Xangati

Survivor VDI—Episode One: “Real” Timing is Everything

David Messina, VP Marketing and Product Management, Xangati

If you applied Darwin’s theory of natural selection or ‘survival of the fittest’ to the business world today, nowhere would it be more appropriate than in the financial industry. The financial sector is frequently turned to as a bellwether in its usage of cutting edge technologies for competitive advantage. And, with enormous monetary gains and losses frequently at stake, failure is not an option when implementing new IT solutions in the financial market.

Survivor VDI Music

(Enjoy listening to the Survivor Song, Ancient Voices, while reading the blog)

 

One of our European partners—ICF Systems, an IT systems company—recognized that VDI offered a unique opportunity—as well as a tremendous competitive edge—by improving on existing trading floor environments for their financial customers. By designing a virtual trading floor, traders could seamlessly and instantaneously access their desktops—exactly as they would on the trading floor—fully integrated with all the right exchanges and the key market feed services—from any location and any device.

By harnessing VDI technologies, ICF could design a system that would allow the traders to conduct all of their business from whatever device they wanted—whether a 3G iPad or their home PC. As we’ve talked about in previous blogs, this is significant, as users are increasingly pushing for total corporate access from a myriad of devices.

In addition, looking beyond that benefit, by centralizing the data center, ICF could also dramatically reduce equipment costs, as well as all but eliminate the time-consuming task of managing such a highly dispersed system.

Off the top, they had a few necessities. The system needed complete infrastructure independence; the highest possible execution speed; availability anywhere and anytime; and to-the-second disaster recovery.

Not a task for the faint-hearted!

But succeed ICF did and rolled out the industry’s first virtual trading floor—called Trading Anywhere—which is up and running today—allowing ICF customers to execute the same financial transactions at home or traveling on business that they make on a fixed trading room floor.

The question is—how did they survive the key obstacles on the way?

To answer that, I’d like you to consider time. Time represents the very essence of the financial trading industry. A trader’s survival hinges on the element of timing. No matter how innovative and cutting edge an IT solution might be, if it doesn’t support the real-time needs of the trading floor, it won’t work. Timing really is everything in financial trading.

ICF knew that their customers required real-time access to the best market intelligence in order to compete. If the new system slowed down due to a performance issue, the end-user experience would be irrevocably damaged—and the financial repercussions devastating. System downtime translates into lost deals.

As Harald Spanuth, Senior Technical Consultant at ICF, explains, “We knew that the successful implementation of a VMware View VDI solution required an entirely new level of management if it was to be successful. The significance of managing the infrastructure in real-time was of utmost priority.”

Xangati’s infrastructure performance management (IPM) solution is unique in its ability to provide real-time visibility into all VDI activity across the VI and the WAN—encompassing real-time views of all devices spanning both the physical and virtual infrastructures. Having insights into all network activity presented in live, continuous views, gave ICF the troubleshooting capabilities to quickly and easily identify and resolve potential performance problems.

With the Xangati Management Dashboard, ICF can rely on a single dashboard to navigate through the infrastructure and to drill down to where a problem might be—even while it was occurring—i.e., “real” time.

Survivor lesson: The many moving parts in a VDI ecosystem—particularly one where time is of the essence—demand an accurate, timely and comprehensive view of the entire infrastructure. In addition, real-time management capabilities are essential for identifying shifts in storage or network latency across the WAN. Without real-time latency measurements, VI administrators can be inundated with calls even when their systems are still green. What’s up with that?!!

Fortunately, Xangati’s real-time management solution allows VI administrators to cover all their bases—providing a view into physical and virtual components, continuously analyzing the infrastructure and alerting administrators immediately of any changes.

See you at the next Survivor VDI tribal council!

 

Survivor VDI: A Xangati Reality Series

David Messina, VP Marketing and Product Management, Xangati

Forget Survivor Nicaragua. Xangati is unveiling a new reality blog series—Survivor VDI—and we expect to have a hit on our hands in 2011. Consider all the attention that virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) has been generating. Expectations are running high for VDI in the data center. Much of the focus has been on the technology benefits—which are considerable—but good reality TV centers on real people.

Our new blog series has all of the right components: actual people—like you, the virtual administrator—placed in new and unfamiliar surroundings, facing challenging circumstances, given a minimal number of tools, who must outwit, outplay and outlast in order to survive the VDI jungle. Sounds familiar, right?

Xangati sees the end user as the number one driving force that will push VDI forward over the next 12 months. The expanding mobile market is creating a world where computing is fast becoming ubiquitous. As a consequence, users are making new demands. They want to be able to access whatever applications they want from whatever device they want and whenever they want. The end users are becoming the new IT tribal chiefs in determining direction.

Heightened end-user expectations and demands will give impetus to more VDI deployments, as well as create pressure on IT to get it right. For VDI to takeoff, it must successfully meet end-user demands.

We started out last year with a series of VDI technology primer blogs. The blogs contained practical information for managing your VDI deployments—providing an overview of the changing desktop infrastructure; looking at the new network requirements for VDI; assessing your WAN readiness; sharing rapid problem identification techniques; and scaling deployments across the globe. Xangati has been ahead of the times in tracking these technology issues, as well as the emerging management requirements.

But this year, it’s your turn. We think it’s the perfect time to take an in depth look at how real VI administrators are implementing their VDI deployments, managing users in innovative and cost-effective ways and meeting and exceeding the aforementioned ever-increasing end-user demands and expectations along the way.

I recently participated in a WebEx session with a local government agency on the East Coast. This organization had purchased 400 VDI licenses and wasn’t able to get past even 60 users. Not exactly the cost savings and operational efficiencies they were envisioning! 

This VDI roadblock—like many—was largely due to a WAN bottleneck—basically insufficient network resources to support the growing number of users accessing their desktops via the WAN.

Survivor lesson: Before implementing a VDI initiative, administrators need to take a baseline of the WAN and VPN networks to determine what bandwidth is available for VDI traffic. When looking at bandwidth, also make sure to account for peak utilization periods—when legitimate spikes of activity occur across the links—not just the average use.

A top U.S. law firm, with hundreds of users, was moving to VDI but experiencing significant performance issues and unable to recreate intermittent end-user performance issues. Xangati’s solution—with its ability to capture end-user experiences without the use of agents—enabled administrators to identify a user of a document scanning system as the top generator of VDI workload. They then determined that the rate limits had not been properly configured and were able to resolve the issue. 

It’s exactly these types of lessons that we hope to share and elaborate on in our new Survivor VDI blog series. Please stay tuned. We learn from others, and have a hunch that you might be interested in many of these stories. And please, if you or one of your customers would like to share your VDI experience, contact us! Your stories might win you the coveted immunity idol for the next tribal council.