You may have heard the news about VMware collaborating with Cisco on SmartPlay with VMware Horizon View. In this new solution bundle for scalable VDI, it’s Fusion-io memory that makes the solution truly scalable—without a costly or complex back-end storage upgrade.

Cisco and its channel partners will resell an upgrade option for Cisco UCS M3 Blade Server that includes VMWare Horizon View 5 and the Cisco UCS Storage Accelerator, based on Fusion’s 785-GB PCI mezzanine flash module. Instead of relying on back-end shared storage to host the golden master image and associated clones for users, the image can be stored locally on the ioMemory-based Storage Accelerator, right on the blade server.

This is great news for customers in many market segments, including government, education, and healthcare, who are looking to deliver desktop virtualization that’s faster and less costly than physical desktops. Nearly all VDI projects start small and grow based on success. The Fusion solution is helpful as it provides a cost-effective, high performance proof-of-concept vehicle to get started. It’s manageable by server administrators, which is beneficial because most VDI projects don’t get additional IT resources, and SAN expertise is precious. And when it’s time to scale, it’s as easy as adding another blade server.

One of the key challenges with successful VDI implementations is delivering data at speeds that meet or exceed what users experience with physical hardware. We are excited to join VMware to be part of Cisco’s innovative, new VDI solution that easily scales to meet the needs of organizations of all shapes and sizes, right out of the box.

Learn more about the Fusion-io, Cisco and VMware Horizon View reference architecture in our video linked here. For more information on the SmartPlay from Cisco, VMware and Fusion-io, download Cisco UCS SmartPlay with VMware Horizon View.