Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., today announced that Hitachi NAS Platform, powered by BlueArc, has achieved exceptional benchmark results from VDI-IOmark testing based on the delivery of high-performance, scalable and file-based tools essential for managing Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployments. Hitachi NAS Platform has a superior ability to offload critical VDI functionality and delivers massive scalability and clustering capabilities. This is vital for organizations to drive operational efficiencies that further extend their investments in virtual environments, to reduce operational costs and to improve centralized management of enterprise virtual desktop implementations.

The VDI-IOmark is a storage-centric benchmark that measures storage performance metrics with VDI workloads. By using I/O replay, the benchmark measures the I/O capabilities of storage systems under actual workloads, without costly server and application setup. VDI-IOmark recreates typical usage, including boot storms and steady state operations.

“We are pleased that Hitachi Data Systems is the first to announce their VDI-IOmark performance results,” said Russ Fellows, senior partner, Evaluator Group. “IT users can be confident that VDI-IOmark results provide an accurate and fair method for comparing storage systems that support VDI workloads. With these results, Hitachi Data Systems is demonstrating its leadership position in the VDI market by highlighting not only the high performance of Hitachi NAS Platform for VDI workloads, but also the excellent price/performance levels achieved. The tested configuration demonstrates the ability to support more than 1,500 standard VDI workers with a single, midrange Hitachi NAS controller. Scaling Hitachi NAS Platform up to 8 nodes offers further possibilities for supporting significantly larger and more I/O intensive VDI workloads.”

“Selecting the right storage architecture is essential to virtualized environments, especially as those environments evolve to include thousands of virtual machines, virtual desktops and business critical applications,” said Ravi Chalaka, vice president, Product and Solutions Marketing, Hitachi Data Systems. “Hitachi NAS Platform allows customers to gain cost-effective, scalable capacity and performance benefits through virtualization across server, storage and desktop infrastructures. This enables greater efficiencies across the data center, and allows more effective deployment and management of virtual IT environments.”

Hitachi NAS Platform for VDI Environments: VDI-IOmark Benchmark Highlights

Storage plays an important role in VDI deployments, and is often a determining factor for the performance, scalability and efficiency of the overall system. VDI deployments require a combination of features from storage designated to augment and enhance the unique VDI lifecycle and workloads encountered. Hitachi NAS Platform delivers the essential storage capabilities required for organizations looking to VDI for a centralized desktop application management solution that ensures data security while reducing IT administration costs generated from the explosion of personal productivity devices. The exceptional Hitachi NAS Platform VDI-IOmark results were achieved through scalable, high-performance capabilities that easily manage I/O storms while imposing no additional management overhead.

Customers benefit from the following features:

• More Virtual Desktops: The VDI-IOmark benchmark results indicate that Hitachi NAS Platform can support an industry leading 1,526 standard VDI workers and 768 knowledge VDI workers.
• Performance Efficiency: All data is dynamically and transparently cached, and array-based writable clones support solid-state disk (SSD) and spinning media for high-performance and storage efficiency.
• Space Saving Clones: BlueArc® JetClone delivers unlimited, space saving, file-level, writable clones allowing the desktop administrator to instantly clone VDI instances without impacting the I/O of the virtual machine or increasing storage capacity. BlueArc JetClone has storage-based clones coupled with 96GB read/write storage cache, which virtually eliminates the impact to back-end disk subsystems experienced during boot storms and login operations.
• Large File System Size: BlueArc SiliconFS 256TB file system for Hitachi NAS Platform is many times larger than other traditional NAS systems and aids in reducing the complexity of managing storage overhead providing administrators with virtually unlimited hosts per physical and virtual file server. Dedicating a virtual volume to a single host or group provides the administrator with fine-grained control over performance priorities and capacity allocation.
• Simplified Management: BlueArc JetCenter integrates with VMware vCenter and enables instantaneous or policy-based snapshots that may be used as recovery points allowing VDI instances to be restored within minutes. The number of snapshots supported is important and Hitachi NAS Platform provides virtually unlimited snapshots – approximately four times more than competing systems. Support of this software will be extended to the full Hitachi NAS Platform in the second quarter of calendar year 2012.