Dell Appliance for Wyse — Business-Class VDI for $331 per Desktop

Toward the beginning of last month, I compared the costs of DaaS and VDI, suggesting that the difference was too small to declare a winner. The three-year cost of a bare-bones DaaS service, like Amazon WorkSpaces, comes in at about $315,000, not so far off from the $380,000 list price of a VMware EVO:RAIL–based VDI platform with …

Dell FluidFS 4 and Dell Compellent FS8600

Dell FluidFS is a scalable NAS software storage solution sold as an independent front end to Dell’s storage offerings (Compellent and EqualLogic). FluidFS provides file-level access to Dell Compellent and EqualLogic traditional block-based arrays, using protocols like SMB and NFS. FluidFS is also where Dell has chosen to implement technologies like deduplication and compression (which …

Dell PowerEdge FX2 Converged Architecture

The Dell PowerEdge FX2 is a 2U rackmount blade chassis with a common infrastructure allowing servers and storage to share power, cooling, network switching, and chassis management. When it was announced last fall, there were two options: the FC630 two-socket, half-width Xeon blade, and the FM120x4, an Intel Atom–based microserver option. Dell quietly started shipping …

GTC: The Biggest VDI Conference of the Year

It’s hard to believe, but this week’s NVIDIA showcase, the GPU Technology Conference (GTU), might be the biggest VDI conference of the year. This year, there are forty-nine sessions covering GPU virtualization for desktop workloads. Yes, that’s right: VDI is as big at GTC as it was at both Citrix Synergy and VMworld last year.

Six Features You Absolutely Need on Your Storage in 2015, Part 2

In part one of this article, I lamented the state of our enterprise storage arrays and talked about the features we absolutely need on any new arrays bought this year. Why the lament? Because this is 2015, and we’re tired of the 1995 technology we’ve been using. When you send out your RFPs this year, …

Six Features You Absolutely Need on Your Storage in 2015

It’s 2015, but you would think it was 1995 based on what we’re still using in our data centers for enterprise storage. We still have gobs and gobs of spinning disks, sucking power and boring us to death while they find our data. Convergence is largely unconverged—we still have separate Fibre Channel and IP data …