“Hybrid work” is now part of the daily lexicon of professionals everywhere: an arrangement where employees split their work locations between their home and the office. Automation of routine process tasks is now also grouped into the term. Only IT professionals know how many behind-the-scenes technology services go into supporting a hybrid work arrangement.
Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is one such asset companies everywhere are leveraging. VDI delivers secure, reliable, and encapsulated end-user experiences, no matter where the end-user logs in from.
IDC’s report “The Role of Storage in Supporting Hybrid Work Environments” outlines the challenges enterprises are currently facing surrounding hybrid work and the solutions automation and virtualized environments can provide.
IDC Findings
IDC predicts intelligent digital workspaces (IDWs) will boom in popularity over the next five years. Through AI and no-code development, the convenience they offer frees IT staff to focus on value-add tasks that propel the business forward, rather than busying themselves with maintenance and tedious manual operations. The VDI market is similarly expected to grow in the next five years, with a 16% compound annual growth rate.
On-premises infrastructure is suitable for some operations, but widely distributed enterprises should seriously consider delivering their virtual desktops through a combination of locations to be more agile, available, secure, compliant, and cost-effective. The public cloud, enterprise edge, and a local data center can work in tandem to provide a dynamic allocation of virtual client resources.
Why Hyperconverged Infrastructure powered by VMware vSAN for VDI
Virtualization is the key to accessing apps, compute, data, and storage in an efficient and space- and cost-conscience manner. Because remote work and automation are increasing, the added demand causes some environments to slow to a halt under the pressure. Today’s frenetic business pace hardly allows for downtime or slow response times. Also, businesses are keen to cut costs wherever possible to funnel their IT budget into industry-leading innovations.
Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) powered by vSAN is an industry-leading HCI platform that provides the best hyperconverged scalable foundation for VDI. HCI powered by vSAN delivers the following features to help companies jump common hurdles to get the most out of their hybrid work setup:
- Support for the latest storage technology – vSAN offers solid-state storage to support higher infrastructure density. The advantages of this are a more compact, simpler, and less expensive configuration that consumes less power to support VDI. For example, vSAN’s solid-state disks deliver up to two times higher IOPS magnitude versus hard disk drives. This results in enterprises needing fewer storage devices to meet or even exceed IOPS requirements.
- Compression and deduplication – Data reduction is key to saving storage capacity and lowering VDI environment storage costs. vSAN identifies and removes redundant data with deduplication algorithms and compression.
- Automated space reclamation – This feature is key to infrastructure efficiency. Constantly creating, deleting, and spinning virtual desktops is a tedious task that requires a lot of administrative overhead to keep the VDI environment running efficiently. Automating the process frees up IT team members and is more effective at utilizing available capacity.
- Security – vSAN supports AES 256 encryption both for in-flight and at-rest and is FIPS 140-2 certified. For customers with regulatory requirements, VMware provides a comprehensive guide on compliance and regulations, here.
HCI powered by vSAN is hybrid cloud multi-cloud ready, VMware HCI and VMware Cloud Foundation, provide a common stack that can be deployed on-premises, across public cloud provider infrastructure, or at the edge, managed through a centralized control plane. Virtual desktops deployed on vSAN can be easily migrated to the public cloud and back as necessary to continue to meet the end-user’s computing requirements of dynamic business.
We placed our trust with regard to desktop virtualization in VMware vSAN, because it runs trouble-free, is cost-effective and has a high performance at the same time.” Ronald Scheer, Organisational and Information Technology, Client-Server Operation, Berliner Stadtreinigung
“Without VMware, I don’t think we would have the uptime or the reliability to be able to perform what we do on a global scale and do what we do best – save patient lives.” Paul Green, CIO, Angel Medflight
Are you interested in learning more?
Download the IDC whitepaper The Role of Hyperconverged Infrastructure in Supporting Hybrid Work Environments
Download the IDC Infographic: Why HCI is Preferred Architecture for Hybrid Work
Visit our website to learn more about VMware Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) powered by vSAN.
Take a technical deep dive at Tech Zone
Take a free test drive on VMware vSAN Hands-on Lab (the evaluation is free, get up and running on your browser in minutes, no installation required)
