After catastrophic earthquakes in Christchurch toppled its New Zealand law office, Duncan Cotterill implemented desktop virtualization to provide stronger disaster resilience, according to the law firm’s CIO at the time.
Natural disasters, bring-your-own (BYO) computing and the overall familiarity that many organisations now have with virtualization has generated a groundswell of activity, with CIOs seeing desktop virtualization as a means to reassert their authority over the end-points in their business.
The popularity of consumer devices combined with the launch of four learning hubs has caused the University of Sydney to deploy desktop virtualization software across its campuses.
If two technology trends were ever made for each other, at least in vendor marketing materials and generically simple diagrams of IT infrastructure, they are the consumerisation of IT and desktop virtualisation.
NSW electricity grid operator, TransGrid, will move as many as 500 of its desktop PCs to virtualised thin clients in an effort to reduce costs and extend the hardware refresh cycle to seven years.
More than halfway through what vendors and many analysts predicted would be the year virtual desktops would replace enormous numbers of the physical kind, sales of desktop virtualization products are growing at a rate "that looks about the same as in 2009," according to Ian Song, analyst for International Data Corp.
Desktop virtualization has a predicted growth curve that leaves much of the PC and IT services industries smiling: Yet none of the technologies or service providers promising to offer hosted virtual desktops are ready to step into key roles in enterprise IT infrastructures, according the same well-respected analysts who set the server virtualization market on its ear with a similar conclusion last year.
Virtual desktops-once the most rigid, least friendly way to put applications in front of end users-have become a hot topic by promising to deliver the security and easy maintenance that was always desktop virtualization's strength. The trouble: Desktop virtualization now comes in so many varieties that even vendors confuse terms referring to the flavors.
In response to the desktop performance challenges of their widely dispersed workforce, a global financial management firm leveraged a VMware Horizon View virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployment with Tintri VMstore to meet end-user performance needs while reducing the burden on IT.
