ThinIO – Let’s get right to it!

Let’s get right to it! Warm up your labs or fire up your golden images ladies and gents, we’re delighted to announce ThinIO’s brief public beta will begin today!

This project has taught us some really interesting things about Windows IO, how Windows behaves and how the hypervisor and storage can behave. This project really felt like a David vs. Goliath task as we (members of our community with a desire to simplify this issue) attempted to tackle one of the largest issues in our industry, storage bottlenecks and Windows desktops.

We’ve spent countless hours testing, tuning, retesting and even more tuning. We’re extremely happy with the results. This public beta will serve as an opportunity for you to really kick the tyres and believe the hype in what we’ve built while we’re putting together the final touches to release the product in the coming weeks.

What’s really unique about our approach is there are no hardware lead times, no architecture changes needed and no external dependencies. ThinIO can be installed in seconds and the benefits are seen immediately.

During this time, we found achieving positive and consistent IO negation boils down to a number of items:

  • Cutting down on the volume of IOPS sent to the storage.
  • Reducing the data transferred (MB/sec) to and from the storage.
  • Intelligently cutting down on peak IO, such as boot and user logon.

In the coming days we’re going drill down into these categories in more depth. But as a quick overview, here’s a baseline (top) and ThinIO (bottom) session comparison of a Windows 8.1 desktop login, 1 hour Login VSI medium workload and log off with just 350 mb of cache for ThinIO.

Keep an eye out for the coming blog posts, but in the mean time, the ThinIO beta is available to download here now! Go forth and have fun.

Until next time,

A

Ready to see it in action?