www.xiostorage.com

X-IO Technologies

Storage in a VDI Ecosystem

Peter Selin (@pjselin) Principal Architect

X-IO Technologies

Benefits of VDI

2

Flexible desktop environment Better/easier desktop management Desktop by template Security and compliance BYOD support M&A Secure outsourcing

X-IO Technologies

Risks of VDI

3

Not performance –vs- capacity Reliability and redundancy Deploying and expanding

desktop pools Redefining “steady-state”

operations

X-IO Technologies

Virtual Desktop Performance Requirements

4

ClientDevices

Storage

AggregateIO

Sequential I/O Processing

Random I/O Processing

20 – 100 IOPS ea

Not Hundreds of IOPSNot Thousands of IOPS10’s of Thousands of IOPS

X-IO Technologies

Database, BI, VDI and Server Virtualizationand ultimately Cloud Computing all face a major performance

bottleneck that must be broken

The Storage Bottleneck

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X-IO Technologies

CPU performance has increased over 2 million times since 1987 Disk drive performance has only increased 11 times This creates a huge bottleneck in the data center

The storage performance

gap

The Imbalance in the Data Center

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X-IO Technologies8

The Games Vendors Play for VDI Sizing

Beware, each vendor will conceal its performance weakness in workload assumptions. Here are a

couple of comparisons to consider: How many persistent VDI user connections can the POD support?

Some Vendors assumes 500 max and 1500 non-persistent while X-IO assumes all users are persistent users

What is your estimate for the average number of IOPS per VDI user? Some Vendors assumes 8 IOPS per VDI user while X-IO uses 20 IOPS per VDI

What is your estimate for the max VDI user storage footprint? Some Vendors assumes 2GB per VDI users while X-IO uses 20GB

How many simultaneous VDI boots can your system support? If access to the VDI solution is disrupted and then restored, what is the POD RTO

(return to operations) time frame. This is an important question to ask, Some Vendors do not provide an answer

What are the tuning parameters for workload management? Each X-IO ISE is independent and scales linearly with additional units

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Data Requirements for Configuration

9

Desktop Write Cache File

Area

8GB/Desktop

≈42GB/

Desktop≈100% Write

IOLatency

Sensitive

User Data Files Area

50%/50% Read/Write

(Est)File Share Latency

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What Data are you going to store?Distribution of Capacity vs Performance

10

Data with small capacity requirements, and large

performance requirements

Data with large capacity requirements, and low

performance requirements

Small enough to fit in today’s capacity SSDs

economically (and fast)

(>18,000 IOPS/TB)

+6TB HDDs make storing large amounts of data

economical (and SLOW)(<16-30 IOPS/TB)

WebCaching Servers, Memcached, In-Memory

Datasets, etc

Increasing Capacity Requirements (Bigger = Cheaper $/TB)

Incr

easi

ng P

erfo

rman

ce R

equi

rem

ents

(I

OP

S/T

B)

Object Storage, CDN, deploy images, Backup/Archive

X-IO Technologies

XenDesktop

What Data are you going to store?Distribution of Capacity vs Performance

11

Data with small capacity requirements, and large

performance requirements

Data with large capacity requirements, and low

performance requirements

Small enough to fit in today’s capacity SSDs

economically (and fast)

(>18,000 IOPS/TB)

+4TB HDDs make storing large amounts of data

economical (and SLOW)(<16-30 IOPS/TB)

WebCaching Servers, Memcached, In-Memory

Datasets, etc

Increasing Capacity Requirements (Bigger = Cheaper $/TB)

Incr

easi

ng P

erfo

rman

ce R

equi

rem

ents

(I

OP

S/T

B)

Test/Dev

Exchange

Virtual HaDoop

OracleSQL

SecurityActive

DirectoryAuthentication

Server

File Servers

Web Server

Applications Server

Bus. Intelligence

Data Warehouse

SharePoint

EOM Processing

XenApp

Object Storage, CDN, deploy images, Backup/Archive

X-IO Technologies

What Data are you going to store?Tier 1 Applications are in the middle

12

Increasing Capacity Requirements (Bigger = Cheaper $/TB)

HDD

Hybrid

Incr

easi

ng P

erfo

rman

ce R

equi

rem

ents

(I

OP

S/T

B)

X-IO Technologies

ISE: The Advantage of Modular Scale

15

Adding Drives does nothing for the Storage Array “Head’s” Performance

(…until you add another one…)New Technology Integration?

Array ControllerArray Controller

Array ControllerArray Controller

Ban

dwid

th

Ban

dwid

th

Ban

dwid

th

Ban

dwid

th

Storage Controllers:………………..Storage Cache:…………..…………Number of HDDs:…………………..Usable Space:………………………Total IOPS Potential:……………….Total Kwatts/Hr & (Amps) Req:……Total Rackspace:……………………

26 GB4028 TB~9,000.700 & 3.63u

412 GB8056 TB~18,0001.4 & 7.26u

618 GB12084 TB~27,0002.1 & 10.89u

824 GB160112 TB~36,0002.8 & 14.412u

1030 GB200140 TB~45,0003.5 & 1815u

ISE

ISE

ISE

ISE

ISE

1236 GB230x HDD & 10x SSD160 TB+100,0004.2 & 21.618u

ISE

ISE 700 Series

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The trouble with traditional storage?

Blue=ThroughputYellow=Access Time

…A full disk is a slow disk.

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Write Cache Files

100% Write IOPS

X-IO Technologies

ISE Manager Suite

19

ISE Pool Management

ISE Performance

ISE Health

X-IO Technologies

Summary

22

= $

Warranty costs can dramatically increase the

cost of the system

ISE Systems include a 5-Yr Hardware warranty for free

ISE maintains performance as capacity is consumed,

requiring less hardware

http://www.x-io.com/vdi-er

X-IO Technologies

Reference Architecture

23

X-IO Technologies

Reference Architecture

24

X-IO Technologies

References

25

X-IO Xchange Marketplace - http://www.citrix.com/ready/en/x-io-technologies

X-IO Virtual Desktop Solutions - http://www.x-io.com/solutions/desktop-virtualization/

X-IO 750-Seat Citrix VDI Reference Architecture - http://go.xiostorage.com/l/7112/2014-02-20/n2kf9

Value Proposition and Use Cases

X-IO Technologies

Hyper ISE = up to 300,000 IOPS with 3U 14.4 TBLess than 2ms Response Times

Reduce database query times up to 20X Increase virtual server consolidation by 5X Enable virtual desktop deployments

supporting thousands of VDIs on a single Hyper ISE

ISE In Virtualized Environments

Price/Performance/Capacity Leader

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The ISE In Virtualized Environments

“X-IO was the only vendor who was stressing the importance of IOPS, everyone else kept avoiding the subject and focused on capacity”

“It took the students 40 minutes after typing their password to have the My Computer icon appear on their desktop. The class was almost over by the time the login finally completed”

“Now it’s a minute”

“Once we hit about 100 users logging in at one time, the system would completely freeze and no one else could log in.”

“Now we have our virtual desktops configured to log in on boot up. All 270 systems across all campuses are up and running in less than four minutes. We set up the LUNs, added the VMs and really haven’t touched our Hyper ISE since.”

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The ISE In Virtualized Environments

- 3 Win2K8 Servers

- 32 Cores

- 128 GB

- 90 VMs- Test Run includes:

- All 90 VMs starting up

- Random SQL IO

- Sequential SQL IO

- VM Teardown

- Repeat randomly per VM

“We were driving the servers to the max but we were barely putting a dent in the Hyper ISE. It seems the more we threw at it, the faster it got. XIO has become one of my top tier solutions. ”

David Hayes Senior Director, Microsoft Partner Solutions Center

90 VM Boot

Storm

X-IO “Storage Hot Spot Analyzer” Screen Image

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Industry Recognition

"Microsoft Partner Solutions Center hardware-testing projects are designed to put maximum stress on systems so that customers can have the utmost confidence in

deploying them in support of business-critical functions. In such a demanding context, XIO Hyper ISE performed beyond our wildest expectations. We estimate it would

take an increase of workload by a factor of 10 to push the Hyper ISE we tested to its actual performance threshold.“

David Hayes, Director of the Microsoft Partner Solutions Center:

“The Hybrid ISE wins the coveted Breakthrough Product of the Year thanks to its patented Continuous Adaptive Data Placement (CADP) feature, which moves

data from hard disk to SSD on an as-needed basis, avoiding hot spots and providing unprecedented performance.”

Jason Bovberg, Senior Editor for Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Magazine

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Thank you

Peter Selin(312) 259-9444

Peter.Selin@X-IO.com