– Fadi Albatal, vice president of marketing at FalconStor Software (www.falconstor.com), says:

Desktop virtualization is catching on at many small-to-medium size businesses, as well as at large enterprises, as a means to further capitalize on virtualization technology and resources, improve efficiency and lower acquisition costs. However, virtual desktops face many of the same issues as physical desktops – such as how to store and protect the data associated with them – as well as new issues, such as computer resource allocation.

The new challenge of resource allocation comes from the demanding storage input/output storms around the boot, login, logoff, shutdown, patch and antivirus scanning processes. The virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) often experiences storms lasting from 30 minutes to two hours when a large number of users attempts to go through those events simultaneously. A good example of this is when employees sign onto or off of their computers at the start and end of the workday.

The older, more well-known challenge faced by physical and virtual users is in protecting the data stored on or used by their workstations. In the event of a file loss or corruption, individuals need to be assured that the data has been saved and is quickly recoverable. And in the case of a major failure, administrators need to be able to recover a whole environment locally or remotely.

FalconStor Software addresses these two challenges with the recent launch of the FalconStor® Network Storage Server (NSS) SAN Accelerator for VMware View, an SSD-enhanced storage solution that increases the performance of VMware VDI environments while delivering integrated, multi-tier data protection. It dramatically enhances the efficiency of virtual desktop management throughout the virtual desktop lifecycle and performs backup and recovery for the entire VMware View environment and for each virtual desktop – and, for the first time, enables integrated self-service file recovery for individual virtual desktop users.