Sphere 3D Corp. announced its next generation of V3 virtual application and desktop solutions.

V3 Desktop Cloud Orchestrator
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Three appliance families that come pre-provisioned with Desktop Cloud Orchestrator (DCO) software take aim at making VDI accessible to business and branch offices of any size. The families converge storage, server and virtualization services to create unprecedented scale-out and up appliances for VDI use in all three cloud models: private, public and hybrid.

The families are in three categories: V3 Smart Nodes for large centralized enterprises; V3 End User Computing (EUC) Nodes for decentralized and ROBO locations; and V3 Flex Nodes for smaller businesses and branch locations, even locations with as few as ten users.

"Our new family of appliances expands our V3 platform to address the requirements of businesses today and the many ways that their employees use technology," said Peter Bookman, global strategist, Sphere 3D. "In the real world we see businesses that are distributed into many locations of differing sizes and with workers who have vastly different technology needs. The work we have done to enhance our DCO software has enabled us to create new architectures for VDI. With complementary purpose built and workload optimized appliances, businesses can select the most appropriate V3 appliance, or group of appliances, for each location to support the appropriate number and type of workers. This new approach to VDI is the physical expression of our vision for a complete cloud architecture, which includes the distributed hybrid cloud for virtual desktops, virtual applications and storage."

Capabilities in V3 product families include:

• Multi-site architecture. V3 Appliances are designed for use at multi-site businesses, and are cost effective and simple enough to deploy to almost all business locations. The ability to fail over from site to site means that the V3 distributed hybrid cloud architecture becomes more reliable as the number of locations increase.

• Right-sized and workload optimized. V3 appliances offer unmatched options to meet the simplest task-based workloads (i.e., the simplest applications), all the way to some of the highest-end application and desktop workloads (i.e., the most complex applications). However, V3's architecture is flexible to the point that a business owner can easily change and grow their VDI footprint as their business needs change without any requirement to replace their current investments in existing infrastructure.

• Simple to deploy and simple to manage. The company utilizes DCO software to create drop in appliances which are simple to install and manage. After the initial deployment, customers can use existing desktop administrators to maintain their virtual desktops and applications. In addition, by enabling specific local storage capabilities V3 appliances deliver a faster and more efficient user experience than physical or other virtual desktops. DCO is complementary to a customer's existing virtualization management and as such is amongst the first to integrate and take advantage of Vmware Inc.'s features in Horizon.

• Glassware 2.0 and SNAP compatible. The V3 family of appliances are integrated with the G-Series family of products, which utilize Glassware 2.0 technology. Glassware 2.0 can reduce the size and cost of appliances by delivering the most commonly used Windows desktop applications in a more resource efficient manner and increase the application ecosystem available to be virtualized. By adding the SNAP storage family of offerings, users can take advantage of hybrid and distributed storage. These combined technologies enable delivery of desktops and applications with greater flexibility than ever before.

Introducing next-gen V3 product families for complete cloud:

• V3 Smart Nodes - designed for scale up efficiencies that fall squarely into the hyperconverged model utilizing VMWare's VSAN technology for clustered storage. The ability to have a shared file system between the V3 Smart Node appliances allows for the most efficient scale up model for converged systems. It is targeted for large central locations such as data centers and corporate Hqs. Leveraging new functionality within VSAN, such as stretch clusters, Smart Nodes offers a platform for distributed hybrid architectures that is far simpler and more complete than previously available offerings.

• V3 End User Computing (EUC) Nodes - designed for use in both single and multiple location deployments, including ROBO locations. EUC Nodes only require a single node to start. This category is the workhorse of the V3 work-load optimized architecture. V3 EUC Nodes, due to their ability to failover site to site, create a network of distributed sites that become more reliable as the number of deployments at multiple sites increase. This flexibility means a business owner does not need to tear down their IT architecture should requirements change; which in most businesses they inevitably do. The V3 EUC Nodes allow business owners to grow their desktop, application and storage infrastructure as needs dictate.

• V3 Flex Nodes - designed for smaller branch locations, as small as ten users per site. In addition to scaling down the cost of the customer's technology infrastructure to meet the needs of the location, V3 Flex Nodes specialize in business mobility. It use VMWare's policy management layer to give the user the best fit of several different experiences. It provide local access to workspaces without internet access and can utilize VMware technology to provide virtual desktops offline so a user could work regardless of network availability. It can be distributed throughout multiple sites using our V3 DCO management software.

All three of these product families leverage firm's DCO software along with flexible appliance configurations to enable single node appliance installations that can address any size or type of workload, regardless of location. This drop in appliance approach is simple to install and manage yet can scale from tens to 10,000s of users.