HispanicBusiness

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 12/12/12 -- Pure Storage, the all-flash enterprise storage array company, today announced that it is bringing the performance and efficiency of all-flash storage to virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments for less than $100/seat with its new VMware-certified VDI Reference Architectures and All-Flash VDI Starter Kit. As the industry's first and only production-hardened, all-flash enterprise array to successfully drive the cost of all-flash storage below the price of spinning disk, FlashArray makes it affordable for every enterprise to offer their users the best all-flash VDI experience.

VDI environments enable companies to provide more reliable, flexible and secure desktop systems, which increase productivity and simplify IT administration. Moreover, VDI is evolving from simple call center and task worker deployments (stateless desktops with low performance requirements), to broader rollouts for productivity users and executives, where it is enabling secure mobile computing and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) models.

"Many early enterprise VDI deployments failed due to the cost and complexity associated with meeting the demands of desktop workloads on data center storage. Based on spinning disk architectures, these early deployments saw storage costs in excess of $500 per desktop and failed to scale past hundreds of users without introducing unacceptable performance problems," said Simon Bramfitt, founder and principal analyst at Entelechy Associates. "Flash storage has shown that those performance challenges are readily addressable, but the high cost of flash has prevented its broad adoption until now. Pure Storage addresses the flash affordability challenge by delivering inline data reduction that reduces storage consumption by 5-10x. With the power, performance and cost-efficiency delivered by the Pure Storage FlashArray, enterprises can now more readily reap the benefits of VDI."

Traditional VDI architectures based on spinning disk often cost $300-$500/desktop, rely heavily on stateless images to constrain storage growth, fail to scale past 100s of users and ultimately eliminate the overall ROI of VDI due to exorbitant storage costs. Flash storage is the key to making VDI scale and meet user performance expectations, however the high cost associated with flash storage has prevented its broad adoption until now. Pure Storage addresses the flash affordability conundrum by delivering inline data reduction (deduplication and compression) that reduces storage consumption by 5-10x, lowering the cost of all-flash storage for VDI to less than the price of disk.

How Pure Storage Solves the Five Key Storage Challenges of VDI:

1. Problem: Storage costs of $200-300/desktop break the VDI ROI case.
Pure Storage Solution: Inline data reduction enables All-Flash VDI for < $100/desktop, less expensive than putting an SSD in a user's laptop.

2. Problem: Companies abandon VDI projects because of end-user complaints of poor performance.
Pure Storage Solution: All-Flash VDI delivers better performance than local laptops with SSDs, without the performance risk and variability of tiered flash/disk solutions relying on caching.