As I hinted in yesterday’s post, Cisco is in my top vendors list for the second year running. If you need the background on Cisco’s desktop virtualization ambitions, I covered the products and services in some depth here when Cisco first introduced VXI and more recently here when it announced its five-year technology partnership with Citrix in October 2011.
More important than shipping a compelling hardware platform, Cisco is building out a services team capable of designing, deploying and supporting end-to-end environments using either VMware View or Citrix XenDesktop – As I highlighted yesterday there’s a lot more to building a VDI environment than end-point, server, and connection broker. To ensure that it is capable of delivering a complete package Cisco is establishing with partnerships throughout the desktop virtualization ecosystem with such as Appsense and Atlantis Computing, building on its existing relationships with storage vendors such as EMC and NetApp.
While getting into desktop virtualization was enough by itself to get Cisco into my top 5 last year, it isn’t enough to call for a repeat showing this year. However for 2011 Cisco delivered the VCI 6215 thin client which is designed to replace both desktop PC and desk phone (voice and video) with a single box solution that will be the hub of a next generation desktop workplace. At the same time, Cisco has been exploring new ways to lower the cost and improve the performance of VDI environments. Working together with Atlantis Computing, taking advantage of the Extended-Memory Architecture built into its UCS blades such as the B250 M2, it has developed a “Diskless VDI” solution. In this configuration disk images are fully cached by Atlantis ILIO in on-server memory instead of being held on conventional spinning disk or SSD. This delivers the highest possible performance for all IO operations without any concerns over long-term SSD operation in write intensive environments.
Justification enough for a spot in my top 10 list.
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