VDI at Less Than $200 Per Desktop; Interview with Atlantis Computing CEO Part II

For some time, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) promised great benefits but suffered from performance and cost hiccups. Companies going with VDI got stuck in the pilot phase as the disappointing realities of up to $2,000 per desktop coupled with slow performance hit them hard.

Then along came diskless VDI. Driven by customer demand for a better VDI solution, Atlantis Computing developed an architecture that eliminated the need for disk storage. The result of this new diskless VDI architecture was superior performance and the lowest cost per desktop of any other VDI architecture.

In the second part of our interview series, Atlantis Computing CEO Bernard Harguindeguy discusses how diskless VDI fared against several other VDI architectures in testing conducted with Cisco Systems. He also shares how several companies have lowered costs to below $200 per desktop while significantly boosting performance, including reducing boot times to under 30 seconds.

Ben: What was the impetus for this new version of the [Atlantis ILIO] software?

Bernard: A lot of our customers drove us to this architecture, not only for the performance and the upfront storage-cost benefits, but they were paying a lot for maintaining storage: swapping out failed disks, the rack space, the power and cooling to support the storage for VDI. What we've heard from analysts is anywhere from 2 to 4 times the opexOPEX cost of upfront capex CAPEX that you had to pay for the storage.

Ben: That's a significant cost. So, going to a diskless VDI architecture with Atlantis ILIO eliminates that?

Bernard: Yes.

Ben: How does it do it?

Bernard: We published a white paper with Cisco where we validated this architecture and did testing at the Cisco facilities. The objective of it was test out the architecture but also look at the price performance of this relative to other Cisco validated designs, which kind of spans the spectrum: local SAS, FlexPod with NetApp, Vblock with EMC storage. And what we found was, when we looked at the cost per desktop, this architecture delivered the best in terms of price performance and was also the lowest cost per desktop.

Source: Atlantis Computing

This is a simplified version of one of the tables that's in [the white paper]. There are seven different VDI architectures here.

On the left is your diskless VDI. This is where that number below $200 per desktop comes from. And where we generated 44,000 IOPS per server, which translates into 300-plus IOPS per desktop.

Now, numbers two and three are other versions of Atlantis ILIO architectures that use either local SAS drives or local SSD drives. And then four is a local disk-based architecture without Atlantis ILIO. You'll see that there are fewer IOPS in that type of an architecture. So your cost per IOP goes way up.

Then five and six are kind of a traditional SATA or NAS-based with FlexPod and EMC Vblock. And then the last one is using a PCI RAM drive with HP server with Fusion-io. So, that gives you an idea of the spectrum of how it compares to other VDI architectures.

Ben: Is the $200 the magic number customers are looking for?

Bernard:  We have a lot of large customers, including existing customers, who read the white paper and saw that table and said, "I want that as my VDI architecture based on that number--$200 per desktop--and based on the concept of eliminating all of the opex OPEX costs." So, this doesn't even factor in OPEX.

Ben: Do you have any sense what they're paying right now per desktop?

Bernard:  I'd say on the low end you're talking $700 to $1,000 per desktop using enough shared storage to have acceptable performance. We know of customers who are well in excess of $2,000. And those are on a large scale, as well--so that's not just small deployments paying that much.

One of these was a smaller Swiss bank that was paying over $2,000 per desktop just in storage. So that gives you an idea of what they're paying.

There's a wide variation. And a lot of the early VDI projects, especially the persistent desktop ones which have 20, 50 or even 80 gigs of storage per desktop, are well into over $1,000 and all the way up to the low $2,000s.

Ben: In terms of performance, 300 IOPS is more performance than they're probably seeing now, even on a traditional desktop. Can you comment about that?

Bernard: Performance will range anywhere from 75 to 150 IOPS with a 7200 RPM IDE drive.
But if you ask people or go to a NetApp or EMC calculator about how much IOPS you need per desktop, it'll say anywhere from 4 to 25.

Ben: Those are the numbers I see most often. So, is the reason you're able to boot these images so fast because of more IOPS?

Bernard: Exactly. I think what a lot of customers realize is, if you give the end user a desktop that's slower than their previous physical PC, none of the users will want to switch to VDI. That causes a big problem. We have several customers who have experienced this.

CBRE is a good example, where they tried VDI three times. The first two times the performance was really bad and VDI had a bad reputation among the users. Then they inserted Atlantis between the existing storage and the virtual desktops for a third generation. Now they've got better than physical performance. That made people actually want to switch to VDI.

So when you get a desktop that moves three or four times as fast as your physical PC, it's kind of nice, especially if you combine it with a bring-your-own PC or use-it-on-your-iPad kind of bonus.

Ben: It becomes a no-brainer from a technical and a financial perspective.

Bernard: That's what VDI's been missing. There are a tremendous number of VDI deals that are kind of stuck at the pilot phase or 500-user deployments in companies that want to deploy 5,000 or 10,000 users. The reason for the holdup is the cost per desktop is higher than a physical PC.

So, no CFO is going to sign off on replacing your physical PCs with something that's more expensive. Plus, no end users want to use something that's slower than what they already have. So by flipping that equation, it makes VDI much more palatable to both the financial side of things and the users.

We saw CBRE, for example, go from 500 to 4,000 users very quickly after they solved the performance and cost problem. After installing Atlantis, they increased the number of users on their storage system by 6 times without adding any storage. And the desktops got much faster to the point where they booted in less than 30 seconds.

It's a very, very snappy kind of desktop as opposed to their previous couple minutes logon time. Diskless VDI is a whole other level of performance than what was previously possible.

In Part I of this interview series, we discuss how Atlantis Computing optimizes storage for VDI deployments by actually eliminating the need for conventional disk storage.

In Part III of this interview series with Atlantis Computing's CEO Bernard Harguindeguy, we will go in depth by examining a case study of a large telecom firm using diskless VDI to enhance performance, lower capex and opex costs, provide endpoint device options, and more quickly integrate new employees and acquired companies.