OpenStack and the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC)

The future of OpenStack looks bright, and with the all the software-defined data center (SDDC) features contained in the recent release of “Grizzly” they are now ready to compete toe-to-toe with heavyweights like VMware, Nutanix, Dell, and HP. Whether they can start unseating VMware products in the enterprise remains to be seen, though. Despite the immediate SDDC advantage of OpenStack, companies and technologies like that of Nicira and Virsto, both acquired by VMware, are not to be ignored.

VDI Stall: VDI Appliances solve the hardware problem so, what next?

We’ve discussed the fact that VDI appliance makers were making good progress simplifying adoption of a virtual desktop infrastructure. An appliance-based route to market can be seen as win-win: being designed both to reduce cost and complexity of implementation (for the customer) and shorten sales cycles (for the vendor). So goes the theory. To understand this theory further one VDI appliance vendor, Pivot3, commissioned Dimensional Research to survey global IT in order to get real-world insight into the state of VDI.

Appliance Makers Simplify VDI Adoption

The growing availability of prepackaged appliances is making VDI increasingly attractive for customers who value the benefits of VDI. It is not only customers that benefit from this increased simplicity, smaller system integrators lack the appropriate skills to size and sell complex in VDI infrastructure environments can take advantage of these appliance-based solutions to compete with larger system integrators that have led the way in VDI implementation services.

Citrix and Dell team up to deliver VDI-in-a-Box

Dell has joined the the highly competitive and technically diversified single box desktop virtualization market in partnership with Citrix to package VDI-in-a-Box as a virtual appliance. The somewhat awkwardly named Dell “DVS Simplified 1010” appliance is built on the Dell PowerEdge R710 rack server that comes pre-installed with Citrix XenServer 5.6 and VDI-in-a-Box 5.0.