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NetApp can help you realize the full potential of your virtual desktop environment with storage that’s flexible, available and cost effective.
- Maximize the Benefits of a Citrix Virtualized Desktop Environment.
Desktop virtualization with Citrix XenDesktop allows you to deploy and manage desktop environments and applications centrally. You will be able to provide user access to a virtual desktop over standard network infrastructure and bandwidth without affecting your users’ level of control over their desktop environments. Storage is a critical part of the solution. Many of the potential desktop savings can be erased by higher storage costs as desktop data is moved to more expensive data center storage. System outages can now impact hundreds or thousands of workers at a time. A virtual desktop architecture often requires SAN connectivity for the virtualization servers and NAS connectivity for end-user storage, which can require multiple storage systems. Provisioning virtual desktops often requires hundreds of desktops at a time. And while securing end-user data is now a possibility, storage systems have a critical role in both protecting the data and even making sure that a user history can’t be altered or deleted.
- Integrated Storage Management Codeveloped by NetApp and Citrix
Storage for a comprehensive Citrix virtualized desktop infrastructure begins with NetApp. Citrix and NetApp have teamed to codevelop an optimal solution for unifying storage management and desktop virtualization. With our solutions, you can manage virtual desktop storage and data directly from XenCenter. Achieve continuous availability for your desktop environment with a field measured 99.999% availability and best-in-class data protection capabilities. At the same time, you can maximize utilization and lower total cost of ownership using our deduplication and thin provisioning technologies. We also help you centralize storage using the industry’s broadest unified storage architecture. With NetApp you get the flexibility, high availability, and costeffectiveness required to grow your virtual desktop environment.
- Reduce Storage Costs by 50%
We help you lower storage system and management costs in several ways. Using our deduplication technology, you can reduce storage use by eliminating redundant data stored across virtual desktops, user directories, and backup and DR copies. Combined with NetApp thin provisioning, which increases average storage utilization above 70%, you can slash 50% to 90% off your XenDesktop storage requirements. With NetApp, you get the benefits of RAID 10 (local mirroring) protection at half the disk capacity. You can also increase staff productivity by unburdening your storage administrators from the most labor-intensive tasks by enabling XenDesktop administrators to manage storage directly from the XenCenter console.
- Provide Continuous User Access to Virtual Desktops
Now you can provide your users continuous access to their virtual desktops. Eliminate downtime with a field-measured 99.999% uptime and the proven reliability of NetApp storage systems. Because our storage efficiencies extend to the backup and DR environments, you can afford advanced replication and recovery capabilities for your virtual desktops. End users can recover their own data directly from backup. You can maintain continuous availability of user desktops with transparent failover for component and system malfunctions. And in the event of an unplanned site outage, you can recover to the DR site in minutes.
- Increased Agility for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
To respond to rapid growth, you need to be able to deploy new virtual machines and provision storage quickly. With our solutions, you can provision hundreds of virtual desktops in minutes with our nearly instant, low-overhead storage cloning. You can flexibly support both the SAN and NAS aspects of a virtual desktop environment on the same storage system with NetApp multiprotocol capabilities (FC, iSCSI, NFS, or CIFS). You can scale to support thousands of virtual desktops on a single system. In addition, the same system can be used for controlled or sensitive data that needs to be retained in tamperproof (WORM) storage to meet corporate or regulatory requirements.
To learn more about the features of NetApp’s storage solutions or Citrix XenDesktop, please contact us to schedule your personal session with our consultats.