Why Enterprises Should Consider Intelligent Infrastructure for VDI Deployments

The need to support remote workers is driving Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) adoption – a trend that has likely accelerated with the ongoing pandemic. Unfortunately, most conventional storage systems are not designed for highly virtualized environments and can’t keep pace with dynamic VDI demands. Rob Girard, Principal Technical Marketing Engineer, Tintri explains why enterprises should consider Intelligent Infrastructure for VDI deployments.

Faced with the global health crisis and a massive shift toward employees working at home or at other remote environments, enterprise leaders are looking to quickly deploy IT solutions that enable anywhere, anytime access for workers – securely and at-scale. Now, more than ever, mobility and the need to support remote workers is driving VDI and End-User Computing (EUC) adoption.

Unfortunately, most conventional storage is not designed for highly virtualized environments and can’t keep pace with VDI demands. Too often a poor user experience, performance degradation, complex deployment and scalability, and management challenges can stall VDI initiatives before any benefits are realized. 

Additionally, the shift toward remote work pushes IT departments to take on additional tasks such as monitoring network bandwidth and access controls to ensure employees can still do their jobs. This furthers strains existing infrastructure and forces IT to shuffle resources to meet changing demands.

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Standard Infrastructure vs Intelligent Infrastructure for VDI

Typically, people stick to what they know and feel comfortable with, especially if they believe it’s working. However, businesses are now finding out the hard way that most standard storage is just that – standard. It no longer works because it’s ill-suited to meet the demanding and fluctuating I/O requirements of VDI. 

As a result, IT wastes considerable time configuring, tuning, and optimizing storage, and squanders even more resources on unused storage “headroom” – to scale and support more users and address peak VDI loads.

Intelligent Infrastructure delivers a different VDI experience compared to standard infrastructure. It is intelligent because it combines advanced machine learning with a VM-centric, VM-integrated approach that eliminates decades-old constraints and complexities associated with managing storage parameters such as LUNs, volumes, and RAID configurations. 

Instead, Intelligent Infrastructure is “smart storage” that leverages AI-driven automation and analytics, providing an almost hands-off experience for storage experts, while being simple enough to offer a self-service experience for IT generalists and other non-storage experts. This simplified experience simultaneously provides freedom for different teams to manage storage footprints in VDI environments and flexibility for storage experts to work on strategic imperatives.

Here are the following ways in which Intelligent Infrastructure differs from standard infrastructure across manageability, performance, value, and protection in VDI environments:

Manageability: With standard infrastructure, the first VDI deployment must be set up correctly as it may be difficult to change configurations after the fact. Intelligent Infrastructure enables IT, staff members, without specific storage expertise to deploy systems in minutes and start running virtual desktops. End-to-end visibility combines with autonomous operations and intelligent analytics across the entire infrastructure and at the individual VM (desktop) level. This comprehensive yet granular level of insight and data collection enables IT to monitor and administer thousands or even hundreds of thousands of virtual desktops from one management console view.

Performance: Standard infrastructure must be configured with enough additional resources to handle any possible performance issues that may arise, such as boot storms, anti-virus scans, noisy neighbors, and more. Intelligent Infrastructure maintains consistent, predictable performance with a dedicated I/O lane for each virtual desktop that removes resource contention and latency. Additionally, Intelligent Infrastructure eliminates manual tuning by automatically balancing resources for every desktop with the dynamic quality of service (QoS). This avoids the performance degradation that can occur when VMs and applications compete for resources.

Value: As more organizations quickly transition toward an anytime, anywhere workforce, a VDI-optimized approach becomes more appealing and even essential. When issues arise unexpectedly, organizations can’t afford to spend countless hours on troubleshooting – especially with fewer IT staff members managing a greater number of virtual desktop users. Unlike standard infrastructure, Intelligent Infrastructure provides IT with industry-leading insight into per-VM and per-vDisk latency details, visualizing where bottlenecks reside: at the host, network or storage layer. For businesses, this means faster resolution and more predictable operations with minimal human intervention. Also, when adding new users, Intelligent Infrastructure provides AI-driven recommendations that advise admins where to place virtual desktops for optimal performance. This ultimately makes the best use of storage resources and avoids overprovisioning.

Protection: Unfortunately, the unprecedented number of remote users accessing internal resources can increase an organization’s exposure to risk and data loss. Ransomware has become a harsh reality, particularly for a growing number of unprepared, vulnerable businesses. In addition to enhanced security features, Intelligent Infrastructure enables IT to provide data protection for each desktop according to its own schedule and needs with VM-level snapshots. These instant, non-disruptive point-in-time copies also offer an easy way to stage and restore data at the VM level, avoiding disruptive LUN-level restores associated with standard storage Infrastructure.

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Achieving the Best Experience for Anytime, Anywhere Workforce

VDI teams can manage their own storage footprints with generalist-friendly administration that requires no specialized training – which means greater efficiencies for the organization. End-to-end visibility also provides intelligence – across the entire infrastructure or at the individual VM (desktop) level – and enables IT to identify the root cause of latency in seconds for any and all desktops.

By choosing Intelligent Infrastructure over standard infrastructure, organizations can experience several benefits for VDI including:

Simplified Operations and Reduced IT Burden: Intelligent Infrastructure is purpose-built to optimize VDI, so it simplifies, automates, and scales VDI environments while maintaining the ideal system and user performance. Intelligent monitoring and automation reduce the time required to manage thousands of desktops to just minutes-per-month versus hours or days. 

Ultimate User Experience: A differentiated user experience is a key to a successful VDI initiative. With Intelligent Infrastructure, desktop performance isolation, and autonomous operations create a frictionless end-user experience with consistent service levels that support greater productivity. Intelligent Infrastructure also empowers VDI teams with a game-changing experience that includes self-service control and eliminates thousands of hours of time-consuming storage configuration and tuning with self-optimizing systems.

Reduced Costs and Complexity: Intelligent Infrastructure enables organizations to grow VDI environments economically with precise, drive-level expansion or with large-scale system-level expansion to support hundreds or thousands of desktops. It also provides intelligent advice that enables the placement of virtual desktops across storage nodes for optimal capacity utilization and performance. Additionally, Intelligent Infrastructure drives precise, dynamic storage scaling for virtual desktops. It provides highly accurate resource projections up to 18 months in advance, based on capacity and performance needs, so organizations can eliminate wasted,

overprovisioned resources, and buy storage only as needed.

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Intelligent Infrastructure Can Drive Business Focus 

Intelligent Infrastructure scales and performs unlike anything else for VDI – and any other virtualized workload – resulting in a consistently reliable virtual desktop experience for line of business workers and developers alike. In today’s turbulent times, the last thing organizations want their remote workers to worry about is slow desktop performance. 

Apart from frontline workers who are directly working to address the pandemic, infrastructure professionals have perhaps the most important job of all – making sure that end users can be productive and not concern themselves with backend infrastructure. With Intelligent Infrastructure, your team can shift its focus from managing storage to managing strategic services and activities that drive business success.

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