VDI Is Not Just About Thin Clients

As part of our never-ending quest to unearth new trends in VDI, we recently spent some time going through the Web sites of some of the leading hardware and software vendors, such as VMware, Microsoft, Dell and one or two others. The goal was to seek out case studies of organizations that have actually deployed VDI and to find interesting stuff to share with our readers here. One of the things we found of interest was that a number of companies are utilizing traditional rich clients within their VDI deployments, even when they have gone to a model that is predominantly thin-client based. Here are a few examples of how it’s being done:

• Rather than buying all new client devices, one company is using all of its older PCs and repurposing them for VDI. Each of the PCs has locked-down USB connections, so the threat of stolen or lost data is basically gone. All of the applications, operating systems and user data are in the data center, so none of it gets saved or stored locally. This is significantly extending the life of existing hardware. When the devices reach the end of their life cycle, they are then replaced by thin clients.
• Similar situation at a school district in the Midwest. It couldn’t afford all new client devices when it deployed VDI, so it is repurposing all of its existing devices and extending their lifecycles. Again, as these devices need replacement, they are replaced with thin clients.
• One government agency decided to use VDI as part of an effort to encourage telecommuting as part of a Congressional mandate. The solution was to extend the user’s office environment into the home using rich laptops with centralized control over the client’s work desktop. The result is that many more employees are working from home four days a week – thousands of employees, actually – and the organization has saved money on office space and IT support while enhancing security, collaboration and disaster recovery.

Do you know of a similar success story in VDI? Feel free to share it here at VDI Trender.