Whitehat Virtual Technologies Blog

Buy VDI Appliances? The Answer May Surprise You

Written by Val King | Aug 12, 2021 1:30:00 PM

The next generation of Whitehat’s Titanium HCI hyper-converged Citrix and VMware Horizon VDI-in-a-Box appliances launch this week. And while we are certainly excited about it, anyone wishing there was an easy, zero-expertise-required way to get a great VDI experience delivered from their data center(s) should be too. No cloud gymnastics required.

Titanium HCI has been a secret among Whitehat customers for more than five years and is one of the tools of the trade we use to help our customers achieve and maintain record-low support incidents each month. One of our most recent Titanium HCI customers has seen a 68 percent decrease in the number of support incidents each month since Titanium HCI went live in May of 2021.

Over the history of VDI technology (I include all forms of desktop virtualization in my use of the VDI term), clients with desktop virtualization challenges typically have undersized hardware, unable to defy the laws of physics and deliver the correct quantity of virtual desktops at the right quality of end-user experience. Titanium HCI was born to solve this specific problem but grew wings over the years and developed into a true flagship VDI appliance, finally making the benefits of VDI easy to achieve.

We’ll be the first to acknowledge that Titanium HCI is not a fit for everyone. Titanium-driven Desktops-as-a-Service, for instance, would be a better fit for those that only need great desktops, with or without NVIDIA vGPU, but don’t need or want servers.

So, who is a fit for Titanium HCI VDI appliances and the guaranteed great desktops they deliver?

There are nine potential slam-dunk situations where Titanium HCI makes perfect sense for companies that want the benefits of VDI without some of the challenges inherent in the journey to a great VDI workspace experience.

  • Companies that want a fantastic turnkey “work from anywhere” experience and a guaranteed great VDI experience but don’t have strong VDI experience on staff and are a little intimidated by the hardware, software, and vendor selection process.
  • Companies interested in saving, on average, 15-30 percent overall on VDI solutions and ongoing support vs. tackling VDI by themselves.
  • Companies with 100 or more employees that could benefit from the capabilities VDI provides.
  • While not exclusive, companies in healthcare, banking, financial services, manufacturing, services, insurance, retail, government, and education, most typically.
  • Architecture, engineering, construction, media & entertainment, with exceptionally graphics-intensive applications, are a great fit as well.
  • Companies that like the subscription model of the cloud but can’t or don’t feel comfortable having workloads in a third-party environment.
  • Companies with Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop or Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops (CVAD) or VMware Horizon with hardware more than three years old.
  • Companies that are smarting from a poor VDI experience today because of undersized hardware that is still being depreciating and hurting their ability to get the equipment to deliver a great VDI end-user-approved experience.

VDI relies on 13 different technologies plus the applications to deliver a great desktop experience to any device, anywhere, freeing employees from their desks and enabling them to group, regroup, collaborate, and relocate anywhere it makes sense to do business. With that power comes the complexity that Titanium HCI exists to eliminate.

With VDI today, you essentially spend your money upfront buying LEGO® blocks, go home, and hope you have everything you need to build that LEGO® Millenium Falcon™ of your dreams, with some potentially significant and expensive problems if you make a mistake.

With the existing way VDI is deployed, all the risk is on the people who probably know the least about VDI technology and have everything to lose if the deployment goes wrong. With Titanium HCI, no one buys parts; they buy a complete experience and desired result. To continue the analogy, if you want a LEGO® Millenium Falcon™, you get a LEGO® Millenium Falcon™, and we fix it when you accidentally feed it to a ceiling fan on one of your more epic space adventures.  

If you want a great VDI experience, but do not want to worry about figuring out how to make VDI great, Titanium HCI was built with you in mind. Register for a demonstration.