X-IO Storage Verified for Citrix Ready VDI Campaign

May 8, 2014 - PRLog -- London, UK –  May 07, 2014 – 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 Programme for Citrix XenDesktop®. The Citrix Ready VDI Capacity Programme 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 Programme 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 programme; 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 Programme, verified for 750 users.

“X-IO has satisfactorily completed the testing requirements to join the Citrix Ready VDI Capacity Programme,” said Greg Fox, director, Citrix Ready programme at Citrix. “Through this programme, 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 programme, 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 optimised 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 programme, 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.”

About Citrix Ready

The Citrix Ready programme identifies verified solutions that are trusted to enhance virtualization, networking, and cloud computing solutions from Citrix, including XenDesktop®, XenApp®, Cloud Portal™, XenMobile®, XenServer® and NetScaler®. The Citrix Ready designation is awarded to third-party products that have successfully met verification criteria set by Citrix, and gives customers an added confidence in the compatibility of the joint solution offering. The Citrix Ready programme leverages industry-leading alliances across the Citrix partner ecosystem to meet a wide variety customer needs, and currently incorporates partners who have demonstrated more than 25,000 product verifications. It also includes the Citrix Ready Community Verified programme, which allows customers to see thousands of products that have been verified by other customers to work in their production environments.

About X-IO

X-IO Technologies, with its Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) architecture, has solved some of the fundamental challenges of enterprise storage, such as performance drop-offs concurrent with increases in capacity utilization. Invented as a division of Seagate Technology, ISE addresses the demand of customers for long duty cycle storage, achieves 100 percent capacity utilization without loss of performance, and uniquely does not require service intervention during its lifetime.

Based in Colorado, the organization has offices throughout North America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa and has a proven installation of more than 6,000 units across 1,200+ customers worldwide.

Resources

Website: http://xiostorage.com

ISE Storage: http://www.xiostorage.com/products/ise-storage-systems/

Blog: http://www.xiostorage.com/company/blog/

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/xiostorage

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/x-io-storage

Rebelmouse: http://www.xiostorage.com/rebelmouse-2/