A more common approach for users who don't want to take that risk is server-side flash, in either in PCIe or SSD form. One solution is a non-volatile DRAM solution, as discussed in this article. This may be a generally acceptable risk since this is desktop data, but some users will likely push back. To maintain performance, these products must cache both reads and writes, which risks data loss until the write is flushed to permanent storage. The challenge with DRAM is its volatility. Further, some products perform compression and/or deduplication in the RAM cache space itself, making RAM utilization even more efficient. DRAM's aforementioned write performance capability overcomes the write performance penalty of the capacity-saving techniques. But these capacity-saving techniques typically have a high level of latency caused by their need to dynamically allocate writes. Thanks to the capacity-savings capabilities of the hypervisors, thousands of persistent desktop images can be stored in a very small storage space, which overcomes DRAM's cost challenges. VDI typically has a very mixed read/write workload, and because DRAM is ideal for writes it is a perfect complement to VDI. Much of the innovation we are seeing involves the use of DRAM as the first tier of caching for virtual desktop images. I'm avoiding the use of server-side flash intentionally. In this column I'll discuss server-side storage memory, and I'll cover the other methods later. I see three key areas where flash and DRAM (as storage) are being used to significantly increase virtual desktop density (which saves money and improves user acceptance by increasing performance): server-side storage memory, network caching and shared SSD appliances/arrays. It is simply easier to justify to non-IT decision makers something that will save the organization dollars than it is to rationalize something that will save IT department time or increase security. Moving beyond operational VDI project justification is critical for the large-scale deployment of VDI projects. In my last column I posited that advances in storage technology - mostly innovative use of memory-based storage - is making virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) projects more likely to generate a return on investment beyond just an operational one.
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