Businesses in Ireland are “arguably” still behind European counterparts in terms of desktop virtualisation adoption. So claims Grace O’Rourke Veitch, country manager for Ireland with Citrix. Careful not to paint too gloomy a picture of the marketplace here though, O’Rourke Veitch was quick to add that the situation is improving with a “renewed interested in, and understanding of, the strategic value that desktop virtualisation can bring” beginning to become evident.
Indeed, asked what the biggest game changer in the virtual desktop market in the past year has been, Rob Paddon, solutions director with Trilogy Technologies said the “key change” for him has been “a much broader acceptance and adoption of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and a much better understanding in customers of the costs versus short, medium and long-term benefits they should expect to gain.”
It’s likely, added managed services and cloud evangelist at IBM Global Services, Bryan Hickson, that company CFOs will need to “see a return on investment in less than 12 months because an upfront cost for desktop virtualisation is going to be more expensive up front than just doing a standard desktop rollout”.
With this in mind, O’Rourke Veitch said organisations must select “the right combination of desktop virtualisation technologies to match the needs of a range of workers – from task workers to executives that travel extensively”.
“The key change has been a much broader acceptance and adoption of VDI and a much better understanding in customers of the costs versus short, medium and long-term benefits they should expect to gain,” Rob Paddon, Trilogy Technologies
Storage
CEO with Qualcom, Ken Breen told TechPro that over the past 12 months one industry trend he has picked up on is the increase in storage devices “tailored to VDI workloads, particularly solid-state storage like Tintri”. These products, he said, “can provide more IOPS per user, which allows for a much improved virtual desktop user experience”.
Storage was also pinpointed, alongside network performance, by Barry Sheeran, senior virtualisation consultant with Logicalis Ireland, as being potential “technical killers” for VDI. “You need both,” said Sheeran who also revealed that he has seen greater adoption levels of virtualised applications such as [VMware’s] vApp and ThinApp recently which are allowing VDI desktops “to be more homogenous and use standardised images”.
“Non-commodity applications can be virtualised and delivered in tandem to the ‘vanilla’ desktop, over a file share or on portable devices, which keeps everything simpler, more reliable and with strong performance,” said Sheeran.
Elsewhere, Jim Kelly, consultant systems engineer with Datapac said that the desktop virtualisation offerings which have gained “the strongest foothold in the Irish market over the past year” are those that securely provide users with the “same high quality of experience across all mobile devices”.
One of many industry experts to raise the changed face of the virtual desktop market brought on by the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, Kelly said that Citrix, Microsoft and VMware “have all continued to improve their desktop virtualisation offerings” to respond to this shift.
“CFOs will need to see a return on investment in less than 12 months because an upfront cost for desktop virtualisation is going to be more expensive up front than just doing a standard desktop rollout,” Bryan Hickson, IBM Global Services
Mobile devices
“Users of mobile devices are essentially using thin client devices anyway,” noted Paddon, “and so VDI potentially offers a win for the users in that it can make access to corporate systems and data much easier and quicker, while for companies they can potentially layer on security and management in a way that may be challenging otherwise, especially for BYOD and similar hybrid models.”
Hickson pointed out that recent research from IBM found that “a typical end user now spends two thirds of their time on their mobile device as opposed to their laptop and pick up their mobile device 150 times a day”.
Saying that any worthwhile desktop solutions deployed “definitely” had to focus on the importance of “linking in desktop infrastructure with mobile infrastructure”, Hickson added the functionalities made possible by this approach are too good to ignore.
“You can update your sales targets, share files and documents, access data on the client and be ready and prepared for a meeting on the fly. It’s an enabler,” said Hickson
“Organisations must select the right combination of desktop virtualisation technologies to match the needs of a range of workers – from task workers to executives that travel extensively,” Grace O’Rourke Veitch, Citrix
Protecting data
Peter Trevaskis, enterprise marketing manager with Dell Ireland warned however, that when it comes to intertwining the virtual desktop with mobile devices, “the gains to be had in user productivity have to be offset against the cost of protecting the organisation and its data from the gaps that can appear through an unplanned BYOD strategy”.
Also weighing in on the influence of mobility in the current market was Francis O’Haire, director, for technology and strategy at DataSolutions. He said “truly mobile workers” have placed unique demands on any desktop virtualisation solution. “For one thing, they may need to operate with no connectivity at all,” he pointed out, “in this instance a typical VDI solution here will be of no use, as the desktop runs in the data centre”.
For such situations O’Haire said that Citrix XenDesktop delivers “centrally managed, virtual machine desktops for offline use on Windows or Apple laptops which have no connectivity”.
Logicalis’ Sheeran added that offline desktops are “VDI but with a twist”. A user can, he said, effectively download their desktop and work on it locally before uploading or re-syncing back to the data centre later “once they are back on the corporate LAN or VPN”. Sheeran added, “Each vendor has its own mechanism for doing this”.
“However,” he said, “unless offline desktops can be implemented with relative ease, and the mobile workforce is large enough to warrant this option, an encrypted laptop may actually be the better option for these users.”
“Non-commodity applications can be virtualised and delivered in tandem to the ‘vanilla’ desktop, over a file share or on portable devices, which keeps everything simpler, more reliable and with strong performance,” Barry Sheeran, Logicalis Ireland
Desktop-as-a-service
One increasingly popular concept in this is space the area of desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) which sees the back-end of a VDI solution hosted by a cloud service provider. “This will be a pivotal year for DaaS,” said O’Haire, “many businesses are still struggling to upgrade their desktops from Windows XP but at the same time are seeing how easy and cost-effective moving services and applications to the cloud can be.”
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