Bicycles and Virtual Desktops

When I was kid...
We used to go on bicycle trips...
one, two some time three people on one bicycle...
the bicycle trip was more fun with more people sitting on them but painful for the driver.

Sharing a Single user appliance with multiple users is generally painful for the primary owner of the resource.

Let's take the case of Desktop computers. If you carefully analyse a desktop computer, there are three main functions:

1. Access - Keyboard, Video, Mouse, Sound, USB etc.
2. Storage - Harddisk and CDROM
3. Compute - Processor and Memory

Let's take the bicycle analogy again of sharing access - this can be realized by software like VNC Server and VNC Viewer - here One Driver(VNC Server) and Many passengers (VNC viewers) can share the Access experience. In this case the passengers(VNC viewers) are the sufferers. So Sharing the Access layer may not be such a good idea.

The same is not true for both storage and compute. The Capabilities and capacities of desktop storage and compute engines are far beyond the utilization levels of a single user. It may make perfect sense to slice these resources and share them with Access only(thin client) devices.

The concept of conventional VDI solutions has focussed on replacing the Desktop environments with Data center based compute and storage architecture. This mainframe like approach has mainframe like limitations on scalability and affordability.

We(sify team) are are proposing a hybrid Distributed VDI approach by Sharing only the Storage and Compute parts of the standard desktops for Achieving affordable and Sustainable VDI deployments.

The Concept Reduce Compute power, Reuse existing hardware and recycle the access devices is powerful yet simple approach to affordable computing.

The Practical Realization of this approach hinges on the fact that each desktop acts as access device in the environment and is configured to share its:

1. Compute resources
2. Storage Resources

There are equal or more number of access only devices like thin clients that are brokered by a middle ware layer to access the share resources.

We are open to comments and critical review of this idea to perfect it...

Please feel free and flame...

-4thought

Comments

RAINing Appliances in the Clouds

Appliances always had a soft-corner in Data center and cloud strategy. My Brush with appliances started in early 2000. We were looking at soultions for traffic management and billing for small ISP. the solutions with software and hardware were quite complicated. We came across small company out of Israel called Allot Networks (www.allot.com). they did a good job in a simple way. Later at NVIDIA, I was exposed Netapp for NAS storage which quickly pivoted into block storage with iscsi. they literally gave away the iscsi protocol license for free with the box for a long time. On the network side, my Exposure was with F5 networks while managing nvidia.com. We were facing scalability issues during product launhces and driver release announcements. We tried newer players such as Array Networks and Netscaler while they were in Beta. We ended up assisting and supporting Netscaler with our feedback to evolve the product to have in-memory caching. In VMworld 2013, I have seen a emergence ...

Living a dream...five years of moving from services to lasting products.

RCV innovations has transformed from a training and consulting outfit to product based services organization. The last five years had a see-saw effect on our existence as a viable business. We cannot forget the contributions of our mentors, early patrons and partners- Niranjan, Brad, Rakesh,Dorothy, Avik, Supriya, Sridhar, Bhaskar, Jaipal, Kishan, Joseph, Goutam, Mishra and many others. I am deeply moved by the faith some of our new customers have placed on us by adopting VAMANiT appliances for their business needs. Our team is grateful for the opportunity to serve you to the best of our ability. I am humbled by the commitment and excitement the team has shown in executing our new Nested Data center strategy. The pace at which we have trained ourselves in cutting-edge VMware vSAN and NSX technologies is noteworthy. We are applying our VMware knowledge to Strategic and Mission critical applications by integrating energy efficient purpose built VAMANiT Nested Data ...

Information Infrastructure for Human Advancement - Vedic thought

Human Advancement is a far-cry when we are living in a world where human existence is threatened by man-made vulnerabilities. Human existence is threatened by Global warming - Natural disasters Health Crisis - Drinking water, Biodiversity/Genetically Modified Food, Virus Outbreaks Materials Crisis - Availability of Petroleum/Rare-earth for EV's (Lithium/Dyspersium) Security Crisis - Cyber Security/Data Breaches Global Political/Economic environment – Sanctions/Tariffs Purpose and Motivation Purpose of this conversation is to discuss the application of emerging technologies in information infrastructure for improving resilience of the human race and aspire for human advancement. This requires understanding key concepts of AI/Deep learning/Machine Learning, Nueromorphic computing and Pervasive computing in the context of human interactions. There is need for a Multi-disciplinary approach involving Non-STEM and STEM(Science, Technology, Engineering and Math)...

ForeThought - RCV Innovations

Search This Blog