EMC Corporation extends its leadership position in virtualization today by announcing a new EMC Proven™ solution for Citrix XenDesktop® environments. The solution expands EMC’s portfolio enabling Citrix customers to accelerate the adoption of virtual desktop infrastructures and realize the benefits of a secure, centrally managed end-user computing environment. The robust, flexible and cost-effective solution built on the EMC VNX™ unified storage with full NFS support, and the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) platform that has unparalleled desktop density and IO performance provides integrated application streaming and centralized desktop management for 1000 users. The solution utilizes a building-block approach which can then scale to thousands of virtual desktops.

EMC also announced updates to the EMC Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) plug-in, simplifying the task of creating multiple virtual desktop machines and registering them with Citrix XenDesktop. VSI continues to support self service storage provisioning and management across all EMC VNX™ unified storage platforms. The new integration now provides customers the ability to easily deploy XenDesktop and EMC VNX storage regardless of hypervisor.

Through tight integration with XenApp, a key component of XenDesktop, the new solution can leverage compression and replication on the EMC VNX to centralize management of the applications and improve storage utilization. This provides customers with a flexible desktop solution optimized to meet their unique requirements.

The new EMC Solution for XenDesktop is built upon the EMC VNX unified storage systems with advanced flash technology which provides customers flexibility, choice and control as they support virtual desktop provisioning. Customers can optimize and manage their infrastructure with the assurance that EMC storage will perform and scale to meet their specific needs. EMC FAST Cache technology delivers the IOPS required to exceed a customer’s virtual desktop SLAs and ensure maximum performance to easily scale without incurring the power, space and acquisition costs associated with a large storage array.

To demonstrate the performance benefits of EMC FAST Suite, which includes EMC FAST VP technology and EMC FAST Cache, the new solution was tested under various workloads including Boot Storms, Anti-virus scans, Patch installs and response times. A login storm of 1000 users showed an average session start time of as low as 5 seconds. The login test generated over 11,000 IOPS from the storage repository with system cache and EMC FAST Cache absorbing almost all of the I/O. Moreover, the EMC VNX system required only thirty SAS drives and two flash drives to achieve these results which are less than half the drives needed to achieve similar results in a comparable competitive configuration.

Satinder Sethi, Vice President, Data Center Solutions, Server Access and Virtualization Technology Group, Cisco

“Cisco works closely with industry-leading companies such as Citrix and EMC to accelerate and simplify the adoption of desktop virtualization infrastructure. The industry-leading density of the Cisco UCS combined with EMC VNX unified storage, delivers a highly secure, high- performance and integrated solution delivering a lower cost of ownership for our mutual customers while responding rapidly to changing business needs.”

John Fanelli, Vice President of Product Marketing, Enterprise Desktops and Applications group, Citrix

“Citrix customers are transforming their desktops to enable mobile work styles while improving business agility, flexibility and security. Citrix and EMC are committed to supporting customers in this transformation by providing a simple, secure and robust architecture optimized for this environment.”

David Linzy, CEO, LPS Integration

“EMC has absolutely hit the mark with its virtual desktop solution for mixed Citrix XenAPP and Citrix XenDesktop environments. We have several customers who have deployed this solution and they are already seeing the positive results. Infrastructure is the major component to successful Citrix VDI deployment and EMC has helped us to be successful every time.”