Last week at Citrix Synergy 2011, EMC and Citrix announced a new EMC Proven™ solution for Citrix XenDesktop® to accelerate the adoption of virtual desktop infrastructures and realization of the associated benefits. The robust, flexible and cost-effective solution built on the EMC VNX™ unified storage systems deliver predictable high performance and high availability for up to 1000 virtual desktops and is easily expandable. The solution utilizes a building-block approach which can then scale to thousands of virtual desktops.

“Today’s announcement showcases the tangible benefits associated with implementing EMC’s advanced unified storage systems and associated technologies in a virtual desktop implementation,” said Eric Herzog, EMC’s Vice President, Product Marketing and Management, Unified Storage Division. “Customers can now quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively implement and scale their virtual desktop environment while taking advantage of trademark EMC reliability, availability, multi-protocol support, disaster recovery features, replication and snapshot technology, and hardened security.”

EMC VNX unified storage systems with advanced flash technology provide customers flexibility, choice and control as they support virtual desktop provisioning for Citrix XenDesktop. 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 ensures maximum performance to easily scale without incurring the power, space and acquisition costs associated with a large storage array.

EMC FAST Suite which includes EMC FAST VP technology and EMC FAST Cache enables 1000 virtual desktops to power on, achieve a steady state and register with the XenDesktop controllers within 8 minutes. At peak load and with high IOPS being generated by the Boot Storm, the EMC VNX system requires only 20 SAS drives and two flash drives in comparison to the 90 – 100 (nearly five times more) SAS drives required by an equivalent competitive configuration without flash drives to match this performance.

“Customers are grappling with the costs and complexities associated with infrastructure implementation in a virtual desktop environment,” said John Fanelli, Vice President of Product Marketing, Enterprise Desktops and Applications at Citrix. “To meet customer needs, Citrix and EMC have created tight integration between VNX unified storage systems and XenDesktop which enables a simple and cost-effective storage solution that meets high performance requirements of the most demanding service level agreements for XenDesktop customers.”

Implementing and configuring a complete virtual desktop infrastructure requires expertise in desktop deployment and migrations, application virtualization, security, system management and storage design. The powerful combination of EMC Global Services expertise—including consulting and implementation —and EMC’s industry-leading technology for Citrix XenDesktop 5 environments enables customers to achieve business agility, application flexibility and infrastructure efficiency.