Making VDI easier to implement

Having observed that implementing virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) management systems can cause real difficulties in managing reliable service delivery, Nutanix – a provider of datacentre infrastructure solutions – has  announced a program that delivers simplicity and predictability to an important potential deliverable for VDI management.

With this initiative, Nutanix customers can purchase advanced web-scale infrastructure per desktop, and de-risk their VDI investment through the industry’s first and only VDI Assurance pricing option.

“Inaccurate sizing, insufficient resources and high TCO continue to doom VDI projects running on traditional datacenter infrastructure”

Purchasing traditional server and storage infrastructure for VDI is complicated and can undermine user experience when not properly sized or designed. As a result, the industry has begun experimenting with DaaS (desktop as a service) offerings to achieve greater predictability while focusing on the actual end-user desktop experience.

Unfortunately, these cloud-based offerings struggle to match the security and long-term total cost of ownership (TCO) of on-premise solutions. The Nutanix Per Desktop Program enables enterprises to purchase and deploy desktop infrastructure as a predictable, public cloud-like service. This approach minimises long-term costs, and retains the control and manageability benefits of an on-site deployment.

As part of this new program, Nutanix is offering VDI Assurance to ensure that every virtual desktop receives sufficient server and storage resources to deliver a consistent and high-quality experience. VDI administrators no longer have to estimate CPU, memory, and storage resources that can fluctuate significantly with different user profiles and change unexpectedly over the course of a project.

IT managers can now simply determine the type and number of VDI users in their environment and transfer the risk of sizing infrastructure requirements to Nutanix. This program simplifies virtual desktop projects by enabling VDI purchases on a per-desktop basis, giving IT managers 100 percent predictability in performance and costs.

For maximum choice, the program supports a range of VDI user profiles – Kiosk, Task, Knowledge and Power – to ensure that enterprises pay for precisely the resources their users need. The program can be leveraged for VDI projects based on VMware Horizon or Citrix XenDesktop, starting with as few as 150 desktops and seamlessly scaling to 10,000 or more.

With well-defined support for real-world VDI images, coupled with assured infrastructure resources, Nutanix empowers IT teams to keep long-term virtual desktop costs to a minimum.

For even greater budget and deployment flexibility, Nutanix is offering Per Desktop via time-based purchase options so that enterprises can get the infrastructure they need, but pay only for the time they need it. Enterprises can now support any VDI project with perpetual or term-based consumption models that were previously available only with public cloud-based offerings.

Nutanix delivers a host of powerful VDI optimisations, including MapReduce Deduplication, VMCaliber Snapshots and Compression, Shadow Clones and simple one-click manageability via the Nutanix Prism framework. By combining ease of management, rich technical capabilities and the VDI Per Desktop Program, Nutanix has proven once again it is the hands down choice for VDI deployments of any scale.

“Inaccurate sizing, insufficient resources and high TCO continue to doom VDI projects running on traditional datacentre infrastructure,” said Sudheesh Nair, senior vice president of worldwide sales and business development at Nutanix. “We looked at these issues carefully and challenged ourselves to offer a new procurement model that would both disrupt the VDI market and reduce the risk for our customers. With the VDI Per Desktop Program, our customers can procure desktop infrastructure the same way they procure other desktop software from companies like Microsoft, Citrix and VMware.”