An effective business or workplace environment all boils down to choice. This flexibility is paramount in today’s digital era, where advancements in technology proliferate at break-neck speeds. At the same time, this flexibility of solutions means nothing if it leads to excruciating amounts of downtime and inefficiency within your virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). This is where a hyperconverged infrastructure, especially one powered by vSAN, can be a gamechanger.
Bolstering Your Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
More than 19,000 customers worldwide have achieved success with hyperconverged infrastructure powered by vSAN. VMware vSAN powers industry-leading hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions with vSphere-native, flash-optimized storage for private and public cloud deployments. The software reduces infrastructure costs, allowing you to start small and grow non-disruptively as your needs evolve. It also delivers high performance while lowering total cost of ownership (TCO) over traditional storage arrays, allowing IT teams to deliver desktop services to end users by running virtual machines on consolidated clusters in the data center.
One of these customers is Colorado College, which turned to vSAN for this very reason. “We chose hyperconverged for our environment primarily because of the redundancy features that it gives us,” Andrew Watson, systems engineer at Colorado College said. The power of vSAN provided the college with data resiliency, availability and speed of performance, particularly for their VDI so that they could boot multiple desktop instances at the same time.
“We chose hyperconverged for our environment primarily because of the redundancy features that it gives us”
The Broader the Flexibility, the Better
vSAN offers flexibility for organizations in ways that were previously unachievable given normal cost constraints. With certified solutions from the hardware vendor of your choice, vSAN offers the broadest possible flexibility with Day One support of the latest technologies and unified resources under policy-based management. This power of choice for administrators of VDI environments is taking clustering to an entirely new level.
For example, vSAN allows for clustering that is directed by the needs of the business and the consumers of those services. In the case of Colorado College and its students, this meant giving them the virtualized desktops, files and technology tools to do the work they need to do anytime, anywhere. Putting the technology in the hands of the people who need it most and allowing them to utilize it in numerous ways is the foundation of flexibility, especially in today’s digital paradigm.
No More Downtime
Last but certainly not least, vSAN helps keep uptime at a maximum, which is crucial for any business that wants to remain efficient and competitive. With vSAN, no one has to wait around for the resources they need to become available to them. At Colorado College, vSAN was the saving grace for the school’s rigorous block plan, which crams a semester’s worth of a class into just three-and-a-half weeks. This proved extremely challenging for the school’s IT department, as any downtime could cause the entire block plan program to derail. Luckily, with vSAN’s uptime capabilities, students were able to access VDIs and load applications in mere seconds so they could remain on top of their academic game.
If you’d like to get schooled on more of vSAN’s industry-leading hyperconverged solutions, be sure to follow us on Twitter (@vmwarevsan) and stay tuned to the Virtual Blocks blog for more insights.
