Nimble, VMware in mobile VDI deal

Infostor reports.

It's a move that the companies say will help take the uncertainty out of finding suitable storage for secure, responsive virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) based on VMware's software.

“Identifying storage for VDI is challenging,” says Radhika Krishnan, head of product marketing and alliances for Nimble Storage. Finding a balance of performance and cost-effectiveness can stymie organisations that are seeking to provide workers with access to corporate IT resources.

According to Krishnan, what companies “care for the most is responsiveness”. Although the storage industry has attempted to address this with flash storage by “throwing a lot of cache at it”, there are downsides.

One of the keys to VDI's ability to support the bring your own device trend is having a storage architecture that effectively uses flash to provide low-latency access to data even in challenging corporate scenarios such as 'boot storms', which occur when multiple users log into their VDI workspaces simultaneously, Market Watch writes.

Traditional storage was built before the use of flash became mainstream, resulting in high latency in accessing critical data.

Flash as a storage tier is designed to store 'hot' data, which requires data to be migrated dynamically among different tiers of storage to ensure it is stored in the proper location.