Cisco and Intel Re-Imagine Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

Co-Author: Chris Michael, Product & Solutions Marketing Manager, Cisco and Christine McMonigal, Director of Hyperconverged Marketing, Intel

2020 has been a year that’s caused organizations around the globe to throw out the rulebook when it comes to tradition. With the massive migration to working remotely, the definition of “work” itself has changed. It’s no longer a place you go, but an activity you perform – an activity people are performing from anywhere they choose.

This rapid shift to enabling a more flexible, agile workforce hasn’t been without its drawbacks. Suddenly, businesses must:

Ensure workers have secure access to business-critical data and applications
Ensure that those applications perform as well remotely as they did on-premises
Ensure their user’s devices can be easily maintained across geographies
Ensure their infrastructure can scale as needed

As organizations move to address these challenges while adapting to the changing professional landscape this year has delivered, many are choosing virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to simplify the transition. VDI offers a proven approach to increase worker productivity, security and flexibility regardless of their location or the devices they choose to use, and the latest updates to hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) provide even greater benefits for VDI.

HCI provides an efficient infrastructure to support VDI, with simplified deployment and management that easily scales incrementally as needed, reducing CapEx and OpEx. Cisco HyperFlex, running on Intel-based Cisco UCS servers, provides a performant, scalable, and flexible HCI solution that supports multiple VDI options.

But VDI, like all technology, is not one-size-fits-all. Just as important as flexibility is to the workforce, so too is a responsive, productive environment. VDI is a compute-intensive workload. It is important that VDI solutions deliver adequate resources to meet users’ needs for responsiveness. Intel’s extensive product offering enables organizations to tailor their Cisco VDI solutions to meet these user requirements.

Intel has partnered with the VDI SW ecosystem and Cisco to optimize performance and efficiency on Intel technologies. Second Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors offer:

Outstanding performance for VDI where VM density is key
Efficient scalability to meet the needs of diverse numbers and types of workers

Additionally, Cisco UCS servers that utilize Intel® Optane™ persistent memory can deliver large memory capacity and support for data persistence without the huge costs that capacity typically incurs. This enables more VDI users or consolidated sessions to be active on fewer servers – reducing CapEx, Opex, and datacenter real estate.

Beyond this, Intel’s Data Center family of SSDs, including Intel Optane SSDs, can speed access to data, while Intel Ethernet Converged Network Adapters help ensure network performance meets users’ needs for responsiveness.

As your organization continues to migrate to an infrastructure that enables remote productivity, airtight security, and simplified and streamlined management and maintenance, the benefits of Cisco VDI solutions will help meet your requirements. Cisco and Intel are trusted advisors on VDI and an array of workloads, from the private to public cloud, providing guidance to help accelerate your evaluation, deployment, and time to value.

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