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NOS, or Next-to-No Operating System (OS), is the exclusive platform in which 10ZiG customizes its Zero Clients with extremely lightweight and extremely secure OS, for accessing Microsoft solutions – including AVD, RDS, and now Windows 365 Cloud PC. With the 10ZiG NOS platform, you experience lightning-fast boot-up times, very low power consumption, and simple and intuitive configuration locally or via Cloud with The 10ZiG Manager – our free endpoint management software. The NOS Zero Client lineup provides a solution for all user types, from simpler task workers to more demanding power users.

Andy Martin, 10ZiG COO, “It’s not enough that 10ZiG works diligently to leverage our NOS Zero Clients, or any of our Client endpoints for that matter, with the latest Microsoft Solutions and others – we know what we do is our best. It’s also how we do it. We deliver cutting-edge custom hardware that is supportive of all these advances, with people who care, and offerings that truly help IT professionals. We deliver great products, great technology, great service, and the 10ZiG guarantee – we customize our products to work in the customer’s computing environments, and not the other way around.”

This latest 10ZiG Microsoft support feature enhances NOS Zero Clients 4648qm, 5948qm, 6048qm, and 6148m – task to knowledge to power workers – in that order. Microsoft Windows 365 Cloud PC securely streams the Windows experience to any 10ZiG endpoint device including personalized apps, data, and settings. It reduces security risks by storing information in the Cloud, and not on devices. It allows end users the flexibility to work where and when they choose to, with Windows in the Azure Cloud. For today’s remote and hybrid work situations, end users are enabled to access a full Windows PC virtually.

To learn more about 10ZiG, or to arrange for a free Thin or Zero Client demonstration device, please contact 10ZiG.

Image licensed by unsplash.com

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It’s an employee’s market and employers need to do everything they can to keep their workforce engaged, productive and happy. In fact, the U.S. has more job openings now than any other time in history. To keep workers on the job, many enterprises are prioritizing their end user computing experience. And well, they should.

With so many employees now working remotely full-time or in a hybrid workplace environment, a productive and collaborative computing experience is both needed and expected by today’s digital workers. Further, companies that can’t deliver a more engaging computing experience will face an uphill battle in attracting and keeping the best talent. This will ultimately impact both customer experience and revenue as well. According to Qualtrics, high team engagement contributes to 21% greater profitability and a 20% increase in sales, pointing to the direct value happy employees can have on the business.

The Cost of Traditional VDI

To deliver end user computing many companies have adopted virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technology, often turning to well-known brands who established themselves in the category decades ago. These solutions typically deliver the employee desktop through on-premises servers which are maintained by in-house IT teams. The problem? They can be very complex to manage and maintain, are very costly to license, require expensive hardware and are infamously hard to support.

This complexity can also translate into lower capabilities which effect the end user experience. Login times, for example can become dramatically impacted when complex traditional VDI implementations fall into disrepair. Access to necessary applications and data as well as security and policy limitations are also common challenges with legacy solutions. But heavy technology investments and solution licensing can “lock” enterprises in, a costly endeavor which will ultimately put a toll on user experience, and the business.

Benefits of Modern Cloud-Delivered Workspaces

One way to break free of this VDI vendor “lock in” and ensure a better end user computing experience is the adoption of modern, cloud-delivered workspaces or desktop-as-a-service solutions. By shifting desktop workspaces to the cloud, organizations can achieve the flexibility, security and user empowerment today’s workers need, while lowering cost and lightening IT staff loads.

When considering how to support your remote or hybrid workforce, consider these six advantages of a cloud model for delivering virtual desktops, such as Microsoft’s Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD), versus the restrictions of traditional on-premises VDI solutions.

1. Improved Scalability. One of the biggest takeaway lessons of the pandemic for IT teams has been recognition of the value of rapid response to change. Many enterprises needed to quickly support the work from home needs of their users, and that required the ability to quickly scale their end user computing environments. For those relying on traditional VDI this was harder than expected because scaling on-premises infrastructure was a big barrier to success. Alternatively, delivering employee workspaces from the cloud makes scalability easy. The environment can be easily scaled up and down when needed without a large infrastructure investment or heavy management overhead. In many cases, it can be as easy as clicking a button to add additional users or remove employees who have left the company.
2. Lower Cost. Supporting workspaces via public clouds like Azure, AWS and GPC is also much lower cost than traditional VDI, which is known for having very pricy and lengthy licensing structures. Furthermore, by delivering user workspaces as a cloud-delivered service, the investment is a consumption-based operating expense, not a heavy capital expense.
3. Greater Access to Apps and Data. With the cloud’s deployment simplicity, it’s also easy to enable user access to the apps and data they need to get their job done with efficiency. This not only keeps users productive and content but also helps eliminate the risk of users deploying their own, unauthorized apps which can create a “shadow IT” environment that increases security gaps and exposure risk.
4. Ensured Business Continuity. With corporate apps and data secured in the public cloud, the risk of unplanned interruption or downtime is avoided. Business data and apps are not at risk of a datacenter outage or disaster. Instead, data is consistently accessible via the cloud with protection assurance through the public cloud’s SLAs for redundancy and high availability.
5. Increased Security. Using cloud-delivered workspaces will minimize the security threat surface and help prevent security risk at the endpoint. When using identity and access management best practices, DaaS environments can protect sensitive data and ensure that only those that absolutely need to have access do, providing a much more tightly secured computing perimeter.
6. High Performance for Graphics-Heavy Workloads. For users that require access to graphics-intensive workloads or are heavy users of collaboration environments, such as Microsoft Teams, cloud-delivered workspaces are also an ideal choice. They can enable high computing power without requiring the cost of high-performance endpoint computers as the compute operations are performed in the public cloud environment rather than locally on the user’s device.

If employee experience is as important to your business as it is for most, consider the value of migrating physical desktops to virtual desktops in the cloud. Not only can it be achieved without changing the user experience much at all, you’ll realize so many more benefits in terms of management simplicity, cost savings, security and user productivity. It may just be the solution your environment needs to charge up the employee productivity, loyalty and engagement your business needs to spur growth.

Vadim Vladimirskiy, CEO and Co-founder, Nerdio

Image licensed by unsplash.com

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As a result of this agreement, Whitehat Virtual is the preferred virtual desktop services partner for BOXX. An expert in solving even the most challenging Citrix and VMware VDI issues, Whitehat Virtual has cataloged over 1,500 optimizations for virtual environments, making them perform better and deliver an optimal user experience. Whitehat Virtual is also a proven service partner for NVIDIA vGPU environments ensuring vGPU enables the best possible performance.

“The arrival of new virtual GPU (vGPU) technologies places heightened demands on virtual desktop technology,” said Val King, President and CEO, Whitehat Virtual. “For users of high-performance graphic applications that want the ability to work from anywhere there is an Internet connection, virtual desktops (VDI) must be paired with vGPU technology and optimized to deliver the performance and user experience digital workers need. At Whitehat Virtual, we’ve seen and solved it all when it comes to high-performance computing on VDI. We are pleased to bring our expertise to the BOXX community of power-computing users and we look forward to bringing BOXX innovations and high-performance hardware to Whitehat Virtual customers.”

As a result of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, work from anywhere means new demands on environments, including rich multi-media content delivery for remote training and facilitating team member communication. Overall, VDI environments struggle to deliver this level of content since most were not designed to support robust visual content.

NVIDIA vGPU software enables powerful GPU performance for workloads ranging from graphics-rich virtual workstations to data science and AI. This enables IT to leverage the management and security benefits of virtualization, as well as the performance of NVIDIA GPUs required for modern workloads.

“All VDI systems host multiple users on a single server,” said Tim Lawrence, Founder and VP of Engineering, BOXX Technologies. “Only BOXX has the experience and product portfolio to provide engineers, architects, and 3D artists with bare-metal performance in a virtual environment. With Whitehat Virtual managed services and support, we are extending our expertise in high-performance computing with a VDI services partner we trust.”

Whitehat Virtual’s partnership with BOXX Technologies was recently finalized and services options from Whitehat Virtual are available now through BOXX.

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Offering a complete, self-contained system to deliver hardware, software and management, Titanium HCI delivers everything Citrix and VMware Horizon users need to be successful, including better performance and a great end-user experience while lowering the total cost of ownership.

“The majority of virtual desktop users are frustrated with the cost, complexity and performance of their VDI environment,” said Val King, President and CEO, Whitehat Virtual. “Many continue to throw more tools and software at the problem, only to add to their management complexity and headaches. Companies need worry-free ongoing solutions, not band-aid fixes, that are guaranteed to work with leading-edge technology without escalating cost options. Titanium HCI offers everything VDI users need, for life. It represents the culmination of all our experienced team knows about building, managing, and supporting the use of virtual desktops by thousands of end users every day, from the simplest environment to most graphic-intensive, requiring NVIDIA vGPU to get the VDI end-user experience right.”

Built on the strength of Dell EMC and VMware vSAN Ready Nodes, Titanium HCI delivers scalability and easy hardware management and support. The solution provides the stability and performance benefits of best practices learned from more than 1,500 optimizations cataloged by the Whitehat Virtual team’s proven experience. Additional benefits offered by Titanium HCI include:

•  Sub 30-second VDI user logins
•  No performance bottlenecks
•  Automatic issue resolution
•  Fixed, predictable cost
•  No capital expenditure on software or hardware
•  Zero-cost Citrix and VMware upgrades
•  Fully deployed and managed

Designed for users that want to simplify their VDI environment or are looking for a quick and easy way to stand one up for the first time, Whitehat Virtual’s Titanium HCI packs everything that’s needed in a fully managed hyperconverged appliance. The solution is fully supported by the Whitehat Virtual team including:

•  Unlimited experts as required to address all issues immediately
•  Unlimited upgrades as necessary to maintain current protection and operation
•  Dedicated software for unlimited communication between customers and Whitehat Virtual experts
•  Unlimited resolution of challenges and network issues

Whitehat Virtual customer Central Texas Pediatric Orthopedics (CTPO) has reduced their VDI support issues by 68% since migrating to Titanium HCI infrastructure. “Our old IT infrastructure could not keep up with the demands of the practice.  Whitehat’s Titanium solution was perfect for our needs,” said Cindy White, Practice Administrator for CTPO. “After migrating to the Whitehat Titanium HCI infrastructure, our environment is 100% faster and more responsive. That means we can spend more time focusing on what really matters, the children in our care.”

Whitehat Virtual’s Titanium HCI is available now. For more information, visit: www.whitehatvirtual.com or register for a demo here to experience “VDI that’s Easy as Pie.”

Image licensed by: WhiteHat Technologies

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The two main reasons behind the sentiment were clear.

84% do not want to commute to work. Employees prefer the commute from the bedroom to the home office, the dining room table, or wherever they call the “home office.”

75% are enjoying the cost savings, or pay raise, depending on your perspective, that comes with staying home to work. Less money spent eating out, less spent on fuel, bus/train fare, lunch, less on wardrobe, etc.

58% of this group now consider the “benefit” of working from home so crucial that they would

look for a new job instead of returning to a pre-COVID office environment.

Of course, that is easier to say than to do, but the message is worth considering.

Employees have discovered that they can be effective in their roles working from home, among other perks, and no longer see enough benefit in being at the office. The financial and quality of life improvements that come with living in PJ bottoms and bunny slippers all day and still being able to get stuff done are just too compelling.

Working from Home Isn’t Perfect

Working from home is not perfect; it comes with some challenges identified in the survey.

Employees voiced a common concern with working from home, not being able to unplug from work.

While the short commute from the bedroom appreciated, the inability to separate the place work gets done from the home space introduces challenges for 35% of those surveyed.

Experiencing distractions while working from home, at 28%, was another element employees surveyed found challenging.

It is not hard to imagine what some of those distractions might be, especially for employees who cannot create a dedicated quiet space for work at home. Children attending school via distance learning, pets, and spouses working from home all come to mind with some of the challenges these can present.

From the employer’s perspective, beyond evaluating new ideas like downsizing or eliminating the office, this survey points out new stresses on organizations with a remote workforce.

The Technical Challenge at Home

28% of those surveyed said that one negative aspect of working from home deals with added technical problems.

The survey finding makes logical sense. There are more technology components involved in delivering a successful work experience when working from home. Many of these new elements are not the responsibility of the company IT department. Responsibility for supporting everything within the home network falls to the employee and maybe a tech-savvy relative.

Expanding beyond the corporate network to home networks, IT problems are more varied, making them more challenging. The types and brands of home IT equipment are more varied while the travel distance to support employees has increased. Outside of the office, employees can lose the benefit of unofficial IT support offered by those sitting nearby

In short, there is more to manage, less visibility, more variation, more distance, and no additional IT people to help. A perfect recipe for the surveyed response given by employees reporting that dealing with technical problems is one reason not to work from home.

Remote workers are harder to physically get to for IT personnel when something needs to be fixed or replaced in person than working in the same building as the IT team. It turns out there is still a commute of sorts; it just moved to IT department field techs traveling to employee’s homes or a nearby Starbucks to render assistance when remote support is not an option.

Many companies have taken the policy that it is the employees’ role to own support for their own home IT equipment which seems reasonable. In reality, these policies get tested when an employee working on a critical project has a problem with their home network preventing them from being productive.

While officially IT does not support home networks, the reality is it is an unofficial necessity in some cases to enable employees to work productively.

These elements contribute to the pain felt by employees when technical challenges occur and the increased wait times while the issues get resolved.

How Virtual Desktops Help

Virtual desktops continue to be an effective option to deliver an excellent PC-like experience for work from home employees while simplifying IT management efforts, reducing resolution times, and eliminating the need for staffing increases to meet increasing IT support demands.

There are some unique paths some companies have put in place to embrace the capabilities of virtual desktops and the simplification these environments can provide.

One financial services firm provides new employees with a menu of IT equipment to select from based on their role as part of the new employee onboarding process. The equipment chosen off the menu is pre-provisioned, asset tagged, etc., by a vendor-partner and delivered to the new employee’s home.

Equipment replacement, upgrades, etc., are all managed by the vendor, giving the IT department time to focus on other areas. With this model, IT can maintain standards and maintain appropriate training to deliver adequate support. Employees feel better about the experience because they get to have a hand in selecting the tools they will use to do their work. IT can reduce the complexity a bit and provide a better, more productive end-user experience.

Other innovative companies we work with have extra equipment (mice, monitors, computers, etc.) stored central to their remote employees, allowing them to replace damaged equipment and maintain productivity. At the same time, IT handles the logistics of servicing dead equipment. Hoteling at one of the office locations is an option if there is a problem with the home environment that will take an extended time to fix.

Virtual desktops deliver the applications employees need, and the pre-configured, hot-swap hardware makes management and logistics easy. With these systems in place, IT Support costs have maintained or decreased their pre-COVID levels while maintaining or improving the employee’s ability to work.

An engineering firm uses virtual desktops to protect intellectual property and expand their staffing options with VDI outside of their office locations to take advantage of more diverse pools of talent that do not want to move to cities with office locations.

Employees like working from home on their terms. While benefits more than outweigh the drawbacks for a large portion of the working population, there are ways to minimize the potential impact of some of the potential disadvantages considerably.

Technologies like VDI allow employees to work remotely and be productive with a better end-user experience than a legacy VPN connection can provide. The improved management and delivery capabilities will enable IT to support a diverse set of endpoints, including PCs, Macs, Chromebooks, iOS, and Android devices, in its evolution over the last 25 years.

This technology allows employees who can work from home to work from home and meet all security, intellectual property, governance, and compliance requirements and standards.

Great employees are hard to find and can be harder to keep, but the decision of where an employee should work post-COVID does not have to be a potential show stopper. IT can be equipped with a VDI experience to meet these use cases and protect the valuable talent that makes companies successful.

Source: https://www.statista.com/chart/24714/survey-on-pandemic-remote-work-us/

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Earlier this year, during our annual DISRUPT event, we had the opportunity to dig deeper into the issues and challenges IT faced during the onset of the global pandemic. Most specifically, we looked into how end user computing (EUC) professionals addressed the immediate need to move workers from the office to home with record speed.

Based on survey responses from 269 end user computing (EUC) professionals across North America and EMEA, 61% named user experience the most significant challenge they faced when shifting to a work-from-home model. While being the number one issue across all regions, the challenge was more prevalent in North America (66%) than EMEA (52%).

This finding was notable, considering the significance of the other challenges we ranked, including issues around security and VPNs as well as help desk impact and policy control. The takeaway? EUC professionals know that if user experience isn’t optimal, the productivity and performance of the company can suffer.

SECURITY STILL CRITICAL CONCERN

Even while user experience ranked the highest, it’s still notable to see that nearly half (47%) of EUC professionals ranked endpoint security a top challenge. Combine this with other related security issues including policy control (43%), VPN issues (42%) and unpatched devices accessing the network (21%), one could argue that concerns around security, together, do claim the top spot.

What is the EUC professional’s biggest concern when it comes to security? That they can’t effectively manage remote software, OS upgrades and patching for their remote systems (34%). Fear of ransomware attacks (24%) and accidental data loss (22%) were also notable. This shows that, while the concerns may vary, fear of limited protection for remote workers and their devices from unwanted intrusion is high.

NEED FOR A BETTER USER EXPERIENCE AND SECURITY DRIVES VDI ADOPTION

With user experience and security so top of mind, it’s not a surprise that EUC professionals, to address these needs, named virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) as a top consideration for adoption (58%) following the pandemic. This was a much more heightened consideration in North America (65%) than EMEA (25%).

Other significant technologies being considered following the pandemic are the adoption of cloud workspaces and desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) (44%), centralized endpoint management (38%) and moving Windows to the cloud and off the desktop (30%). Each of these solutions puts control back into the hands of IT for greater security and policy management, while further empowering remote users with the data and application access they need for high productivity.

Enabling technologies, including the adoption of a non-Windows based endpoint OS and the conversion of user devices into cloud-enabled endpoints also ranked as desired post-pandemic technologies, 24% and 23% respectively. As solutions to enable VDI, DaaS and the move of Windows to the cloud, these additional selections show that EUC professionals are not only looking at the future of their user workspace architecture, but how they will improve deployment speed for that architecture, while lowering costs.

PERSISTENCE OF WORK FROM HOME DRIVES NEW ENDPOINT PRIORITIES

Among the EUC professionals responding to our survey, one additional factor remained perfectly clear: employees will continue to work remote, long after the pandemic subsides. In fact, during the pandemic, 75% of respondents reported the more than 50% of their employees were working from home. Once the effects of the pandemic are over, as many as 39% expect more than 50% of their employees to continue working from home.

What does this mean for future EUC technology priorities? Respondents still prioritized end user experience, stating that employee experience management (EEM – 58%) technologies would become their top priority over the next 12 months. Driven by the need for increased security and a lighter IT resource load, identity and access management (IAM – 52%) and modern unified endpoint management (MUEM – 45%) were also in the top three.

Ultimately, the global pandemic has given EUC professionals a lot to deal with, in very fast order. This has accelerated many of the trends and technologies that may have already been in discussion, including VDI, DaaS and cloud workspaces. But what may not have been as anticipated is just how important a delightful user experience is to ensure business continuity and productivity.

Moving forward, close attention to the needs of users, along with ensuring security and simplified management for IT, will remain more important than ever. As we push beyond the effect of COVID-19 on the workplace, a heightened understanding of the challenges and needs to empower users to work remotely will remain. The silver lining may just be that we are more ready than ever to enable an agile work model, come what may.

The post Survey Finds User Experience is IT’s Top Remote Work Challenge appeared first on Digital IT News.

As a validated solution in the security segment of the IGEL Ready program, VeridiumID delivers passwordless authentication for VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure), DaaS (Desktop as a Service) and cloud workspaces. It enables organizations to eliminate passwords and/or legacy OTP token technology for user authentication. This enhances security and user experience while also reducing operating costs. The software-only platform has a front-end mobile application available from public stores or as a software development kit (SDK) and enables a broad variety of explicit and implicit authenticators to meet all customer and regulatory requirements.

“Veridium is excited to join the active and growing community of IGEL Ready partners,” said Ismet Geri, Chief Executive Officer, Veridium. “Device authentication is a critical component to any security strategy and is particularly important at the endpoint – whether in the cloud, VDI or DaaS. By validating VeridiumID for use with IGEL OS-powered devices, we are helping to provide a simple, yet powerful layer of security to safeguard applications and data from growing cyber threats.”

“The future of work requires secure access to cloud workspaces from anywhere on any device,” said Jed Ayres, Chief Executive Officer, IGEL. “Logging into corporate resources needs to be done without friction and with supreme confidence. IGEL and Veridium offer a true enterprise grade passwordless experience. We’re pleased that Veridium has joined our growing network of more than 100 IGEL Ready partners focused on delivering the industry’s best end user compute solutions.”

Now more than ever, providing customers and their employees with reliable, frictionless access to tools, applications, and services is critical for businesses continuity and growth. The IGEL Ready program ensures that partner applications are validated and shared, and that their customers have access to updated and secure software. This rapidly growing ecosystem of over 100 technology partners enables customers to consider compatible devices and partner applications across a range of categories in the customer-facing IGEL Ready Showcase.

To learn more and start the application process, visit igel.com/partners/technology-partners/.

To explore the IGEL Ready ecosystem of solutions, visit igel.com/ready.

Image licensed by Pixabay

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Whether or not a business decides to combine WVD with Citrix, the first step in migrating more VDI workloads to the cloud is moving Citrix workloads to Azure. Establishing Azure as the Citrix cloud of choice provides flexibility for the future – integrating WVD at some point or adding other Citrix applications. Hosting a Citrix environment in Azure – either workloads, the management layer, or both – removes the need for expensive on-premises server hardware and storage. Azure offers a rapid deployment platform, with a consumption-based pay-as-you-go model, perfect for addressing the current challenges in a remote-centric work environment.

Readiness Checklist

The combination of Citrix Cloud and Microsoft Azure makes it possible to spin up new Citrix virtual resources with greater agility and elasticity, adjusting usage as requirements change. Virtual Machines on Azure support all the control and workload components required for a Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service deployment. Citrix Cloud and Microsoft Azure have common control plane integrations that establish identity, governance, and security for global operations.

Before moving an on-prem Citrix implementation to the cloud, start with this checklist to assess your Citrix-on-Azure readiness:

• Define the user workspace: Start with an overview of how your employees are currently accessing applications. Estimate how many users are expected within the environment. Determine what types of applications will be consumed and what the VDI requirements are for the applications. Assess Citrix Virtual Apps versus Virtual Desktops as the best system for delivering the applications.
• Gauge workflow performance requirements. Analyze when users will be accessing the environment and what are peak hours. What is the expected consumption throughout the day? The consumption of users during specific hours helps identify workspace requirements for scale automation and Azure reserved Instance purchasing.
• Determine geographical reach needs. Obtain a clear, current picture of where end users are located. Will workspaces need to be deployed across multiple regions or only in a single region? Multiple Azure regions are typically considered for the following high-level reasons: – Proximity to application data or end users – Geographic Redundancy for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery – Azure Feature or Service availability.
• Evaluate current applications running on Azure, if any.  Will they be migrated to Citrix on Azure? Have they been vetted recently for business value to justify cloud storage costs? Are they also hosted on-prem? This is an opportunity to do some application cleanup based on ROI and storage fees.
• Establish identity management. How to achieve identity integration is a decision the IT teams need to make early on. One of the cornerstones of the entire picture of Azure is the identity of a person and their role-based access (RBAC). Azure identity is managed through Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) and Azure AD Domain Services. IT must decide which way to go for its identity integration.
• Assess application security requirements. Azure provides a wide array of configurable security options and the ability to control them so that customers can customize security to meet the unique requirements of their organization’s deployments. Among best practices, Citrix recommends keeping VMs current and ensuring at deployment that the images built include the most recent round of Windows and security updates. It also recommends periodically redeploying VMs to force a fresh version of the OS.
• Estimate needed environment resiliency. VDI, whether in the cloud or on-prem, needs to be reliable and resilient. IT can perform a load and stress-test on VDI before putting workloads into production and/or moving them to the cloud. Business critical applications cannot fail. This test can determine the resilience level of the system to handle usage peaks, for example.

Pre-production testing is essential to ensuring business continuity as VDI workloads go into production. Look for an expert that can stand up a demo of your environment. Many can be live in just a matter of days. This will enable you to test applications before executing any switchover from on-prem to the cloud and give you the confidence you need to realize a rapid time to value.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (RSHP) is well-known for designing a wide range of building types from offices, education, and retail to civic and healthcare. Employing a staff of 200, it’s famous for the Grade I-listed Lloyd’s Building, The Leadenhall Building – the so-called Cheesegrater where its head office is based – Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport and The Macallan Distillery and Visitor Experience in Scotland. The quality of its designs have been recognized by the architectural industry’s highest awards, including two RIBA Stirling Prizes, one in 2006 for Terminal 4 Madrid Barajas Airport and the other for Maggie’s West London Centre in 2009.

“Rather than using standard PCs or laptops, architects follow the film industry and rely on powerful graphics-based software and workstations to do their work. But they were holding us back and we couldn’t get the flexibility we wanted. The idea was to develop a strategy to introduce mobility into the practice so that staff aren’t just stuck to their desks but can work from anywhere irrespective of whether they are in or out of the office.” – Mark Read, RSHP’s head of IT, RSHP

Grid Technology Powers VDI

A key facilitator of this strategy has been the introduction of VDI along with grid technology from NVIDIA. At its on-premises datacenter, RSHP has installed VMware Horizon View running on seven high performance Dell EMC PowerEdge R740 rack servers – each with 24GB of system memory to fuel graphics power – with a further three servers located at its disaster recovery site.

NVIDIA Tesla P40 graphic processing units (GPUs) have been used to ensure that the server-based graphics are then segmented and shared so that each member of staff gets 1GB of performance. This is ample to run key applications like Autodesk Revit, Bentley MicroStation, Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft Office 365 and a project information management system from New Farmer.

IGEL OS Allows Workstations to be Repurposed

To maximize its investment in existing Dell workstation hardware, RSHP has installed IGEL OS, allowing it to convert and repurpose these Windows machines into Linux devices, thereby extending their operational capability to around seven years rather than four as is currently the case – a 75% increase in lifespan.

The IGEL Universal Management Suite (UMS) is then used to centrally manage and control them – a massive benefit to the IT team of four – as it saves time having to go to individual desktops to update software, install patches and so on. The new desktop solution was purchased through IGEL gold partner, Creative Network Consulting based in London.

“We looked at competitive products but they were a bit clunky. We wanted something which offered a good end-user experience, fast login into VDI, was simple to manage and which runs smoothly on each machine. That’s what IGEL delivers.” – says Read

Another reason for the selection was IGEL’s easy integration with Cisco Jabber for instant messaging, video and voice calls and conferencing. Read adds, “Frankly IGEL was the only solution where the telephony worked. With other suppliers, you could see the softphone on the desktop but not actually hear anyone.”

In terms of roll out, further to a proof of concept with one architectural team, RSHP will roll out the solution project by project – equating to about 15 teams – a process expected to take no more than three months.

Work-life Balance Realized; Solution Minimizes the Impact of the Coronavirus Outbreak

While it is early days on the project, RSHP is positive about its move to VDI and use of IGEL OS. By avoiding an annual workstation refresh cycle, budget has been reinvested into VDI – a platform which has delivered the flexibility the practice was looking for, with even specific applications experiencing a performance gain.

“While there are clearly benefits to the IT team in terms of central endpoint management, this project has been all about enabling staff to work as they want to rather than being constrained by technology. VDI has introduced full mobility and encouraged a better work-life balance so that architects can now work when and wherever they like using whatever device they have on hand. And it’s simple to do so. It doesn’t matter who you are, anyone can use the system.” – said Read

Read adds, “In less than a few months, work-from-home and remote work computing demands have gone beyond being simply desired to becoming absolutely essential. VDI and IGEL are certainly helping us address the challenges presented by the Coronavirus pandemic so we can continue to support and serve clients effectively.”

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