Workspace Anywhere During a Global Health Crisis

By Colin Gallagher posted 04-03-2020 18:02

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The last few weeks have been, to put it mildly, chaotic as we all have struggled to adapt to once-in-a-lifetime situation that has turned all our daily lives upside down. While some of us may have worked remotely a lot, the outbreak of the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) global health crisis has required many more businesses to ask many more or even all of their employees to work remotely as a measure to stabilize and contain the situation. Some of my friends, whose employers never considered remote work, are now struggling to login remotely as they protect themselves and the communities. This evolving situation has put remote work to a major test and on a never-seen-before scale.

Some of the challenges facing business in ensuring business continuity while complying with social-distancing guidelines are below:

How to enable all employees to work remotely with access to all apps
How to quickly scale the remote environment to serve all remote workers
How to deliver a native desktop experience for all users, across the locations and devices
How to ensure data access, security and compliance while users are outside the corporate walls
How to provide continuous data access for users in the event of outages and unforeseen events

One solution companies are using to overcome the potential business disruption is Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). It can be the cornerstone of a connected work environment enabling employees to perform business operations anytime anywhere and from any device.

Due to its unique characteristics, when designing a VDI environment, careful consideration needs to be provided for the entire stack of VDI, encompassing network, underlying compute and storage infrastructure to achieve the business and IT objectives from the solution. Because of so many moving parts, IT teams sometimes miss certain critical details when architecting a remote desktop solution.

We at Hitachi are stepping up to help our customers navigate the unprecedented situation and come out of it unscathed. Hitachi partners with VMware and Intel to deliver a highly available VDI solution that meets your time-sensitive need of extending your workspace into employees’ homes.

Remote work for everyone: Integrated VDI solution ensures that all users have quick reliable access to desktop and apps. Enterprise-grade hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) powered by VMware vSAN to power small and large workforces. The solution provides elasticity to optimize IT for today and future workspace needs.

Kickoff VDI in hours: Pre-validated turnkey VDI appliance engineered with industry-leaders Intel and VMware Horizon to reduce time to deliver desktops. Desktop-as-a-service from your own data center. Quick starter packs to accelerate deployment

Invisible boot storms: Consistent native desktop experience with all-NVMe UCP HC powered by Intel Optane SSDs. Consider boot storms to be a distant memory (a piece of history) with the exceptional end-user experience across devices, locations, and connections. What more than happy users with Nvidia GPUs M10, P40, V100 and T4 for an exceptional visual experience.

Anytime access with security and compliance: Solution delivers always-on access to enterprise apps with legendary Hitachi business continuity technologies. It limits data loss from user devices and edge locations in the event of a ransomware attack. Self-service flexibility for end-users for version-control and recovering hijacked (deleted) data in the event of ransomware or accidental deletion reduces the workload on admin teams. Full visibility and control for security, compliance, and governance

Global packaged foods manufacturer ConAgra Brands shared their experience with always-on VDI below -

“Hitachi’s integrated HCI solution provided high availability for VMware Horizon virtual desktops, which was crucial for business success, without having to deal with multiple management tools. UCP HC helped us maximize the virtual desktop density, without sacrificing performance or resiliency, resulting into lower TCO and reduced IT footprint. We expect to grow our VDI set-up on UCP HC for truly always-on desktops”

Matt Bouges | Enterprise IT Architect
ConAgra Brands | conagrabrands.com

To learn more, please visit www.hitachivantara.com or contact your Hitachi or partner representative

Stay Safe. We’ll get through it together!
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#Blog

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Lakshmi Pedda

04-06-2020 18:15

Nice to see our solution serve the greater good.

Neil Salamack

04-06-2020 15:52

Nice piece, VDI so good that its like "being there".

Jeffrey Lundberg

04-06-2020 15:41

Another cool piece of the remote work puzzle from Hitachi Vantara is Hitachi Content Platform Anywhere. HCP Anywhere provides file sync and share as well as user data protection that works with persistent and non-persistent VDI environments. By putting user data into HCP Anywhere, customers can reduce the data load during VDI boot storms as the VDI client just needs to load the HCP Anywhere client, not all of the users' files.

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