There is a lot of speculation about whether 2010 will be the year VDI hits its stride.  We all know intuitively there is a huge market for desktop virtualization given the large installed base of PCs that need to be refreshed - the questions are, how quickly will this market adopt desktop virtualization and is the technology addressing needs sufficiently  to drive broad market acceptance?

Our point-of-view, from having worked with VDI over the past decade, is that the demand for virtual desktops is real, but for widespread adoption two things are needed: the technology needs to be less expensive than PCs and it must be easy to use.

Interestingly, several studies have pointed out the same - just this week I just saw an article from a business consulting firm who said that most VDI proof-of-concepts are failing.

The first two of their three reasons relate to cost and the corresponding value.As they say, "customers must replace cheap desktop computing and storage with expensive datacenter computing cycles.  This is a major upfront capital expenditure that is difficult to justify in a tough economy."

We consistently hear this from our customers - companies want to do more with less. The question they ask is: "How can I use my PC replacement budget to deploy virtual desktops and get a lower TCO without needing a datacenter forklift or changes to my business processes?"

This is the exact problem Kaviza addresses - our patent-pending architecture eliminates the need for expensive infrastructure and shared storage, and scales on inexpensive commodity hardware.  All the desktop provisioning and management functionality is built-in, so you can simply load Kaviza on any hypervisor-enabled workstation grade server, and go, and it is designed to be managed by desktop IT.  Try how easy it is, and let us know what you think.

Labels: complexity, cost, Desktop Virtualization, fail, hot trend, Kaviza, proof-of-concept, Terminal Services, VDI

A news item caught my attention a few days back:  a Pa. school district was accused of using the webcams on school issued laptops to spy on a student at his home.  This raises an interesting issue of where to draw the line between access and privacy - especially as several school districts are considering issuing laptops to middle and high school students.

The reason schools want to provide students with computers is benign and noble - they want students to easily have access to all the software programs and tools they need to do their school work without having to buy and install these themselves. But the question is, should schools be issuing laptops?  Not only does this raise privacy issues, but it also adds to management and oversight headaches - schools now have to keep these laptops patched and up-to-date, they have to track these assets, update them, etc.

There is of course a better way - school districts could provide students with virtual desktops that have all the software applications and tools the student would need to do their school work.  Students can access these virtual desktops from anywhere - from their home computer, from a computer at the library, etc.  This solves several issues: i) schools don't have to be in the business of managing physical laptops or patching them - they simply update the templates for these virtual desktops periodically and the changes get propagated automatically the next time the students login, ii) privacy is ensured since the virtual desktops can be locked down to restrict access, so schools can enforce policies easily using the desktop templates, and iii) this option provides students with anytime, anywhere access without having to carry around a laptop and manage it.

All the school districts we speak with are very receptive to virtual desktops - they love the simplicity, the ease of management, and the affordability that solutions like Kaviza's offer.  Don't take my word for it, try it for yourself.

Labels: Desktop Virtualization, Kaviza, privacy, School laptops, security, VDI, virtual desktops

I am always curious to see who Time Magazine picks as the Person of the Year because their pick not only honors that person's achievements but more importantly, it recognizes a key theme or trend that was a major focus for all of us that year.


I wish Time would do the same for companies - if they did, my pick for 2010 would be the Small to Medium Enterprise (SME).SME's today can enjoy the same superior technology infrastructure, sophisticated forecasting applications, and cutting edge innovations for a fraction of the costs that large enterprises paid for these innovations.

Who would have thought a few years back that you could now have a global CDN for pennies, thanks to cloud computing players like Amazon, or that for a few dollars a month, you could have sophisticated sales forecasting or marketing automation applications thanks to the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies.

These "as-a-Service" and cloud  innovations with flexible pay-as-you-go models level the playing field, enabling SMEs to compete with the same level of sophistication as the big guys.  But, there is one area where this cost disruption has not yet happened - on-premise virtualization.

Virtualization infrastructure still requires massive datacenter buildouts, with expensive shared storage, and custom built setups that are complex and labor-intensive to manage.   But it doesn't have to be - especially not with desktop virtualization.  Virtualizing deskotps streamlines and drastically cuts down desktop support costs, improves uptime, and gives companies a competitive edge where it matters most - its employees' productivity.  This is of value not just to large enterprises, but perhaps even more to SME's, who have to do more with less.

Which is why Kaviza has re-designed the hosted desktop virtualization stack so companies do not require the expensive datacenter buildouts or shared storage pools to run virtual desktops - for under $500/desktop, starting with as few as 25 desktops, a company can quickly and cost-effectively get immediate ROI on virtual desktops with Kaviza.  Try it for yourself, and see how Kaviza is changing the game in desktop virtualization.

Labels: Cloud Computing, Desktop Virtualization, desktop virtualization. VDI cost, Person of the Year, SaaS, SME, Time Magazine, virtual dekstops

Here is a video chalk talk describing why we founded Kaviza, the shortcomings of VDI today and how Kaviza's architecture addresses VDI cost & complexity. Take a look and let me know what you think!

Labels: Citrix, Desktop Virtualization, Kaviza, VDI, Video, VMWare, YouTube

Last week, UK's, "The Register" conducted a survey on VDI in which they found that although customer interst in VDI is high, customers see cost as the primary roadblock to adoption. This exactly matches our experience. We founded Kaviza to eliminate the cost and complexity of VDI. Here are some highlights from the survey resuts:

Server-based VDI was second only to Terminal Services (TS) as the most adopted form of desktop virtualization. Given how long TS has been around and how new VDI is this is quite remarkable and it validates the sort of interest that we are seeing among both customers and partners.


So if there is so much interest and understanding why aren't deployments going through the roof? What's holding VDI adoption back? Well, the latter questions of the survey bring that out well. It has to do with the costs.

Cost was picked by respondents as the major reason for not moving forward with VDI. Over 75% felt the upfront infrastructure and implementation costs of VDI was the biggest roadblock, followed closely by the high storage costs.

Of course, this is exactly why we founded Kaviza two years back. Having led VDI for large companies, we saw how expensive it is to implement traditional VDI. This is because traditional VDI is layered on top of a generic server virtualization platform and uses the same heavy infrastructure that was designed to virtualize a few mission critical applications (in the hundreds) as opposed to thousands of desktops. And therein lies the issue. Current VDI approaches require big-iron servers, shared storage like SANs, high-speed interconnects - all of which are expensive to acquire and deploy.

At Kaviza, we realized the only way to bring down the cost was to start from scratch. We set out to design a VDI architecture that could run on inexpensive commodity whiteboxes and scale horizontally like modern Web architectures (e.g. Google). No more high-speed interconnects and shared storage and servers with expensive FC HBA cards. Kaviza's VDI-in-a-box is a distributed next gen VDI solution that provides virtual desktops at sub-$500 prices (the pricepoint is the fully loaded cost of a virtual desktop, including Microsoft's VECD license and all the infrastructure). We recently launched a Beta, and the response has been overwhelming.

If you'd like to try it for yourself, check out our free trial. In and hour or two you should be up and running with a single server and many desktops. If you want HA, then email us to get the license that will allow you to tie many such boxes together without the need for shared storage, high-speed interconnects and all the other stuff needed for mission critical server virtualization. In case you want to read the articles: click here to participate in the survey, its still open. See the results here.



Kumar

Labels: Desktop Virtualization, poll, Register, VDI cost, VDI survey, virtualization

Today is an exciting day for us at Kaviza. We launched a beta  of our multi-box virtual desktop appliance which offers built-in high availability. 

You can setup a highly available farm of virtual desktop servers by simply loading Kaviza on two or more commodity servers and linking them together.  It is truly that simple - no custom coding, no expensive SAN's, high speed interconnects, or high end servers are needed.  Our entire solution can be setup from scratch in under three hours.  With Kaviza's unique shared-nothing, Google-esque architecture, you get a highly scalable solution at a very low cost.  There is no single point of failure, and features like high-availability are built-in.

And the best part is that our virtual desktops cost less than a PC to deploy - our fully loaded cost (including the server, our software, MS, the hypervisor, and other licenses, thin client) is cheaper than a PC.

We are encouraged by the response we are getting from early trial users on this release. Here is some feedback we have received from beta partners and customers:

"Now I see why you say it's "turnkey". We got the whole thing up and running on multiple servers in just a few hours."

"Neat architecture, solves the fundamental awkardness with VDI."

"My team is raving about your solution."

You can either download a free trial of our single box version here, or register here if you would like to try the multi-box version.  We would love to get your feedback, let us know what you think!

Labels: Desktop Virtualization, High-Avaialbility, New Release, Product Announcement, VDI