Liquidware Labs,  a VDI solutions provider that developed the Stratusphere and ProfileUnity offerings, has a new service to help customers make the most out of their virtual desktop deployments. In partnership with NetApp, the company is now offering a new consulting service to the latter’s customers and partners that is designed to help companies optimize their resources and reduce IT costs.

“New data output engines” developed by Liquidware are meant to offer users insight into best practices, storage design and capacity planning.

“Proper storage sizing is critical to virtual desktop infrastructure design and successful deployment,” said Patrick Rogers, VP, Corporate Alliances at NetApp. “By integrating NetApp with Liquidware Labs Stratusphere, customers benefit from powerful metrics to help determine storage sizing and efficiencies in any Windows environment to allow our mutual customers to gain the flexibility and cost savings that virtual desktop infrastructure enables.”

The data from existing customers who use the new service would have access to can also enable them to integrate the NetApp VDI Storage Sizing configurator and scale storage capacity based on usage and load patterns.

NetApp has certainly been growing, in terms of partnerships and clients.  Earlier this month, NetApp published a case study of one of its latest and likely biggest clients to date, Thomson Reuters. NetApp, Cisco and VMware shard infrastructure now powers the intelligence firm’s Westlaw legal research service, and reportedly eliminated the need to build a second datacenter at an estimated cost of about $65 million.

The virtulization market is a very competitive one, and the biggest players are constantly working on biting off chunks of each others’ market share. Microsoft Hyper-V has been making gains recently according to a study by Stratus, partially due to the new licensing model VMware introduiced with the launch of vSphere. That has since been reverted to a more economic, memory-based one.