VDI: Goin’ Mobile

October 25th, 2011

David Messina, VP Marketing and Product Management, Xangati

I can pull up by the curb
I can take it on the road
Goin’ mobile
I can stop in any street
With a tablet – which is sweet
Goin’ mobile
Keep me movin’

‘Keep me movin’—the famous refrain of The Who has become the refrain of the end user. And as end users push for the convenience of their favorite mobile device to access corporate data and applications, VDI is in the spotlight.

It’s difficult to ignore that something is happening. Vendors (those that are advantageously positioned, anyways) are predicting the death of the PC; pundits are calling mobility the tipping point issue for VDI; carriers are touting the imminent release of mobile virtualization solutions; and the numbers from the market research firms are going up, up, up.

Despite some layers of confusion, one thing is crystal clear. The world is definitely ‘goin’ mobile’ and this trend is going to have an enormous impact not only on your business but also on our society as a whole. What is more difficult to determine is exactly what it means for your enterprise and what it means for you in terms of managing this whole process.

What do you have to do to take your users to this new era of unparalleled flexibility? How quickly must you do it? What devices do you need to support? How exactly do you manage these emerging dual persona or split-personality smartphones or tablets?

One blog is not long enough to answer all of those questions. But I want to open a dialogue on this topic—which I know will continue to be a hot one—and touch on what Xangati sees as being some of the critical performance management issues facing us in this brave new mobile world.

To start, let’s look at some fundamental truths:

With reduced costs, maximized productivity, and improved business efficiencies, businesses are embracing virtualization and scaling deployments accordingly. A September 2011 Forrester Consulting study projects the number of virtual desktop deployments will grow from 27 percent to 46 percent in the next two years.
Without a doubt, the inflection point of desktop virtualization is fast approaching – propelled by demand for “at your fingertips” mobility, bring your own device (BYOD) freedom, or consumerization of IT—however you want to define it. With its simplified provisioning, VDI allows IT to more readily support user choice for the latest and greatest mobile devices and still control the process—making it an extremely attractive proposition.

At the recent GigaOm Mobilize, Art King—Global Infrastructure Lead at NIKE—talked about how NIKE is implementing mobile solutions. With more than 30,000 worldwide users, Nike’s IT department wants to make employee-owned tablets and smartphones a part of its everyday business reality. According to King, end users are frustrated and want their professional computing experience to better match the ease and convenience they already enjoy in their personal computing experience. NIKE’s solution involves enabling employees to bring their iPhones and iPads to work and to fully access applications and information within the firewall.

But, as end users push for a mobile solution, the pressure remains on IT to ensure a positive end-user experience. Performance management is still the key to successfully rollout VDI whether to office-based thin clients or an entire distributed mobile workforce. Without a guaranteed positive end user experience, mobile VDI deployments are doomed to failure, and the touted productivity gains are a total wash.

Xangati’s solution gives you the 360-degree visibility across both the physical WAN and the VI, so you can manage and track every VDI session end-to-end as it traverses the network—from any device, including smartphones and tablets. This unparalleled visibility is key to successful deployment of VDI. With live, real-time views and proactive system health alerts through our Performance Health Engine, Xangati allows you to quickly identify and resolve performance problems before they start to impact your road warriors.

The technology is coming fast, and the reality will be a hybrid. Your users are pushing for it, and you need to be prepared to manage a mobile environment with the right approach and the best tools to ensure performance. As the leader in infrastructure performance management, Xangati is intricately familiar with managing highly complex VDI environments. We’d love to talk with you about how our solutions are helping customers manage and grow their VDI environments to include a wide range of mobile devices.

…

Out in the woods
Or in the city
It’s all the same to me
When I’m mobile

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