Storage industry innovator X-IO Technologies today announced that its Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) performance storage array has been verified as part of the Citrix Ready VDI Capacity Program for Citrix XenDesktop. The Citrix Ready VDI Capacity Program is designed to address the specific storage needs of customers who have implemented or are thinking about implementing VDI using XenDesktop.

The Citrix Ready VDI Capacity Program helps guide customers through their VDI storage needs. VDI presents multiple types of data, each with its own unique requirements in the storage infrastructure tier. Storage copes with these requirements by using various hardware- and software-based approaches, some of which can be combined into hybrid solutions.

X-IO’s zero-touch ISE array completed a rigorous verification process as part of the program; this verification process enables Citrix storage partners to test their solutions against a turnkey VDI Capacity test environment that contains the compute resources necessary to generate a 750-user reference XenDesktop deployment. Successful solutions demonstrate the appropriate amount of storage performance and capacity combined with a cost-effective design. Partners whose technology satisfies the test criteria are determined to be certified as part of the Citrix Ready VDI Capacity Program, verified for 750 users.

“X-IO has satisfactorily completed the testing requirements to join the Citrix Ready VDI Capacity Program,” said Greg Fox, director, Citrix Ready program at Citrix. “Through this program, we are working with our storage partners to help provide our joint customers with guidance in choosing storage solutions for their XenDesktop VDI deployments. By taking part in the program, X-IO is helping customers make informed product purchasing decisions.”

X-IO’s ISE enterprise storage arrays are frequently deployed in large XenDesktop environments where performance is critical and cost-per-desktop is a closely monitored project success metric. Knowing that VDI workloads can have a variety of performance profiles, X-IO approached this testing with the understanding that Citrix XenDesktop FlexCast write cache would carry a high degree of critical write I/O and need to be at one-millisecond latency -- perfect for the highly optimized cache and back-end performance of the ISE.

Unlike traditional enterprise storage arrays, which must overprovision capacity to meet VDI performance requirements, the X-IO ISE precisely balances performance and capacity -- in both its 700 and 200 lines -- to ensure that large-scale XenDesktop VDI implementations have all the performance they require for heavy-workload users, and all the capacity those users require both for boot images and for user data storage, with no excess provisioning. It’s the optimal solution.

“As a member of the Citrix Ready program, we are able to offer intelligent solutions that combine X-IO with XenDesktop, demonstrate strong out-of-the-box performance, and offer a highly productive desktop experience,” said Blair Parkhill, VP of Marketing, X-IO. “We tested our system at maximum capacity because our customers tell us their initial VDI implementations failed as they added more desktops to the infrastructure and saw increasing amounts of Help desk escalations and poor user experiences. We developed the ISE to deliver top-line performance without the drop-off that traditional storage arrays experience in hosted desktop architectures. Our new Citrix Ready verification clearly demonstrates our plans to work closely with trusted partners, through the Citrix partner ecosystem, and provide the highest-quality experience possible for our customers.”