Sphere 3D With Lower-End Hyper-Converged Virtual Desktop Appliance

Sphere 3D Corporation announced the expansion of its family of purpose-built V3 hyper-converged virtual desktop appliances with the addition of the V50.

This addition provides deployment and management for distributed virtual desktop environments with fewer than 50 desktops. The company offers a series of V3 virtual desktop appliances, including the V50, V100 and V200, to meet requirements ranging from 50 to 200 virtual Windows desktops per appliance, with scalability up to 10,000 desktops or more.

V3 appliances are delivered pre-provisioned for installation into existing IT environments, eliminating long deployments typical of virtual desktop implementations. The V50 appliance is designed to address the needs of smaller distributed workgroups and offices while providing price-performance metrics. The V50 is for virtual desktop projects in larger enterprises and institutions that want the flexibility to scale their VDI environment by adding V3 appliances in increments of 50, 100 or 200 desktops.

“V3 Appliances uniquely help businesses to recognize the value of virtual desktops. Many VDI implementations get stalled when users experience slower-than-physical-PC performance with traditional SAN-based VDI architectures,” said Nilesh Patel, VP product management and product marketing, Sphere 3D. “Our unique distributed computing architecture provides the fastest virtual desktop experience on the market today. The addition of the V50 adds flexibility for enterprise-wide implementations of VDI that are designed to host the desktops as close to the users as possible, while still enabling central management.“

V3 Appliances integrate compute, storage and network interface, as well as the required hypervisor infrastructure, and are managed by Desktop cloud Orchestrator (DCO) management software. It simplifies set-up, maintenance and failover of desktop pools, making it possible for desktop administrators to remain in control of their desktops, manage infrastructure locally or in remote locations, all without specialized virtualization certifications. DCO’s software architecture enables V3 appliances to be a turn-key appliance solution that delivers HA failover architecture, eliminates performance bottlenecks and installation problems, and provides predictable cost for VDI deployments.

Alan Loh, senior sales director, Datum Technology Pte Ltd, an enterprise solution VAD in Singapore, said: “We were introduced to the V3 VDI hyper-converged appliance at vForum in Singapore and are very excited to have a product like V3 in our portfolio. V3 appliances offer a unique value proposition and remain highly differentiated from traditional converged infrastructure or solutions trying to use clustered storage file systems. Additionally, the added capability of scaling storage separately from desktop computing should create greater flexibility for our customers.“

Benefits of V3 Appliance Series:

• Ease and Flexibility of Deployment: The purpose-built, all-in-one V3 appliance incorporates storage, compute and management in a rack-mounted chassis. V3 appliances can be deployed and managed in a public, private, or hybrid model and scale up and out for industry-leading flexibility when deployed locally or in a datacenter.

• Operational Simplicity: The V3 Desktop cloud Orchestrator (DCO) management software streamlines virtual desktop pool administration with dynamic provisioning for maximum resource utilization, failover for HA, and the flexibility to migrate pools between public and private clouds.

• Predictable and Consistent Performance: By removing legacy VDI bottlenecks, the V3 virtual desktop appliance maintains consistent levels of performance for each V3 user, typically two to eight times faster than physical PCs.

• Secure Desktop Computing: The V3 appliance architecture delivers -secure desktop computing because no data is stored on, or transferred to, the user’s desktop. Administrators have the ability to control access in real time.

• Scalability: VDI typically requires additional storage for user data.Sphere 3D completes the V3 virtual desktop solution with optional SnapServer and SnapScale storage solutions that deliver cost-effective, reliable and infinitely-scalable performance and capacity.

The V50 appliance, optimized to serve up to 50 virtual desktops is available from authorized channel partners of Overland Storage, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sphere 3D.