Realizing the Promise of Virtual Desktops
Most enterprises are still figuring desktop virtualization out: architecture, model, technology, process impact, and security. The net is that it's growing...but most users are still working through what is the 'model' that fits their business and technology needs, and most importantly how much will it cost and save.
Stephen Elliot, IDC Research Manager
The industry is excited about virtual desktops, and with good reason. Traditional desktops are difficult and expensive for IT staff to manage. Securing and supporting desktops consume significant IT resources. And, in our increasingly global and mobile world, it is extremely challenging to scale desktop environments in a manageable way.
By moving from physical to virtual desktops – essentially, centralizing desktops into virtual machines that run on data center servers – enterprises can mitigate these challenges. In fact, the primary drivers for desktop virtualization, according to a recent Goldman Sachs survey of IT professionals, are reduced desktop total cost of ownership, improved manageability and enhanced security. These benefits are so compelling that IDC estimates there will be more than 20 million virtual desktops by 2011.
But moving to a centralized, virtual desktop environment is not easy. That's why, although the technologies required for virtual desktops exist, wide-scale adoption has been slow. It is too difficult, costly and time-consuming for enterprise IT staff to integrate and support all the technologies required for virtual desktop deployment. As a result, companies that try to deploy virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions find them nearly impossible to scale both operationally and cost-effectively.
Barriers to Virtual Desktop Adoption
Solution stack complexity: The technologies needed for VDI (i.e., servers, storage, network, thin clients and virtualization software) are provided by many different vendors, causing considerable confusion among enterprise IT staff about which technologies to adopt. In addition, the technologies are typically managed by different IT groups, which makes it very difficult to coordinate virtual desktop initiatives.
Cost structures: Costs in the data center are optimized for hosting servers, not for desktops. For instance, simply moving hard drives from the desktop to the data center can increase storage costs more than 100 times. When combined with compute density challenges and increased data center expenses for power, cooling and floor space, the cost of moving enterprise desktops to the data center can be prohibitive. Finally, most of the software that IT needs to integrate to create a VDI environment is sold as traditional enterprise products with perpetual license fees.
Operational complexity: Even if enterprises deploy and absorb the costs of VDI themselves, managing the environments can be a huge challenge. Because VDI solutions span many IT organizational silos, there is no single team responsible for managing the systems and troubleshooting issues. Problems can take much too long to resolve, resulting in frustration and loss of productivity for end users.
Desktops as a Service™ (DaaS™): Realizing the Promise of VDI, Eliminating the Obstacles
By turning VDI into an outsourced service, these challenges are eliminated. With DaaS, instead of building, deploying and managing the virtual desktop stack, enterprises outsource these tasks to service providers who already have the data center equipment and real estate needed to handle virtual desktop infrastructure. This not only eliminates the hardware, support costs and complexities inherent in enterprise-developed infrastructures, it also enables enterprises to implement VDI quickly and realize its full manageability, TCO and security benefits.
Desktone categorizes VDI environments into two functional tiers: enterprise and service provider. Our approach to DaaS integrates all VDI functionality while separating these tiers. This allows enterprises to manage a collection of virtual desktops that are supported by a very large set of physical resources which are owned and maintained by a third-party, and that reside either at the enterprise or at a service provider.
Desktone-enabled DaaS is the only solution that gives enterprise IT the full benefits of a virtual desktop infrastructure, without having to incur the costs or risks associated with selecting, owning and managing the physical resources. IT can continue using the best practices and skill sets already employed for managing desktops in the physical world, including those for OS and application deployment, Active Directory, help desk, and security policies. Enterprise end-users get reliable access to their desktops from any device, at any location, anytime. And service providers benefit from optimizing use of their data center assets while offering a new, highly scalable, value-added service to customers.
With Desktone, desktop computing is turned into a cost-effective, reliable outsourced service that can be implemented and scaled quickly, delivering immediate financial and service-level improvements for enterprises and service providers alike.