Covid-19 makes 2020 the year of VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure).
I had the opportunity to speak with Alan Conboy, Office of the CTO at Scale Computing which was founded in 2008 to address the expense, complexity, and disaggregation of virtualization amalgams.
Scale Computing wrote every layer of its virtualization platform to ensure it integrated smoothly, reduced complexity, and significantly reduced the RAM footprint. The 2011 prototype of HC3 led the move to hyper-convergence.
Scale offers small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), K-12 schools, state and local government and education (SLED), and mid-market businesses easy to use and deploy infrastructure. Ahold Delhaize has standardized on HC3 and is installed in 6,000 grocery stores. The operation of HC3 is so easy the manager of the grocery store can do it. The platform is offered as an OEM solution by NEC and Lenovo.
Alan has seen growth in the edge over the past four years as SMBs have moved beyond the firewall while also reducing cost, complexity, and support renewals while increasing ease of use. Over the last two months, during the Covid-19 pandemic, companies are focusing on VDI and enabling their employees to work-from-home (WFM). There’s also a lot of focus on security as research has shown that 48% of home networks are infected.
When a business moves to HC3 they are able to take the manpower that was managing infrastructure and let them focus on DevOps, tuning apps, and more strategic technology initiatives. Time is money and HC3 saves both since it is self-monitoring, self-healing, and self-load-balancing. A hospital client that had moved to HC3 prior to Covid-19 experienced no problems with technology staff working from home during the pandemic. Administrators have logged into the platform from their smart refrigerator, their Peloton, and their child’s tablet.
When I asked Alan how he saw the future of SMB infrastructure, he mentioned that each of the last 10 years was supposed to be the “year of VDI” but the pandemic has really made that promise come true in 2020. VDI is part of business continuity and how businesses need to work going forward. As WFH requirements are loosened, Alan anticipates digital workspaces, security, end-user, and distributed computing will be supporting companies as more employees WFH partially or fully.
As part of their ongoing commitment to be agile and dynamic, Scale Computing just introduced the HC3250DF, the first of a new class of HC3 appliances designed to enhance support for performance-intensive use cases such as database analytics and high-density VDI deployments. With faster storage, more CPU, and faster networking options, the HC3250DF is specifically designed for the needs of performance computing for both the enterprise and the SMB and from the core data center to the edge.
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