Blog

High performance Nutanix Unified Storage powers VDI

By Sean Donahue, Senior Solutions Marketing Manager and Santhosh Siruvole, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Unified Storage

February 18, 2024 | min

Deploying a VDI environment for a globally distributed workforce, BYOD, hot desk environments and call centers is complex and is hard to manage. However, the storage that supports VDI to run VMs and unstructured user profile data need not be.

Exponential growth1 of unstructured data is putting a tremendous strain on the legacy three-tier architecture of VDI environments. Whether it is a single user VDI or a multi-user remote desktop service, deteriorating VDI performance, complexity in managing storage, protecting user data against cyberthreats and ransomware are key challenges. This is especially true with a growing remote workforce and user data.

Modern software-defined storage (SDS) – built on a distributed architecture and designed to span on-premises datacenters, edge sites and public clouds – offers advantages over traditional SAN and NAS systems to support VDI.

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is a software-defined data services platform that consolidates management and protection of siloed block, file and object storage into a single platform. Powered by rich data services – such as analytics, ransomware protection, lifecycle management, and data protection – NUS lets you adapt to fast-changing VDI needs and shift focus from one-off capacity management to global data management.

Leveraging the Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP), NUS is built for the seamless scaling, high-performance and integrated data security requirements of VDI applications deployed on core, cloud or edge infrastructure.

A single point of management with intelligent operations, automation and a self-service model enables a consistent cloud operating model that eliminates the complexity and cost of different architectures, while the server scale-out design taps into server economics and can be managed by VDI administrators.

1Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/871513/worldwide-data-created/

Our staff can meet or exceed workload expectations and see more patients per day. Nutanix was the best choice I made as a CIO.

Isaiah Nathaniel
Chief Information Officer, Delaware Valley Community Health
Nutanix Unified Storage for VDI

Key benefits include:

  • Simplicity – With NUS, you can take charge of storage resources with simple tools that eliminate long learning curves and administrative overhead. VDI instances integrate with NUS, giving VDI administrators end- to-end control to manage storage for user profiles and home directories. 
  • Performance – NUS builds on NCP to offer data locality that improves the VDI user experience with faster application start times. All VDI disks are stored locally on the same host where the VM is running, resulting in a low-latency, highly responsive application interface. In addition, data locality with base disks for non-persistent desktops are cached on every host to speed-up access to storage resources. 
  • Efficiency – NUS unifies File, Object and Block storage services into one data services platform with one flexible license, and is deployed quickly and easily onto an existing HCI cluster from Prism Central. Nutanix customers have deployed files storage 82% faster and objects storage 75% faster, compared to traditional storage. Faster availability of data services to your remote workforce accelerates investment payback. 
  • Scale – Combining the flexibility of NUS and the ease of scale of the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, VDI administrators can procure storage capacity for what they need and when they need without overcommitting. Leveraging a consumption based OPEX model for NUS allows you to license just the capacity needed and expand easily as the virtual desktop user demands grow. 
  • Business continuity – In addition to metro availability and fast snapshots, NUS enables self-service restore, which allows end-users to recover their own files. NUS also offers Smart DR to facilitate share-level data replication and file server-level disaster recovery. 
  • Integrated security and ransomware protection – Nutanix Data Lens offers integrated ransomware protection to detect, protect and recover from ransomware threats and other vulnerabilities against your VDI data stored on NUS. With intelligent behavioral pattern anomaly detection, security and storage teams can detect and block threats before they do damage. 
  • Data visibility and compliance – Nutanix Data Lens enables auditability of Files and Objects data with global data visibility, and permissions and risk visualization. The advanced storage consumption and usage analytics help you to effectively forecast and plan for future storage needs. 
  • Superior Customer Support – Nutanix and its customer support team are ranked among the industry’s best with an NPS score of 90+ based on customer loyalty, satisfaction and buyer recommendations.

Managing and upgrading storage for a globally distributed VDI environment requires taking a new look at how data services are deployed. Nutanix Unified Storage helps organizations with simplified and faster data migrations, data management strategies and overall makes storage highly available for mission-critical applications and users deployed in a VDI environment. 

Additional Resources

© 2024 Nutanix, Inc. All rights reserved. Nutanix, the Nutanix logo and all Nutanix product, feature and service names mentioned herein are registered trademarks or trademarks of Nutanix, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Other brand names mentioned herein are for identification purposes only and may be the trademarks of their respective holder(s). This post may contain links to external websites that are not part of Nutanix.com. Nutanix does not control these sites and disclaims all responsibility for the content or accuracy of any external site. Our decision to link to an external site should not be considered an endorsement of any content on such a site. Certain information contained in this post may relate to or be based on studies, publications, surveys and other data obtained from third-party sources and our own internal estimates and research. While we believe these third-party studies, publications, surveys and other data are reliable as of the date of this post, they have not independently verified, and we make no representation as to the adequacy, fairness, accuracy, or completeness of any information obtained from third-party sources.

This post may contain express and implied forward-looking statements, which are not historical facts and are instead based on our current expectations, estimates and beliefs. The accuracy of such statements involves risks and uncertainties and depends upon future events, including those that may be beyond our control, and actual results may differ materially and adversely from those anticipated or implied by such statements. Any forward-looking statements included herein speak only as of the date hereof and, except as required by law, we assume no obligation to update or otherwise revise any of such forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent events or circumstances.