Last week Boston's Managing Director, Manoj Nayee, visited Kerala for the Citrix Partner Huddle 2014 at The Leela Kovalam. Boston was invited to speak at the partner huddle after working closely with the Citrix XenDesktop team to successfully design a reference architecture to deliver the network and server infrastructure for VDI at a price point less than $120 per user.
The presentation, delivered from the main stage on day 2 of the event, served to highlight the many challenges facing IT Managers required to deliver desktops to end users, and explained how, by utilising commodity hardware, IT Managers can deploy a scalable, cost efficient solution to deliver VDI.
One of the key desktop delivery challenges of recent years is balancing the required capital investment against what the virtual desktop infrastructure has to deliver. When scalability, flexibility, reliability and affordability are taken into account, it often seems that the traditional method of delivering desktops may be the best option, but how do IT Managers keep their IT estate secure, meet demands for flexible working practices, and halt rising IT costs without harnessing the benefits of VDI?
The commodity hardware reference architecture reduces concerns about over-investment by doing away with the need for an expensive SAN infrastructure while retaining performance and scalability. When tested, the reference architecture never saw CPU utilisation go above 90% while under load, up to 200 users could connect, complete a test run, then disconnect cleanly, and storage and network performance was well within normal guidelines. By bringing together proven hardware from vendors such as Mellanox, SanDisk and Supermicro, Boston has designed a solution that offers all the benefits VDI has to offer without breaking the bank to lay the strongest foundations.
You can download the whitepaper "Cost Efficient VDI: XenDesktop 7 on Commodity Hardware" here. The whitepaper contains full details of the reference architecture and the testing methodology. If you have any questions about the whitepaper, or want to talk about delivering your own virtual desktops using commodity hardware, please get in touch and speak to one of Boston's technically trained sales representatives.