by Gil Shneorson, vice president and general manager, Hyper-Converged Appliance, EMC
Virtual desktops continue to transform organizations of all sizes. We journey from meeting 
room to meeting room, home office to local café, building to building. No matter where we go, our applications and systems need to be with us on any device—but at what effort and cost? Setting up an environment that is secure, cost effective and can scale as your company grows can be a laborious task, one that spans days, weeks or, dare I say, months.
When it comes to VDI, VCE has a converged and hyper-converged infrastructure solution for any size business or application. One hundred users, 500 users, 5,000 users—the breadth of portfolio with Vblocks and hyper-converged appliances and racks can meet all business needs. For a traditional converged infrastructure, Blocks are unrivaled for centralized core data center VDI, and customer successes are numerous with VMware Horizon, but the excitement lately is all about hyper-converged appliances—what about those? Simply put, a hyper-converged appliance is the fastest and easiest way to stand up a software-defined environment. It’s also extremely cost effective and fits a wide variety of applications and workloads, including VDI.
The opportunity today with hyper-converged and VDI has just been elevated. The new release of Horizon 7 brings VDI to a new level. Hyper-converged delivers software-defined simplicity to the data center, and when combined with Horizon 7 and its new hybrid capabilities, VCE solutions can change the way data centers view VDI.
One aspect that is particularly exciting in the new Horizon 7 release is the cloud delivery option: Horizon Air Hybrid-Mode. So let’s look at how we can leverage that new capability in a hyper-converged appliance. In the above example of individuals going from office to office with their devices and applications in tow, this is what just got an upgrade.
Horizon Air Hybrid-Mode installed on a hyper-converged appliance now allows customers to take VDI on the move. For example, imagine a team of geologists heading out to an oil rig to collect data. How effective will they be if their connection back to their apps at corporate HQ is sluggish? Would IT have even attempted to use VDI? The new capabilities of Horizon Air Hybrid-Mode would allow them to switch from hosting their apps back at home to having them hosted on an appliance on the rig itself as a local private cloud. With no need to connect back to home, there will be no need to worry.
The combination of VCE hyper-converged appliances and Horizon 7 are a perfect fit for large enterprises with edge use cases or medium-sized businesses for use in the core data center. The combination of these two powerful solutions provide a compelling reason to make the move to a software-defined data center and VDI. VCE hyper-converged appliances running Horizon are a cost-effective, fast-to-deploy virtual desktop environment, assured to keep organizations on the move and productive.
Learn more about how Horizon Air Hybrid-Mode is taking VDI to the next level here, and don’t forget to tune in on February 16th to see how EMC and VCE are doing the same for hyper-converged appliances!
