In this blog, I’ll present my top 3 reasons why you should join the Desktop Cloud movement.

1. This cloud is one giant storm on the horizon
Last weekend I spent some time with a law firm based out of Alabama, which has pushed more than half of their physical desktops to the cloud. Or in other words, they have set up their own desktop cloud specifically for their law firm’s needs, and more than half of their employees are on virtual desktops. MORE THAN HALF, PEOPLE! That is cool! The IT Director at this law firm “sees” the future of desktop cloud computing. He told me that he was committed to desktop cloud computing, even as an early adopter with all the challenges that came with it. He said, "If I didn't do this, I was going to have to buy physical machines and be stuck with them for the next five years." He said it was worth the effort for him to push virtual desktops in his firm. Yes, it has been challenging at times, but it has been gratifying to him and his firm.

Early in my career at Microsoft we all received a book called, "Business @ the Speed of Thought" by Bill Gates. In it he described many of the factors and business decisions that made Microsoft what it has become. One of the chapters was titled: “Adopt the Web Lifestyle.” In this chapter, I remember reading an excerpt that, at the time, seemed very far reaching and yet describes our world today.

Yeah, you read that right, centralize your computing power – reverse all that you’ve been doing in IT for the past 30 years and go back to the dumb terminal mentality. Well, sort of… Technology has made vast improvements in the past few years.  Exciting new architectures are now available that truly make desktop cloud computing not only viable but superior in many ways to a traditional desktop system, and a complete transformation of a legacy VDI implementation.  Let’s take a closer look.

I recently met with a person from a well-known enterprise software security company who shared information with me about one of their 100,000-desktop companies for which they provide audit and assurances.  While the main reason they shared the information was driven by their interest in a secure desktop-as-a-service offering for enterprise and mid markets, they offered another piece of information about this use case that really sparked my interest.

I’ve written blogs about VDI TCO in the past. VDI TCO implies a cold-blooded analytical measurement of a product’s financial performance. It has its place and we stand behind our VDI TCO numbers, which in hindsight appear to be very conservative.

“What Keeps You Awake at Night?”
According to a recent survey¹ of State CIO Priorities for 2012, “Virtualization” ranked number #1 in the CIO list of priority technologies, applications and tools.  As for their 2012 top strategies, management processes, and solutions, “Governance”, “Cloud Computing” and “Security” were ranked as #3, #5, and #6.  So now that we have visibility into some of the issues that keep the State CIOs up at night, I’d like to get a little up-close-and-personal and ask you this, “How comfortable are you with the security of your VDI solution?”

A lot of people are confused about the components of a complete VDI solution and where exactly different products and companies sit. Case in point, back in August, Jack Madden wrote an article and mentioned that V3 competes in a crowded space with competitors such as Whiptail, Xtremio, and STEC,  not to mention “big boys” like Cisco, HP, and Dell. Yes, the “big boys” mentioned are competitors to V3, because they offer the complete VDI solution as a whole, but the first three are not and I would like to explain why in the following paragraphs.

To Persist, or Not To Persist – That is the Question
Back in May of this year I wrote about how all virtual desktops are not created equal.  I would like to expand on this now to talk about the different storage architectures, their uses, and how they apply to virtual desktop deployments. 

Too many people in the industry seem confused about the relationship between high IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) and VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) performance. To prove my point, I pose the following question to you, “When was the last time you logged onto your virtual desktop, and measured your user experience with IOPS?” I will take it one step further and ask, “When was the last time you measured the performance of your physical desktop with IOPS?”  I argue that 99% of the time you have not. You are probably like most of the population, and measure performance by how fast your applications open, by how smoothly your mouse curser cruises the screen, and by how fast you can get work done.

To risk sounding like Yoda: “Needs bring change, change brings progress, progress brings evolution. Evolution brings balance.”  Say good-bye to desktop administrators as we now know them.