Yes you can bash me now for the reference to Disney’s Frozen. When I wrote this a week ago I was sitting at my desk with the doors and windows open enjoying the 70 degree weather here in Kansas while the East coast was getting pounded by #Snowpocalypse. Now that most everyone hates me for one reason or another let’s get to the meat of this post. 😎
I was working on some stuff around Desktop as a Service (DaaS) and got to thinking about #Snowpocalypse in the northeast this last week. It hit me how valuable a DaaS solution would be to many organizations affected by the blizzard. I’m not talking about just a VDI solution I’m talking about cloud desktops also known as VMware Horizon Air.
What’s so great about cloud desktops? I can do it all with VDI in my own datacenter without relying on a service provider. You’re right you can! You can even run VMware Horizon DaaS in your datacenter but there is more to it than just that.
What got me thinking about how VMware Horizon Air was great for the Snowpocalpyse was all the IT staff who are “just hanging out” at the datacenter to insure uptime. Maybe they don’t mind it and maybe they live for making sure the cutover to generator power goes smoothly when the power goes out. Not to mention all of the workers snowed in at home and want to work but they can’t because they can’t connect to the datacenter.
VMware Horizon DaaS Model
This is where VMware Horizon Air really starts coming in handy for businesses large and small. You can provide desktops to employees, even those of us in the middle of Kansas, and when Snowpocalypse happens move those users to other datacenters around the country. Then it doesn’t matter if the power goes down, the communication lines drop to the datacenter in the affected area, or the IT staff is unable to get to work.
What makes VMware Horizon Air even better is its elastic. So maybe all of your desktops normally run on prem. Heck maybe most of your organization still uses physical desktops. When something crazy like Snowpocalypse happens and the datacenter doesn’t have the capacity to provide everyone a desktop. You can grow out into the cloud, and still give everyone a desktop enabling them to get work done.
Wouldn’t it be even better if those desktops ran like they had an SSD drive backing them? But who wants to pay for expensive SSD? At VMware PEX, EMC said they plan to offer a desktop as a service reference architecture (RA) on the EMC* XtremIO All-Flash array. The reference architecture supports Starter X-Bricks scaling up to six full X-Bricks in a cluster. (The X-Brick is the storage building block for XtremIO.) The Starter X-Bricks can support up to 1250 full-clone virtual desktops and the full X-Bricks can support up to 2500 full-clone virtual desktops. Additional X-Bricks can be added to scale out linearly as demand increases.
You might be thinking “DaaS is too big for me.” You can still work with a service provider to see if they offer an EMC DaaS solution that you could purchase space in.
With that said your employees can either be out building a snowman with those who don’t have DaaS or inside being productive. Which is better for your employees, for your bottom line?
*In the interest of full disclosure I’m an EMC employee and I’m heavily involved in this release.
