VDI and the cloud would seem like a match made in heaven. By outsourcing your desktops to a 3rd party, you can save a lot of time and capital expenditure. VDI is complex, so why not capitalize on the in-depth planning and execution that someone else has done already?

This is the idea behind dinCloud, a California-based supplier of enterprise cloud services. As their CTO, Mike Chase puts it, “we had to solve 64 major problems” in order to deliver a great user experience that is highly reliable and lightning quick.

In the process, they learned a lot and integrated a number of innovative technologies, including Xsigo virtual I/O. Three objectives drove their thinking in selecting virtual I/O:

1. Compute density: To minimize costs, dinCloud sought to maximize server utilization without compromising performance. The company’s high-end servers had sufficient compute capacity to accommodate 170 users each, but would have required eight 10G Ethernet connections per server to avoid I/O bottlenecks. With Xsigo, just two connections provided higher performance at ¼ the cost.
2. Server uptime: To maximize equipment utilization, it was essential to minimize the downtime imposed by server maintenance and configuration change requirements. “Planned maintenance can take equipment offline for hours, often involves many manual steps, and introduces operational risk, all of which drive up costs,” Chase continued. “With Xsigo we can make changes in software, with fewer steps, and with zero downtime, all of which helps us offer a better quality service at less cost.”
3. Transparency: Enterprise cloud customers demand predictable service levels that match what users experience with their own data center. In a shared cloud environment, traditional infrastructure lacks the granularity to guarantee application performance, forcing providers to over-provision resources to meet service level agreements. Xsigo’s quality of service features let dinCloud ensure bandwidth to specific applications under all conditions without over-provisioning.

Chase explained, “With Xsigo, our environment becomes compartmentalized. If an application misbehaves, we can limit its impact on other applications. When a problem does occur, we can pinpoint the issue to a specific application, something that is nearly impossible with a traditional infrastructure.”

VDI and the cloud looks like an idea that’s bound to take off, and dinCloud is off to a great start. Learn more about them here.

Tags: cloud, VDI

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 7th, 2011 at 7:13 AM and is filed under cloud, VDI. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.