Cloud PCs Saving Cash
The cloud, as vendors tell us, can do nearly everything except wash the dishes. One new area is serving up virtual desktops/PCs over the cloud as opposed to the corporate network. The beauty here is you can get at your virtual PC from nearly anywhere. My fear is when you don't have solid connections across all hops and into wherever you are, your PC runs like you have Windows 1.0 on an 80286.
Pricing and flexibility may make up for the performance up and downs. And according to Atlantis Computing, the savings are dramatic.
Its customer, Colt Technology, set a cloud-based VDI system equipped to handle 20,000 desktops. Because it is cloud based, you don't need your own massive data center and all the gear that that entails.
To speed performance, the system uses server RAM for storage, a technique pioneered by the in-memory crowd. Despite my fears of sluggishness, Atlantis claims that most common operations blaze by with a 0.53 second average response time.
The cost is perhaps the key benefit. The companies claim that operating expense fell 23 percent and capital expense by 61 percent.
Posted by Doug Barney on 10/23/2012 at 12:47 PM