Storage Major Obstacle to VDI

DataCore Software Corp. has commissioned a report with European IT managers to assess the viability of VDIs working successfully and economically in smaller environments.

The research was gleaned from surveying nearly two hundred UK IT managers, two thirds of them working with companies with under 500 employees, who had considered, but not yet adopted, VDI.

Key Findings and Conclusions
Storage Major Obstacle to VDI
Researchers revealed that most respondents broadly understood that whilst conceptually VDI adoption promised to lower the cost of ownership and reduce the complexity of upgrades, (cutting support and extending the longevity of existing hardware); in reality, VDI was perceived as being too complex to deploy and required a far greater storage overhead than most SMBs would wish to source.

Key findings from the research:

• 25% of organisations with fewer than 100 users upgrade desktops as required without a budgetary plan.
• Reducing desktop total ownership costs is the aim cited by the largest proportion of respondents (40%) closely followed by reducing the desktop support burden (39%).
• Reducing the cost of a one-off desktop upgrade was cited by 27%; 26% cite increasing security and 22% cite better user experience. The desire to gain more control over users was a factor for 19%.
• 12% of respondents said that, although they had achieved their aims for VDI deployment, overall IT costs stayed much the same. And 8% said that although desktop costs were reduced, server and storage costs increased.
• Increased storage costs ambushed 11% of their investments.

If your organisation did virtualize some
or all of its desktops,
what were the extra costs which came as a surprise?

 (Base: 105 SMEs)

Key conclusions for resistance of VDI
uptake within the report include:

• SMBs feel high up-front costs primarily due to the need to implement a specialized storage infrastructure to support performance and HA in a real-world deployment.
• SMBs are concerned that although they appreciate that VDI may lower the TCO at the desktop level, extra costs will emerge elsewhere, such as the storage level
• SMBs feel that due to vendor pricing models typically suited towards the enterprise that promised economies of scale will not translate for typical SMB 100 to 200 seat environments. In larger scale deployments large up-front costs can be made to look less impactful as they are spread over larger project outlay numbers.

To download the full report