Sanbolic Melio for Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp | Solutions Brief

Sanbolic Melio: Desktop Virtualization Pilot to Production

citrix.com

Sanbolic Melio for Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp | Solutions Brief

Sanbolic’s Melio software helps Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp users to consolidate, protect and simplify management of XenDesktop and XenApp Server images; enhance desktop/server performance; enable high availability and seamless scale; and realize significant savings in storage and related cost.

The Role of Storage in VirtualizationStorage plays a key role in desktop and application virtualization. Virtual desktop deployments can impose tremendous strain on traditional storage infrastructures and even the modern storage systems and architectures have been unable to keep up with the ongoing innovations in desktop and application virtualization technologies. As a result, many organizations have found it extremely difficult to implement these technologies in their enterprise environments.

The challenges encountered by these organizations include excessive desktop image and storage management, performance constraints that adversely affect the user experience, lack of fault-tolerance, and inability to keep costs in check as they transition from pilot to production. In addition, the option to scale implementations quickly and easily, without impacting user productivity, was nonexistent.

Implementing Desktop and Application Virtualization with Ease and Lower CostSanbolic’s Melio distributed data management software helps organizations address the limitations of storage systems and architectures. It helps overcome the challenges of implementing desktop and application virtualization technologies by delivering enhanced application availability and scale to critical enterprise workloads.

Using Melio, a comprehensive, software-based product suite that augments existing application, server and storage infrastructures, organizations will be able to extend the capabilities of their storage systems to successfully implement and realize the benefits of desktop and application virtualization. It creates a flexible, scalable, highly available shared storage for Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS), a core component of Citrix XenDesktop that enables on-demand streaming of desktop images.

By combining the unique capabilities of Melio with the ease of deploying and managing desktop images with PVS, organizations can now implement highly scalable and highly available virtual desktop and application delivery infrastructures – without the costs and complexities associated with other storage options such as replication, file shares, and proprietary, file-based hardware appliances. The combined benefits of Melio and XenDesktop include the ability to transition from pilot to production quickly and easily, expand existing storage infrastructure seamlessly without downtime, and achieve dramatic improvements in both server and storage utilization – all of which lead to a significant reduction in overall deployment cost and a faster and greater return on investments in these industry-leading solutions.

Pilot to Production at Enterprise Scale• Data consolidation • Simplified image

management • Enhanced application

availability • Reliable data

protection• Improved server and

storage utilization• Dynamic infrastructure

scale• Lower storage cost

2

citrix.com

Sanbolic Melio for Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp | Solutions Brief

The Benefits of Using Sanbolic Melio with Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp• Improved performance via dedicated, high-bandwidth connections to

block-based storage• Seamless infrastructure scale-out (add more PVS Servers and/or storage

dynamically)• Simplified data management for desktop/server images (vDisks) and write

cache files• Simplified storage management using a single interface to manage Melio

shared volumes • High availability of vDisks, PVS and XenDesktop databases for enhanced

fault-tolerance• Reliable data protection via VSS-based snapshots of Melio shared volumes• Reduced storage cost through enhanced storage utilization• The ability to transition from pilot to production at enterprise scale quickly

and easily

The ResultsBy combining the benefits of Citrix Provisioning Services and Sanbolic Melio, organizations are able to deploy XenDesktop and XenApp pilots quickly and easily with lower upfront cost.

Upon successful completion of their pilots, they can move their solutions into production with minimal effort using Melio’s advanced features (i.e., live storage/data migration).

Finally, when these organizations are ready to add more XenDesktops and/or XenApp Servers to their infrastructures, they can do so dynamically by adding more PVS servers and/or storage resources on the fly while maintaining optimal desktop/server performance levels.

3

citrix.com

Sanbolic Melio for Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp | Solutions Brief

citrix.com

Corporate HeadquartersFort Lauderdale, FL, USA

India Development CenterBangalore, India

Latin America HeadquartersCoral Gables, FL, USA

Silicon Valley HeadquartersSanta Clara, CA, USA

Online Division HeadquartersSanta Barbara, CA, USA

UK Development CenterChalfont, United Kingdom

EMEA HeadquartersSchaffhausen, Switzerland

Pacific HeadquartersHong Kong, China

About Citrix ReadyCitrix Ready identifies recommended solutions that are trusted to enhance the Citrix Delivery Center infrastructure. All products featuredin Citrix Ready have completed verification testing, thereby providing confidence in joint solution compatibility. Leveraging its industryleading alliances and partner eco-system, Citrix Ready showcases select trusted solutions designed to meet a variety of business needs.Through the online catalog and Citrix Ready branding program, you can easily find and build a trusted infrastructure. Citrix Ready not only demonstrates current mutual product compatibility, but through continued industry relationships also ensures future interoperability.Learn more at www.citrix.com/ready.

About Sanbolic MelioMelio is Citrix-Ready™ certified for use with Citrix PVS, across all industry-standard servers and storage hardware as well as all SAN protocols and runs on physical or virtual machines hosted by Citrix XenServer™, Microsoft Hyper-V™ or VMware vSphere™. At the core of the Melio product suite is an advanced, 64-bit, symmetrical cluster file system called Melio FS™ that provides multiple Windows servers with simultaneous read/write access to one or more storage partitions or Logical Unit Numbers (LUNs) on block-based (SAN) storage.

Melio can also provide flexible, highly available shared storage using the disks (DAS) installed in commodity (x86) server hardware, allowing organizations to utilize the storage in their PVS servers to conduct pilots with lower upfront cost, while having the ability to move their deployments seamlessly into production (and leverage the investments in their SAN storage) using Melio’s live storage migration feature.

Offering a unified data/storage management platform, the Melio product suite includes the Melio cluster file system and Melio cluster volume manager, as well as additional tools for automating data management, providing reliable data protection and clustering applications for enhanced application availability and scalability. Advanced storage features (designed for enterprise environments) such as volume sets, stripe sets, mirror sets (RAID1), dynamic volume expansion and Quality of Service (QoS) are also included in the Melio software.

©2012 Citrix Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. Citrix®, Citrix Receiver™, HDX™, CloudGateway™, XenDesktop®, XenApp™, NetScaler® and XenVault™ are trademarks of Citrix Systems, Inc. and/or one or more of its subsidiaries, and may be registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.

4