Analysis

posted on 13 June 2008 15:45

LeftHand Networks sees a big opportunity in working with VMware to reduce storage requirements for desktop virtual machines in data center storage.

The notion is that there may well be a mass move to virtual desktops in the enterprise IT estate because it then makes it much easier to manage the thousands of PCs around an enterprise. With VMware's Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) each PC would simply run a hypervisor plus virtual machine (VM) containing the O/S and app suite needed.

Starting up a PC would mean booting from the data center SAN by downloading, installing and running the VM and its contained apps. If the PC became corrupted, infected with malware, or needed updating then all the data center staff need to do is wipe everything out on it, re-install the hypervisor and VM in a virtually instant fix.

It gets better. Different staff groups in the business could have their own app suites with an HR one, a marketing one, a finance one, and so on. The data center would store a master VM with the O/S needed plus personality wrappers - lumps of software needed by the different management groups. Then a finance PC would get the base O/S part of the VM plus the finance app group.

That's the concept. At the moment such an idea would mean thousands if not tens of thousands of PC VMs stored in the data center ready for distribution to the desktops. LeftHand reckons if could take these thousands of VMs and condense them down to master copies per management group, saving a huge amount of space and a lot of management time and hassle as well.

In effect it will dedupe the desktop VMs and leverage its thin provisioning and other technologies to do cloning of VMs when needed. The early adopters could be call centers and hospitals with lots of desktop users who are not IT-literate.

Larry Cormier, LeftHand's marketing VP, thinks this could change the performance/capacity equation as the thing will be to distribute these VMs fast when users come in and start up their PCs, booting from the base VM's and management group app suites stored back in the data centre. He says: "With our virtualization and multi-spindle striping we can provide the performance (required)."

Solid state disk (SSD) technology will be well suited to this kind of application. Courmier said: "We see blade technology emerging; server and storage blades (with SSDs) ... with 8,000 people booting up at 9am you need to serve it up really fast."

We might expect an announcement sometime around September with LeftHand developing its storage architecture to better serve desktop virtualisation needs. The announcement might even be co-ordinated with a VMworld event.

[Chris Mellor.]