ecosystem of appliance-focused, value-add versions of its storage hypervisor that meet their individual customer needs. As a result, integrators and resellers can quickly see market opportunities and increase volume sales by offering complete, pre-configured, out-of-the-box storage management and SAN solutions, powered by SANsymphony™-V, which are easily to deploy in leading management platforms such as Microsoft System Center.

“By giving specialized appliance and system resellers the ability to expand their areas of expertise and service into the storage world, DataCore is enabling them to broaden their ongoing revenue streams,” said Chris Ilg, Director of Market Research, Infrastructure Channels and Alliances at IDC. “The ease of which the SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor integrates with top selling hardware – coupled with the support DataCore provides – simplifies the sales process and allows partners to easily introduce customers to the great productivity benefits and cost savings that a storage virtualization solution can bring to virtual desktops, virtual data centers and private clouds.”

SANsymphony-V provides open application program interfaces (APIs), supports application to backup facilities such as Microsoft VSS (volume shadow copy service), and Windows PowerShell advanced scripting support for even greater management system integration. Built-in wizards and powerful features include automated storage tiering that allows partners to easily customize solutions or add new technology or capabilities (any storage, SSD, flash cards) into the current mix, while also maximizing the price and performance value of current storage assets. With the new tools and SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor, pre-packaged appliance-like solutions can be easily created to meet a wide range of needs or combined to manage an entire storage infrastructure encompassing both virtual and physical assets.

DataCore also announced today a number of enhancements to its Global Partner Program, simplifying the entire sales process from initial contact to closing to ongoing product support and maintenance.

“Our volume resellers have unique challenges to address. With the new Partner Program enhancements and the tools now available, they can further expand revenue opportunities, while minimizing the time and effort required to market, sell, configure, deliver and install appliance-based solutions,” said Carlos M. Carreras, vice president of alliances and business development at DataCore. “We want to support them by making SANsymphony-V as attractive and simple as possible, enabling end-users to clearly see the great benefits that virtualization technologies and our storage hypervisor hold.”

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FlashSoft’s software is targeted for Windows, Linux and VMWare platforms, and will form the basis of a growing ecosystem of SSD-optimized software solutions from SanDisk and third party partners, enabling the configuration of complete solutions optimized for the specialized needs of enterprise and cloud customers.

Data center managers face ongoing challenges in achieving balanced application performance as the underlying system resources process data at different rates. As CPU speeds and memory bandwidth have grown rapidly, I/O bottlenecks have begun limiting application performance as data-starved CPUs must wait for overloaded I/O subsystems to deliver application data.

SSD-based caching solutions allow the most frequently accessed data to reside close to the CPU in high-performance flash memory, resulting in dramatic application performance increases. FlashSoft’s software solutions enable flash products, such as SanDisk’s Lightning® Enterprise SSDs and PCIe-based devices, to be configured as high-performance cache for their HDD storage. This allows customers to improve performance with smaller, more cost effective storage configurations and to deploy more virtual machines per server in virtualized environments. SanDisk’s strategy for serving enterprise and cloud customers includes offering optimized hardware and software solutions, as well as partnering with leading ISVs and solution providers to enable customers to mix and match devices and software to optimize for specialized application requirements.

“The acquisition of FlashSoft represents an important step in SanDisk’s strategy of delivering complete SSD and software solutions to enterprise storage customers,” said Sanjay Mehrotra, president and CEO of SanDisk. “FlashSoft’s software products complement our growing family of SAS, PCIe and SATA Enterprise SSDs, and we are pleased to welcome FlashSoft to the SanDisk family.”

The FlashSoft acquisition is expected to be neutral to SanDisk’s earnings in 2012 and accretive in 2013. Additional details of the acquisition were not released.

About FlashSoft
FlashSoft Corporation provides software solutions for Flash Virtualization™ that enable customers to increase application performance and virtualization capability while reducing hardware and operational costs. Its Active Data Management technology uses sophisticated algorithms to observe IO traffic and cache hot data on server-tier SSDs.

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"Partnering with Pivot3 adds a compelling offering into our existing VMware-based line-card by providing us with the opportunity to deliver simple and affordable desktop modernization to our mid-market VMware View solution providers,” said Chuck Bartlett, Vice President and General Manager of Advanced Infrastructure Solutions (AIS) at Tech Data Corporation. “Our View solution providers will be able to quickly deploy a virtual desktop infrastructure at an attractive price point to both the reseller and the customer.”

"The strength of Tech Data’s partner network and their focus on serving the desktop virtualization mid-market, such as state, local government and education, make them a perfect partner to distribute Pivot3 VDI solutions,” said, Olivier Thierry, CMO of Pivot3. “The mid-market has been clamoring for a View appliance-based solution that has enterprise class features and yet is simple, scalable and affordable.”

TSK a UK based company that delivers high performance workplaces for corporate organizations recently implemented the Pivot3 vSTAC VDI product. Mark Eades, IT manager at TSK commented, "We were very impressed with how well the Pivot3 vSTAC VDI installation went, making our VMware View 5.0 deployment both simple and affordable. It eliminated the complexities and skill levels normally imposed.”

In support of the this partnership, Pivot3 recently announced its VDI Channel Ready program consisting of many unique elements designed to maximize lead opportunity and qualification for Tech Data resellers and solution providers. Beyond the traditional online resources, there are unique online tools for VDI self-configuration and ROI analysis. Additionally, prospects can “Test Drive” a live, hosted 300 to 400 desktop scenario complete with workload simulation, login storms, scale-out of desktops and performance reporting. The Channel Ready program is also designed to eliminate channel conflict and enhance sell-though with all VMware and Microsoft license revenues flowing to the resellers. In addition, deal registration is available to partners.

Product Availability and Pricing
The Pivot3 vSTAC VDI is available now and has already garnered the interest of several leading enterprises across various industries, including healthcare, education, government and financial services. Customer pricing starts at $350 per desktop.

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The VDI-IOmark is a storage-centric benchmark that measures storage performance metrics with VDI workloads. By using I/O replay, the benchmark measures the I/O capabilities of storage systems under actual workloads, without costly server and application setup. VDI-IOmark recreates typical usage, including boot storms and steady state operations.

“We are pleased that Hitachi Data Systems is the first to announce their VDI-IOmark performance results,” said Russ Fellows, senior partner, Evaluator Group. “IT users can be confident that VDI-IOmark results provide an accurate and fair method for comparing storage systems that support VDI workloads. With these results, Hitachi Data Systems is demonstrating its leadership position in the VDI market by highlighting not only the high performance of Hitachi NAS Platform for VDI workloads, but also the excellent price/performance levels achieved. The tested configuration demonstrates the ability to support more than 1,500 standard VDI workers with a single, midrange Hitachi NAS controller. Scaling Hitachi NAS Platform up to 8 nodes offers further possibilities for supporting significantly larger and more I/O intensive VDI workloads.”

“Selecting the right storage architecture is essential to virtualized environments, especially as those environments evolve to include thousands of virtual machines, virtual desktops and business critical applications,” said Ravi Chalaka, vice president, Product and Solutions Marketing, Hitachi Data Systems. “Hitachi NAS Platform allows customers to gain cost-effective, scalable capacity and performance benefits through virtualization across server, storage and desktop infrastructures. This enables greater efficiencies across the data center, and allows more effective deployment and management of virtual IT environments.”

Hitachi NAS Platform for VDI Environments: VDI-IOmark Benchmark Highlights

Storage plays an important role in VDI deployments, and is often a determining factor for the performance, scalability and efficiency of the overall system. VDI deployments require a combination of features from storage designated to augment and enhance the unique VDI lifecycle and workloads encountered. Hitachi NAS Platform delivers the essential storage capabilities required for organizations looking to VDI for a centralized desktop application management solution that ensures data security while reducing IT administration costs generated from the explosion of personal productivity devices. The exceptional Hitachi NAS Platform VDI-IOmark results were achieved through scalable, high-performance capabilities that easily manage I/O storms while imposing no additional management overhead.

Customers benefit from the following features:

• More Virtual Desktops: The VDI-IOmark benchmark results indicate that Hitachi NAS Platform can support an industry leading 1,526 standard VDI workers and 768 knowledge VDI workers.
• Performance Efficiency: All data is dynamically and transparently cached, and array-based writable clones support solid-state disk (SSD) and spinning media for high-performance and storage efficiency.
• Space Saving Clones: BlueArc® JetClone delivers unlimited, space saving, file-level, writable clones allowing the desktop administrator to instantly clone VDI instances without impacting the I/O of the virtual machine or increasing storage capacity. BlueArc JetClone has storage-based clones coupled with 96GB read/write storage cache, which virtually eliminates the impact to back-end disk subsystems experienced during boot storms and login operations.
• Large File System Size: BlueArc SiliconFS 256TB file system for Hitachi NAS Platform is many times larger than other traditional NAS systems and aids in reducing the complexity of managing storage overhead providing administrators with virtually unlimited hosts per physical and virtual file server. Dedicating a virtual volume to a single host or group provides the administrator with fine-grained control over performance priorities and capacity allocation.
• Simplified Management: BlueArc JetCenter integrates with VMware vCenter and enables instantaneous or policy-based snapshots that may be used as recovery points allowing VDI instances to be restored within minutes. The number of snapshots supported is important and Hitachi NAS Platform provides virtually unlimited snapshots – approximately four times more than competing systems. Support of this software will be extended to the full Hitachi NAS Platform in the second quarter of calendar year 2012.

About VDI-IOmark

The VDI-IOmark organization was founded to develop fair and accurate methods for comparing vendor's storage products under various real-world workloads. The VDI-IOmark benchmark was specifically designed to test storage systems running VDI desktops and applications; enabling IT users to quickly and accurately characterize a storage system's performance while supporting a VDI workload.

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