VDI Is an Essential Part of Hybrid Work
Although virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) has been available for many years, it recently has become vitally important—not just for basic email and single-task applications, but also for advanced levels of communication, collaboration, learning and creating distributed workforces.
As hybrid work becomes the norm, modern VDI solutions that are designed to meet the ever-expanding needs of remote workers will be critical in delivering exceptional employee and end-user experiences. The primary benefits of VDI—work location flexibility, simple management and a consistent security model—are still prominent and have been vastly improved with the latest solutions. IT teams are leveraging the latest technologies and using VDI as a means of enabling a better user experience.
The Many Benefits of Upgrading Your VDI
The dramatic increases in performance, density and support for new accelerator technologies (i.e., GPUs) are top of mind. The massive increase in remote workers and the growing number and diversity of applications being used by these workers are reasons to upgrade. Legacy VDI worked well with simple apps and standard personal productivity tools, but today, remote workers are using computer-aided design, graphic-intensive and data-intensive apps that are much more demanding. Modern VDI can now support the task workers, knowledge workers and power users who make up distributed workforces.
From an IT perspective, the ability to support more remote workers and more demanding workloads is a compelling reason to upgrade the organization’s VDI. Modernization of your infrastructure also brings additional operational benefits. For example, performance per square foot is much higher with new infrastructure, which helps reduce data center sprawl and frees up rack space. Optimizing the amount of needed infrastructure also reduces power and cooling demands and helps meet energy efficiency goals. Further, when more capacity is needed, the newest generation of servers and management tools makes it far easier to add new resources or components without downtime or service interruptions.
Another important goal for IT is to scale operations to support larger VDI deployments. Hence, enhanced management tools that enable IT teams to scale their environments to support significantly more users and provide a consistent, secure environment are a big differentiator. It is critical to have modern operational tools that make it possible to monitor and optimize dynamic VDI workloads and ensure that VDI resources stay responsive to workers.
Hybrid Work Is Here to Stay
Today’s VDI environments must deliver a user experience that is not simply improved but that also meets or exceeds users’ demands. Poor user experiences negatively impact worker attraction and retention. Cisco’s UCS and HyperFlex systems, powered by AMD EPYC processors and managed using the Cisco Intersight hybrid cloud operations platform, provide VDI with outstanding performance and scalable operations. AMD EPYC processors have all the power needed for maximum efficiency and compute density. Cisco’s validation and testing approach enables faster deployment with less risk, seamless integration with existing environments and security for VDI workloads.
A modern operational model is key for simplifying management through global policies that streamline configuration and ensure that consistent security parameters are established. Cisco Intersight simplifies operations by providing holistic management and monitoring capabilities across the entire infrastructure stack—compute, network and storage—enabling IT teams to easily monitor capacity, utilization and potential faults. Most important, Intersight workload optimization capabilities can dynamically adjust resources to meet the constant changing demands of applications, ensuring performance and eliminating any bottlenecks. With these advanced operational capabilities, deploying and maintaining VDI is simplified.
Cisco and AMD are collaborating to deliver high-performance, secure, resilient and scalable VDI that can meet the needs of the most demanding and resource-intensive applications. The performance payoff is Cisco UCS leverages the number of cores on AMD EPYC processors and that allows for more users per server. For more information about this solution, please go to: https://www.cisco.com/c/m/en_us/solutions/computing/ucs-amd.html.
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