Boosting VDI uptake

Despite the expectations of a number of technology vendors that 2011 would be 'the year of desktop virtualisation', the concept has failed to gain ground globally. Many organisations, while supporting the ideas behind virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) integration, have not yet taken the final leap into this world.

SA's poor availability of bandwidth and its high cost have stunted the growth of VDI in multi-sited corporations.

Andy Robb is chief technology officer of Duxbury Networking.

To many industry watchers, this is surprising given the rapid adoption of server virtualisation in the data centre (as a precursor to cloud computing), which is gaining substantial traction.

In South Africa, VDI technology has failed to make inroads into large corporations for a number of reasons. These include delays in the launch of Microsoft's Windows 7, security fears, the poor availability (and cost) of bandwidth, the high costs associated with traditional VDI implementations, and most significantly, storage concerns.

Microsoft's delay in releasing Windows 7, the problems it encountered with Vista and the subsequent motivation for users to extend the life of Windows XP have kept organisations firmly focused on maintaining the status quo on the desktop.

At the same time, the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) movement, expected to become a significant driver for VDI, failed to inspire a fundamental shift in the marketplace. While organisations encouraged employees to bring their private PCs, iPhones, iPads and the Android 'smart' devices to work in order to improve their efficiency, they baulked at taking the final steps towards full VDI because of the perceived security threats associated with the devices violating operational rules when connecting to the corporate networks.

Up to now, cost has been a key inhibitor of VDI implementation. Because it has been cheaper to simply upgrade the desktop instead of implementing VDI, the introduction of the new technology has been difficult to justify at board level. For example, one of the biggest obstacles facing VDI protagonists has been the costs associated with the relocation of storage required by many additional physical single-point-of-failure 'desktops' within a high-availability, centralised model.

For VDI to incorporate the complexity and inflexibility of traditional, fibre channel linked server and storage area network (SAN) or network attached storage (NAS) products, the projected backend investment would be too large and the projects too difficult to configure, manage and scale.

This is where scale-out storage - also called horizontal scaling - has come to the rescue. Scaling-out displaces large, inflexible enterprise storage equipment with a pool of less expensive devices.

The concept differs from traditional architectures in that it adds new storage resources to an environment and is in contrast to 'scaling up', which often relates to the consolidation of several devices into one.

Modern scale-out storage appliances use low-cost, commodity hardware components that combine low-end servers and storage repositories together with user-friendly management software in a single virtual stack. This is packaged with a virtualisation layer that can make hundreds or thousands of network nodes behave like a single system.

Connected by a high-speed Ethernet network, these devices exponentially increase resiliency, throughput and performance as they are added to the network. This allows the storage resources to be deployed as needed and gives organisations a 'try-and-buy' option.

Scale-out storage networks can accommodate as many devices as management deems necessary, and meet growth demands by adding appliances, one-by-one, to increase performance and capacity. This permits organisations to test the VDI concept at departmental level, supporting, for example, the 20 iPads that are run by executives, before adding the existing and future desktop systems incrementally throughout the company

Unlike the traditional approaches, the deployment of scale-out storage appliances can reduce the entry-level cost of introducing a new desktop by 80% to 90%.

As an added bonus, stacked scale-out storage appliances are able to divide and replicate data among their physical drives, bringing increased reliability and redundancy to the network through Raid (redundant array of independent disks) technology.