A few weeks ago, we reviewed a few of the key storage considerations necessary for a VDI implementation (and, more specifically, why Wanova Mirage’s distributed architecture doesn’t need high performance storage networks or heavy server farms.) But there’s another aspect to storage efficiency that is important to consider: data redundancy. While image management can reduce duplication across centrally provisioned applications, what about the thousands of user-installed applications, or the 600 people who have all saved the same copy of a Powerpoint presentation? Centralizing desktops in the datacenter can simplify management and protection of these endpoints, but for the solution to be cost-effective, it is critical that the solution also ensures an efficient use of storage.

Wanova Mirage leverages a global single instance store across all users of the system. Consequently, Mirage can deduplicate both user data and user-installed applications, as well as the OS and applications included in the Base Image.

Let’s consider a fairly conservative example: An organization has 1000 engineering end users. The Base Image for their systems is about 12 GB in size, and includes Microsoft Windows XP, Office, Outlook, Norton Antivirus, corporate agents and IT utilities. 500 of the engineers use the company’s software catalogue and install Visual Studio (2 GB). 100 users also install Visio (1.5 GB), and 50 users install Microsoft Project 2010 (2 GB). Using Mirage, the data comprised in the Base Image can be reduced from 11.7 terabytes to 12 gigabytes. Further, Mirage’s deduplication of the user- installed applications will reduce the storage requirement for this data from 1.2 terabytes to 5.5 gigabytes. Mirage will also deduplicate user files, which on average have about 30% redundancy, depending on the organization.

This indexing scheme results in a massive reduction in the amount of data that must be stored. The deduplication happens automatically — Mirage doesn’t require an administrator to do anything special in order to realize the savings. And what’s interesting is that the larger your deployment, the more efficient it gets.

In looking at the TCO of any desktop virtualization solution for a distributed organization, it’s important to consider how the system addresses all aspects of the infrastructure: endpoints, the WAN, LAN, servers, storage network, and of course, back end storage. At Wanova, we have invested – and will continue to invest – in all of these areas to create a solution that is optimized for the way global enterprises need to work.