vSTAC R2, Pivot3's Next Generation VDI Appliance – the sub-$200 desktop virtual desktop is here?

Pivot3 have made vStac R2 simpler to implement, more scalable and drive further savings than its predecessor. Headline features include utilising VMware View Storage Accelerator allowing reduced hardware costs, performance increases with more memory and updated processors allowing greater VM density, and networking options that can enable adoption by a wider SMB market. With vStac R2, Pivot3 continue to drive the hardware cost and complexity of VDI down. The headline $165 / desktop will be compelling. The performance assurance and dynamic expansion in R2 will likely solve many administrative headaches. The key for any turnkey VDI solution remains getting the assessment right, and managing and delivering on the wider user experience once deployed.

Licensing your Private Cloud

Both Microsoft and VMware have revamped their product suites and therefore their licensing once more and how you buy will dictate how you license (as always). It has taken a bit of time for all the information to percolate through to each corporate site and all the issues to be addressed. As we did before, let us look at licensing. We will look at first the old model of Hyper-V vs VMware vSphere vs Citrix Xen vs RedHat KVM. Then in a follow-on article we will look at the new cloud suite models.