The advent of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) holds great promise in corporate, government, and service provider environments. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, such as VMware VDI, enables end users or their hosting providers to provision and manage hundreds of individual, virtual desktops from a set of centrally administered, consolidated servers. This approach delivers a number of potential benefits, including lower administrative and maintenance costs, higher levels of security, and increased user mobility and flexibility.

Corporate and government entities are increasingly deploying VDI, and a number of organizations are now seriously evaluating the technology. While the foundational computing and networking technologies are now in place to support virtual desktop infrastructures, the performance and provisioning of storage remains a major challenge to deploying an effective VDI.

To overcome these issues, 3PAR has introduced Thin Copy Desktop for VMware VDI, a storage solution designed for virtualized desktop infrastructures. This offering meets all the requirements for a VDI Optimized Storage solution, which we have outlined in this document. 3PAR Thin Copy Desktop significantly decreases physical disk space requirements for virtual desktop images and enables the rapid, simultaneous booting of hundreds-or even thousands-of virtual machines (VMs). The solution greatly streamlines the provisioning of new or upgraded desktops, while reducing the cost and complexity of backup and recovery. By addressing the capacity and performance issues that hamper traditional storage approaches in VDI environments, the 3PAR solution helps virtual desktop infrastructures to achieve their true potential in medium to large corporate, government and service provider entities.