I’ve been hearing a lot about VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) lately. ABI Research predicts this technology is going to grow from $500 million in 2009 to $5 billion by 2016. For the March issue of Business Solutions magazine, I interviewed MSP (managed services provider) RMC ProIT, a division of Ray Morgan Company. This company is projecting 100% growth this year, and it’s attributing much of its growth to VDI opportunities in the education vertical. You can check out this article here: www.bsminfo.com/go/0312VDIfeature.
Before you make the move to VDI, however, check out this counterpoint perspective from OS33, an IT-as-a-Service cloud platform vendor, which recently released the following article: 5 Reasons Why VDI Falls Short on Delivering the Full Benefits of Cloud Computing. In this article, OS33 President Jacob Kazakevich proposes that VARs sell Web-based desktop solutions rather than VDI solutions.
I’d really like to get your perspective on what you think about this debate. Do you think OS33 makes a valid point, or is VDI the better way to go?
March 13, 2012 at 3:37 pm
Both technologies seem to have potential on the surface. Depending on a companies current technology requirements, either solution could look like a fit but at the end of the day both solutions leave me unsatisfied.
VDI, Thin Clients, and cloud based machines bring me back to the days of mainframes and terminals. It sounds like people are trying to bring the past into the future, throw some fancy names around, and sell people a failed technology concept. There is a reason this architecture was abandoned.
When software vendors realize that people are bypassing their licensing agreement or finding loopholes to reduce the number of licenses needed you will quickly see their licensing or pricing updated to fix the problem, any savings you were expecting will be lost and you may even end up paying more. Also, as software requirements increase you will be able to run less clients from each server and have to either upgrade servers or purchase new ones to provide the same processing levels for each client.
I do agree that these technologies give IT professionals more control over their end users and that software updates will be much easier to implement in this type of environment. On the flip side of that, problems are going to be multiplied when the server is down or their is a networking problem and it takes down hundreds or thousands of users.
On the surface these technologies look good, but in my opinion they are simply new implementations of old ideas.
April 3, 2012 at 9:40 am
You make some good points in your post. One of your first points is that VDI feels like a throwback to the mainframe/terminal days, which was abandoned for a reason. Don’t you think that the improvements in corporate and consumer bandwidth overcome a lot of what was missing years ago or do you see other areas that make this type of computing environment problematic?
And, as far as licensing goes; with companies like Microsoft embracing virtualization (Hyper-V)and the cloud model for software licensing (i.e. Office 365 and SPLAs), do you really think that the savings are going to be lost for VARs and their end customers?
I do have to agree with you last point about the problems that occur with an over-reliance on VDI or Cloud-based apps when the service becomes unavailable. Even if the cloud service provider offers 99.999% uptime availability, the local ISP may not be nearly as reliable, and the solution is only as good as its weakest link.
April 16, 2012 at 5:56 pm
You make a great point Jay. Local ISP’s are going to have an issue with the 99.9 % uptime if their datacenters are all in one geographic region. In the end the user is going to go with the technology that gives them the most satisfaction for their money. If you go all in with cloud they’ll need to have multiple DC’s spread across the country as evidenced with the earthquake in Virginia last summer being felt in Toronto and affecting DC’s north of Philadelphia. Most software companies are embracing the cloud and MSP’s as part of their product offering and have factored this model into their costs.