Struggling With Large Scale VDI?

Through customer conversations and ad-hoc surveys at events,  I find that most organisations that have embarked on VDI projects tend to deliver to somewhere between 10 and 20% of their user base.  This is usually where the business case is easily justified - typical examples would be offshore developers or senior executives who would like to use their tablets for business use.

Those who have not embarked on VDI are often deterred from doing so by the costs per user, or the complexity implications.  Those that have delivered to more than 20% of their user base often find that they are seeing poor performance or much higher costs per user than they were expecting - often needing to throw more and more storage at the environment to get somewhere near the performance users are expecting.

Many of the costs are related to the costs of purchasing and operating the storage environment that underpins VDI sessions - either the cost of capacity or the cost of providing enough storage performance to support the required user experience.

As a result of this, I've been working on looking at a number of options for removing these performance and cost bottlenecks.  Using the Dell lab facilities, we've been stress testing a number of these options technically and from a business case perspective, in partnership with large customer organisations.

Our conclusions lead us to a different way of thinking about VDI and a solution that will allow organisations to scale out to 10s of thousands of users and give those users high performing VDI sessions.  You can learn about them through our webcast which will be recorded for future viewing, but if you want to hear about this first, and in an interactive session where you can ask questions, please register for the event on 27 March 2014 at the link below.  This will also give you access to the extensive white paper documenting the test results in our labs:

REGISTER NOW

The First Musing

This blog will be about thoughts that occur to me as I go about my daily role. Currently I work for Dell in the UK, in a mixed infrastructure architecture / design role for our largest global customer organisations. Much of the time I'm working on specific virtualisation / cloud solutions for specific customers or helping them develop their strategic direction. This gives me a good insight into the common challenges I see across a number of customers in different markets, which allows the development of reference architectures that we can take as solutions to many or our customers.

Brief career history, prior to Dell (most recent first):

• Head of x86 Server Infrastructure Architecture, Lloyds Banking Group: 5 year overall infrastructure strategy & Direction; 3 year investment planning and ownership of architecture assets for x86 server, Windows server, VMware and Linux OS; Team of 11 architects; design of VMware platform for bank merger – 1100 host servers. 
• Head of x86 Infrastructure Architecture for HBOSplc – role as above. 
• Head of Infrastructure for Bank of Scotland Corporate Banking 
• Head of IT Audit for Bank of Scotland 
• Several roles in Civil Service IT