Dell’s new services ease move to virtual desktop

More and more companies seeing the success of server virtualization in the data center want to duplicate that on the desktop virtualization side. But many of these organizations have had poor results, failing to achieve economic goals, stalling on deployments, and hitting a virtual brick wall.

In many of these cases, coming up with the right desktop virtualization product is not enough; once an organization has selected a virtualization platform, it still has questions around servers, storage, and networking, and how all of these things interoperate with the different software components and endpoints.

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To help address this challenge, Dell has announced the availability of Dell Desktop Virtualization Solutions, or DDVS, which Dell says was developed to ease the design and implementation complexities inherent in deploying virtualized desktop environments so that organizations can adapt to the changing dynamics of today’s more mobile and global workforce. DDVS can be cloud or locally based, and it utilizes prepackaged services with configured and tested hardware and software.

“Desktop virtualization offers customers an opportunity to drive technology productivity by streamlining and simplifying the management of the desktop, enabling workers to use virtually any device, anytime, from anywhere,” said Jan Uhrich, vice president of solutions at Dell. “Given Dell’s proven strengths in both managing the entire set of hardware and software assets as well as services capabilities, organizations know the solution is fully unified and integrated, helping them achieve an efficient enterprise.”

The Dell Integrated Solution Stack, which is part of DDVS, is designed to accelerate return on investment and solution stability and is a completely configured and tested solution that includes hardware and software, as well as Dell Services. Dell will rely on Citrix and VMware to supply the magic that is desktop virtualization software, while the hardware vendor will supply its PowerEdge servers, EqualLogic storage, and PowerConnect network devices.

Not all customer environments are the same, so it stands to reason their desktop virtualization implementations won’t be one-size-fits-all, and Dell Services will have to work closely with customers to understand their specific challenges and needs. The tricky part may center on the fact that Dell is partnered with both Citrix and VMware. Dell will need to walk the fine line of knowing when to recommend to customers that they implement one technology over the other. Once they’ve cleared that hurdle, they can move on to designing and planning a desktop virtualization solution that fits that particular organization’s needs.

Dell offers four delivery models designed to implement and/or operate the solution based on specific customer business requirements, customer preferences, and IT environments: a hosted solution called Virtual Desktop-as-a-Service (vDaaS), where Dell provides managed virtual desktops hosted from the Dell Cloud; a Managed Service Solution, where Dell implements and manages the customer purchased Integrated Solution Stack either on-premise or in a Dell data center; a Customer Managed Solution, where Dell implements the customer-purchased stack within the customer’s on-premise location with Dell turning over management of operations, monitoring, and incident resolution to the customer once the deployment is completed; and finally, a custom-designed and custom-built solution that utilizes Dell’s best-of-breed ingredients and modified reference architectures.

Dell also announced plans to extend DDVS to include mobile packages specifically designed for vertical markets, including education institutions and health care, which makes sense since these two verticals have been a good proving ground for this type of technology thus far. Both verticals also have end-users who are on the move and need access to the same virtual desktop in multiple places and on multiple endpoint devices such as desktops, laptops, or tablets.

Dell’s plan for being there to support companies from the initial assessment to the design to the actual deployment and implementation, and beyond could be the missing formula needed to help organizations transform their desktop environments from a physical to a virtual world in 2011.

The new DDVS is available now in the United States and is expected to be available in other countries later this year. Pricing for the cloud service is on a per-seat, per-month basis.

This article, “Dell’s new services ease move to virtual desktop,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization and cloud computing at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.