Guest blog By Andy Fenselau, EMC XtremIO
It’s all about the user experience. From its early days, IT has been all about keeping users happy. And now, more than ever, IT has to show its value to users—especially for desktop virtualization. “Users” are everyday people like you and me. In the past, users were tied behind their desk to isolated desktops with homogenous operating environments. Nowadays, we are mobile, use a wide variety of devices and applications, and expect access to services and data, and to collaborate with others – at “the speed of life.” And we are a diverse mix of knowledge workers, task workers, and power users with different needs for our desktop experiences.
This single VDI question has confounded IT for years: How do I provide this at the speed of life – and at the scale of enterprise?
VMware Horizon 6 answers this question by extending the power of virtualization from the data center to devices to deliver virtual desktops and application services. A consistently great user experience at scale is critical to success; however, virtual desktop deployments have been complex to plan and deploy, with storage as a primary bottleneck for performance, consistency, manageability, and cost.
So, with VMware’s news on Horizon 6, the VDI game is changing… and EMC XtremIO scale-out all-flash arrays are transforming storage into a true enabler in VDI environments. With Horizon, and fully converged, ready-to-run VCE Vblocks for VDI featuring XtremIO, customers can deploy VDI at any scale, with simple planning, rapid deployment, a better-than-PC all-flash user experience, and lower costs than physical desktops.
What does this mean for one of us real users? One of my favorite Horizon/XtremIO experiences comes from a sales rep at a Fortune 100 pharmaceutical company who said her experience “was pure bliss”. This sales rep’s days are spent roaming the hallways of hospitals and doctors’ offices with a tablet in hand – waiting for the crucial 2-3 minute window she has to catch doctors making their rounds. Behind the scenes, the performance of her VDI would either make or break those critical few minutes with her clients. Her old VDI experience was inconsistent, unpredictable and “painful” for her and her clients. The day after her organization switched to Horizon with XtremIO, she emailed her IT team and said, “I don’t know what you did, but don’t change it back. My tablet experience is phenomenal now, and I can engage my customers with confidence and success!”
And this is just one of many speed of life stories. To find out more about the joint VMware-EMC XtremIO solution, watch this on-demand webinar or explore all our VDI resources and future webinars at www.xtremio.com/vdi.
