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Get VDI-ready with HPE SimpliVity! Remote work is here to stay

The future of work is here – and desktops are virtual. Hyperconverged infrastructure that is fully tested in VDI environments, customer-proven, and simple to manage can propel your business forward. Validated by LoginVSI, HPE SimpliVity is a compact, cost-effective, all-in-one platform, ideal for remote workforces. 

SimpliVity_VDI_remote-work_shutterstock_1906258501.pngVirtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) isn’t new, but the surge in worldwide deployments is – and it’s not going to change any time soon. When the pandemic hit in 2020, IT organizations that were barely familiar with VDI suddenly needed to put in place edge infrastructure and connectivity that would keep their businesses running smoothly and without disruption. VDI was an obvious choice, because it replicates the office environment from any location and provides simple and secure remote access to   the same apps and data that would have been available onsite.

Fast forward (although for many, it’s been more like a slow crawl) to 2021 and working remotely has become a day-to-day reality, forcing us to reevaluate how we see the future of work. A recent McKinsey survey revealed that businesses around the world, on average, plan to reduce office space by 30 percent. Remote working for now, and perhaps over the long haul, is the new normal across nearly all industries.

But how do you find the time to research and deploy a solution that can take you into the future? The pandemic has forced many businesses to operate with skeleton IT crews and the last thing you need is more complexity and untested solutions.

Validated, high performance hyperconverged infrastructure for VDI

You’re in luck! Running VDI applications on HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) has been proven to be efficient and cost-effective – making it a perfect remote solution to take your business into the future. Due to its simple and centralized management, easy scalability in an all-in-one appliance, peak and predictable performance, built-in data protection, small footprint, and speedy ROI, HPE SimpliVity is consistently recognized as one of the strongest infrastructure solutions available for VDI.

Recently, HPE engineering published a reference architecture for HPE SimpliVity with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops7 which shows excellent results. And our engineers aren’t alone in their findings. Login VSI, the de facto standard in benchmark solutions, also validated and tested the solution and their results are so compelling, Login VSI wrote a blog about it. 

"This validation confirms that a single, tiny, little, 1U HPE SimpliVity 325 server demonstrates high performance for 200 Knowledge Workers per server. This high-density solution demonstrates some of the lowest response times we’ve seen," states Blair Parkhill, Product Director for Login VSI. "The validation also confirmed linear scaling, at 200 desktops per server, up to 8 systems in 8U providing high performance for 1600 Knowledge Workers. Think about that… if you lined up the laptops side-to-side, that would be the length of almost 5 soccer fields, and this solution fits in 8U or 14 inches of rack space. Very impressive."

Customers share insights on HPE SimpliVity at the edge

From a customer standpoint, HPE SimpliVity is an ideal platform for VDI. A Tech Validate survey shows 26% of our customers rely on the hyperconverged technology to support their virtual desktop environments.

TechValidate Survey of 626 users of HPE SimpliVityTechValidate Survey of 626 users of HPE SimpliVity

Here are some snapshots of what our customers have to say.

Duane Morris

At Duane Morris, a law firm founded in Philadelphia, IT teams scrambled to obtain the necessary hardware and additional software licenses necessary to support entirely remote operations when the coronavirus pandemic forced everyone out of offices.  

Like everyone else, our staff's remote access has surged over the past few months. Prior to the lockdown, 450 people was the maximum number of remote workers we’d ever had logged on at the same time. Within a day after all of our offices closed, that number jumped to more than 1,200. There’s no way we could’ve sustained that amount of remote access reliably with our previous infrastructure," reports John Sroka, CIO, of Duane Morris. "We’ve also experienced a huge increase in web conferencing, which we’re actively supporting. In fact, we recently hosted a firm-wide diversity and inclusion webinar that was attended by more than a thousand people. It was the largest web-based conference that we have ever hosted and it was also the most highly attended meeting that the firm has ever held, virtually or in person. We were really pushing the limits of our technology, not knowing exactly how it was going to work. The good news is that it worked very well.

Migros Tikaret

Retail giant Migros Tikaret constantly changes course to meet consumer needs.

We were initially running 300 virtual desktops and needed to spin up 700 more to give our employees the flexibility to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic," says Murat Zobu, System and Cloud Infrastructure Manager, MIGROS TICARET A.S. "Using HPE SimpliVity, we were able to do so in just 12 minutes.

PITT OHIO

Transportation and logistics provider PITT OHIO eased management burdens and increased efficiency with HCI.

The real story on HPE SimpliVity’s performance is how easy it was to add capacity to our VDI environment when COVID-19 hit us in March.  I remember meeting with our CIO on a Monday, when I was told to start thinking about ways to send everybody home and retain productivity. That Tuesday, the directive was, ‘We need to send everybody home now.’ That meant we immediately had to set up 250 people for remote work," says Dave Wundereley, Director EIOS, PITT OHIO. "Luckily, we already had a big VDI environment on HPE SimpliVity, so enabling additional remote workers was just a matter of adding some Citrix servers without even having to add any hardware to the environment. That’s primarily because of the shared storage and the way the I/O is handled. The way HPE SimpliVity does the data dedupe makes a big difference and allowed us to stretch to what we needed. Within three days, we had more than 150 people working from home. In the past, there’s no way we could have scaled that quickly.

Red Bull Racing Honda

Red Bull Racing Honda needs to maximize use of data and resources to drive insights that fuel performance.

 

About 80% of our day-to-day business applications are running on HPE SimpliVity,” relates Zoe Chilton, Head of Strategic Partnerships, Red Bull Racing Honda. "When the pandemic hit, the platform was ready to respond. When we started redirecting people just before the Formula One shutdown, the infrastructure was so scalable and agile that we were able support more virtual users, more VDIs, and enable people to work from home. We could carry on without too much disruption.

Sefar

Textile company Sefar opted for a private cloud solution.  Sefar has developed a fully private cloud based around the HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure. More than 1,000 virtual desktops now run in the environment, with more being added all the time.

 

The fact that we could provide so many virtual desktops effortlessly is a great plus for the HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure. It wouldn’t have worked without it,” says Claudio Zollet, Head of Corporate IT, Sefar . "This example demonstrates that the new IT infrastructure is “opening up new opportunities to implement things in a completely new way.

HPE SimpliVity prepares your business for the future of work

When it comes to the new remote working world that for many companies is the new reality, these HPE Simplivity customers understand the value that HPE delivers:

  • Unmatched and independently validated client virtualization performance for a superior user experience
  • Linear scaling in affordable, all-in-one increments – from pilot to production
  • High density desktop deployments with high availability and built-in data protection
  • Proven success with customer evidence

Click here for more information about HPE SimpliVity for VDI workloads.

Learn about the guaranteed 10:1 data efficiency that HPE SimpliVity provides.  

Read the HCI Buyer’s guide to find out what to look for in an HCI solution.

 

Jodie Jordanger headshot.pngJodie Jordanger, Product Marketing Manager, HPE Storage and Hyperconverged. Connect with her on LinkedIn!

 

 

 

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