UPDATE: We’re excited to announce that we’ve scored highest in the VDI use case once again, with the recently published 2019 Gartner Critical Capabilities for Solid-State Arrays report.
We are truly honored and humbled at Pure Storage to have achieved the highest scores for the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) use case in the 2018 Gartner Critical Capabilities for Solid-State Arrays.*
Since the inception of Pure, we have been serving organizations large and small in their deployments of both Citrix® Virtual Desktops and VMware Horizon®. Why have customers come to rely on running their Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) on Pure? When it comes to VDI, there are 5 pillars for success to consider:
The upside is all five pillars are reasonably well understood and attainable. The downside is that legacy and even some modern storage solutions are not capable of delivering on all 5, or even 3 or 4, so these pillars can become pain points.
So what do you need to consider when evaluating a storage infrastructure for your VDI deployment?
End-user experience
This is by far the most important criteria. Will your end-users receive the same experience as they would with their corporate devices like a PC or laptop? Will booting up all your virtual desktops or performing maintenance/upgrades to the environment negatively impact the overall user experience? Pure’s 100% enterprise NVMe FlashArray//X systems deliver unprecedented performance. What this means is that your virtual desktops can be ensured exceptional performance at consistent sub-millisecond latency. And with superb density, the FlashArray allows you the benefit of consolidating other mission-critical workloads (e.g. databases) on the same system without impacting performance whatsoever.
Highly resilient
It doesn’t matter if you can deliver all the performance in the world if you don’t have a highly available infrastructure. For instance, bringing down your environment to perform maintenance or upgrades impact the business from delivering value, and certainly affects staff productivity which has additional cost implications to the organization. Pure FlashArray is designed with no single point of failure and offers proven 99.9999% uptime across its entire fleet of arrays even through firmware upgrades, capacity expansion, and generational controller upgrades.
Management simplicity
One of Pure’s main design criteria is simplicity. The set-and-forget ease has enabled many IT teams with little to no storage expertise to effortlessly manage the Pure all-flash arrays. With FlashStack™ converged infrastructure, in partnership with Cisco, customers can confidently deploy a pre-tested and validated reference architecture with Citrix Virtual Desktops or VMware Horizon. Many have started small and scaled to thousands of virtual desktops without impact to user experience. Best of all with FlashStack, you can independently scale compute and capacity resources based on your application requirements.
Data Security
We’ve all heard the horror stories of employees losing their corporate devices that contained highly sensitive data. That’s one of the worst company nightmares. VDI certainly helps reduce that risk since no data sits on the employee’s device. Pure Storage’s built-in security features provide native AES-256 bit encryption-at-rest built-in and are FIPS 140-2 certified, reducing the chance of data loss, while additional data protection capabilities including backup, DR, and copy data management give customers further peace of mind.
Lower Cost
No doubt all businesses care about cost. Pure helps organizations reduce the cost of infrastructure. Starting with built-in data efficiency, Pure offers industry-leading data reduction of typically 10:1 for VDI due the highly reducible nature of the workload. With data deduplication, Pure set-offs a cascading chain reaction of cost-savings benefits, including less storage capacity, lower power, and cooling costs, and potentially smaller data center footprint. Add in Pure’s Evergreen™ ownership model, customers can non-disruptively upgrade to the latest hardware and software. And with the newest Evergreen Storage Service (ES2), Pure offers OPEX-based Storage-as-a-Service for customers looking to consume infrastructure like the public cloud, but on-premises.
We look forward to helping you achieve VDI success with Pure Storage.
A couple examples of organizations that realized the pillars of success are Judson Independent School District and John Muir Health. You can also check the many stories of how our customers across industries are reaping the benefits of VDI on Pure.
Source: Gartner Critical Capabilities for Solid-State Arrays, Valdis Filks, John Monroe, Joseph Unsworth, Santhosh Rao, 6 August, 2018.
This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as a part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Pure Storage. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including and warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
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