Companies to Expand VDI

Alacritech, Inc., in NFS storage acceleration, announced the results of a third-party survey of storage professionals.

The survey, conducted earlier this month, gathered information on companies’ intentions around VDI, reasons for implementing, storage challenges with VDI infrastructure, and on what devices virtual desktop applications were to be supported.

Around half of the respondents are currently using VDI solutions, with 43% planning to purchase or expand within the next year.

Participants, whose titles ranged from storage manager to CTO, were asked about purchase plans and what benefits they expected from deploying desktop virtualization. Ease of support was by far the top ranked expected benefit, with more than 44% ranking it their number one reason to implement. Improved data security and cost-savings were closely tied for the second most important expected benefits. With a mirror into BYOD strategy, half of those surveyed said they want to deliver Windows and web applications to employee-provided devices such as tablets and smart phones. Of those, 43% said they plan to do this in 12 months or less, 20% are already doing it, and 37% said they plan to roll out this phase of VDI in a year or more.

Further survey responses provided that approximately 50% are considering purchasing a NFS caching appliance to offset the strain VDI puts on storage infrastructure. 28% said that they are planning a year or less to implement that acceleration appliance.

"These responses are encouraging on two fronts," said Doug Rainbolt, VP marketing, Alacritech. "First, it appears that many companies are recognizing real benefits and are moving out of the pilot phase, ready to roll-out VDI to larger audiences in their organizations. Second, approximately the same number of respondents realize the potential a NFS caching appliance has to an efficiently-run VDI setup, and are actively investigating implementing one or more."

The Alacritech NFS acceleration appliance, the ANX 1500, improves VDI performance by taking advantage of solid state storage, offsetting CPU bottleneck issues, and eliminating much of the latency that storage-heavy VDI can create.

These survey results help confirm that storage administrators are starting to recognize that the technology now exists to create fast, secure VDI setups.

"We expect that, with technology such as ours and the increased availability of solid state storage, VDI will continue to become a more practical approach for companies of all sizes over the next few years," added Doug.