Citrix is Slow No More!

For those of us that have been involved with Citrix since 1995, we have heard this more times than we can count… this year! We have written several Blogs on this subject, all of them focused on the 11 touch points (Hypervisor, SAN, network, AD, etc.) that can cause Citrix environments to suffer in performance. OK, so let’s say that you have addressed all of those touch points, and your Citrix environment is pretty well tuned. You are getting 30 second or so LOGINs and 5-8 second application launches. This is a good average for Citrix environments, but you want and need more, is there a way to do that. YES!

Staying within native Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop before the addition of third party products, Whitehat see's logon times around 20 seconds.  Going beyond that...

Atlantis Computing’s unique In-Memory Storage technology forms the foundation for all Atlantis ILIO products. In virtual desktop environments, Atlantis ILIO delivers better-than-PC performance while enabling linearly scalable VDI and XenApp environments that are fast and easy to deploy and do not require any changes to existing desktop images. In virtual server environments, Atlantis ILIO delivers higher performance VMs at an increased density per data center rack that scale predictably, use significantly less storage, and fully support the high availability and disaster recovery capabilities that server environments require. Here’s how it works:

This product is incredible because it solves the two biggest problems with VDI implementations with one low-cost solution. For more information on this outstanding solution, visit http://www.atlantiscomputing.com/products/overview. This solutions also works for XenApp users as well.

First of all, because of its powerful in-line de-duplication capability, ILIO save up to 99% of the disk space required to host VDI desktops. Think about it. They are almost completely identical, so they are the perfect candidate for this technology. This cost savings in storage space easily pays for the solution.

Second, the performance increase is like icing on the cake. With 5000 IOPS available instead of 30-40 per desktop, magic happens. Instead of 30-45 second LOGINs, we are seeing 5-8 seconds. Instead of 5-8 second application launches, they are instantaneous. Add to that, everthing in the applications just snaps. It is absolutely intoxicating. We are now showing this to customers and people are clamoring to get it. VDI is no longer the “penalty to make things easier for IT…,” it is the performance superchargers to make happy users.

VDI has been slow to take off for 3 reasons… high cost of Microsoft VDI licensing, high storage and server costs, and sluggish performance. This solution, and others like it in the market, solve 2 of those 3 issues completely. It’s a whole new world out there for VDI.