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Want Apples, BlackBerries, and Mangoes? Then Nourish their Trees!

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

My column last month---The Desktop is Dead, Long Live the Desktop---talked about how the desktop is no longer an equivalent of the desktop PC, but rather about bringing the desktop experience on a whole range of different devices like tablets, smartphones, PC sharing devices, cloud-based desktops, and so on. To put it another way, Apples, BlackBerries, and Mangoes are all growing, but shall not ripen up for usage if their trees aren't well-nourished.

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If we put this in context of consumers, then trees are well-nourished with well-placed app stores at the back-end that consumers can use to download apps that interest them. However, the same doesn't hold true for corporate usage. Trees, or shall we say, the ecosystem that makes devices perform at their full potential, still require a lot of nourishing.

There are several aspects associated with tuning the ecosystem of mobile devices for corporate use. One is how you deliver a desktop across devices. A way of doing this is using a hosted desktop technology called VDI, short for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. It requires considerable changes to your back-end infrastructure-servers, storage, network, etc. The quantum of this change of course, depends on the type of VDI technology you deploy.

Do you want to simply provide apps or a complete OS for your devices? If you're providing the OS, then do you want to provide a shared OS or map a physical blade server from the data center for each user? The latter would require significantly higher investments than the former. In both cases, you would require high-speed storage like a SAN at the back-end to store and deliver virtual machines.

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Next, do you want to provide desktop access to devices on your LAN, like thin clients and desktop PCs or mobile devices like notebooks, smartphones and tablets? Here, you'll have to look at your WAN infrastructure and make sure it's optimized to deliver the desired experience to users. For the LAN also, you'll have to ensure that there's minimum latency.

Besides the back-end infrastructure, other important pieces of the ecosystem are app stores and software to manage a desktop on different devices. Because there are so many different devices, each with its own OS, or a different version of the same OS, it becomes a challenge to deliver the same desktop experience across all. The problem is indeed quite complex.

Our cover story this time talks about the different types of VDI solutions, and how you can deliver them to users; solutions required for the same, and the various desktop options available.

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