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Atlantis Computing

Accelerate and Simplify Citrix XenDesktop Deployments with Atlantis ILIO

Atlantis ILIO is a VDI storage and performance optimization software solution that makes virtual desktops more affordable, reducing implementation risks and addressing key barriers to market adoption: storage cost and user acceptance. Atlantis Computing software complements Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp solutions by either eliminating or reducing the amount of storage needed, and boosting the performance of virtual desktops. Atlantis ILIO fundamentally changes the economics and performance characteristics of VDI deployments by intelligently optimizing how the Windows operating system interacts with storage.

On October 17 2012, Atlantis Computing won the Citrix Ready® Best of Synergy Award in the desktop category. The winners were announced at Citrix Synergy in Barcelona on, Tuesday, October 16 at the Welcome Reception. 

 Atlantis ILIO: Citrix XenDesktop Storage Reduction and Performance Acceleration

Atlantis ILIO accelerates Citrix XenDesktop deployments by lowering the cost of virtual desktops to below that of a PC, making virtual desktops perform faster than a PC and making it possible for customers to deploy VDI without compromising security. Atlantis ILIO is a unique and innovative VDI storage optimization solution that fundamentally changes the economics and performance characteristics of Citrix XenDesktop by intelligently optimizing how Microsoft Windows operating systems interact with VDI storage. With Atlantis ILIO, customers can simplify VDI enabling persistent desktops with up to 90% less storage and making it possible to use any type of storage for VDI including SAN, NAS, or local disk (SATA, SAS, SSD), and or non-persistent desktops with no storage or SSDs.

Simplify XenDesktop Architecture

The inherent flexibility of Citrix XenDesktop allows system architects to design solutions tailored to meet the needs of multiple distinct user communities. This flexibility is delivered at a cost of increased complexity, which can create operational challenges and slow deployment. Atlantis ILIO allows system architects to simplify XenDesktop deployments, without compromising performance and without increasing the cost of storage needed to support the environment. System architects can leverage ILIO’s advanced deduplication capabilities to create persistent desktops for all users with the same, or better, storage characteristics than can be achieved using pooled desktops.

Scaling XenDesktop Storage

Growing a conventional Citrix XenDesktop environment requires significant additional investment in storage. Citrix XenDesktop supports the use of OS streaming to provide personalized non-persistent virtual desktops based on a single master image, this significantly reduces the storage requirements compared to persistent virtual desktops but still generate a tremendous amount of IO traffic. Conventional SAN/NAS storage arrays can only deliver the data throughput (measured in IOPS) needed to support VDI by increasing storage drives and controllers well beyond that needed to deliver to the required disk space. More virtual desktops require more storage; it is as simple as that. 

With Atlantis ILIO, all duplicate data requests are served by the Atlantis ILIO software virtual appliance and are never seen by the storage infrastructure, eliminating the need to spend more on storage controllers and their associated disks. As more desktops are added to Atlantis ILIO, inline deduplication of data becomes more and more efficient, speeding up virtual desktops and decreasing the amount of storage capacity consumed per virtual desktop.

Integrating Atlantis ILIO into a Citrix XenDesktop Deployment

The Atlantis ILIO software virtual machine is deployed on each VDI or XenApp server on the same hypervisor used by the virtual desktops to process storage IO traffic locally and perform inline deduplication of virtual desktop images. Atlantis ILIO runs in a dedicated virtual machine that is logically placed between the Virtual Desktop VMs and the storage for the Virtual Desktops. Atlantis ILIO scales out easily to add more desktop capacity by adding either an Atlantis ILIO virtual appliance to each virtual desktop host that is deployed without the need to add any additional storage.

Citrix and Atlantis ILIO Resources

 

Products (2)

  • Atlantis ILIO Diskless VDI

    Atlantis ILIO Diskless VDI is a storage optimization software that eliminates storage from Citrix XenDesktop pooled VDI deployments.

  • Atlantis ILIO

    Atlantis ILIO™ software virtual machine allows customers to reduce the cost of Citrix implementations by cutting the amount of storage normally required and enabling the use of ...