Sphere 3D Simplifies VDI Adoption and Expands Addressable Market with V3 Appliance Family

Integrated, turnkey hyperconverged appliances specifically designed for distributed virtual desktop environments now available through backupWorks.com.
Story Highlights

• Provides one of the industry’s most comprehensive and complete solution portfolios that takes aim at making VDI accessible and appropriate for any customer, any workload with the ability to scale in any increment, whether it be 10 users or thousands.
• Purpose built for VDI, V3 delivers a simple turnkey appliance family for use cases including Remote Office / Branch Office (ROBO), Small/Midsize Businesses (SMB) and distributed enterprise environments.
• Seamlessly integrates with existing VMware solutions and existing VDI investments for streamlined deployment and enhanced VDI capabilities.
• Starts small with a list price of $15,000 and scales through workload optimized appliances that address a variety of workloads, including everything from simple task workers to professional graphics users.
• Integrates Sphere 3D’s Desktop Cloud Orchestrator (DCO) software with VMware and NVIDIA technologies, providing desktop orchestration and automation from a centralized management platform.
• Built for desktop administrators to decentralize virtual desktops and provide an enhanced user experience.
• Introduces a Distributed Desktop Hyperconvergence (DDH) architecture to better align VDI with real world use cases.
• Slated to be able to leverage the VMware Horizon Air Hybrid-Mode capabilities for increased flexibility and expanded cloud capacity as part of VMware’s hyper-converged appliance partnership. (See joint company video ow.ly/Y8inY.)

The V3 appliance family comes pre-provisioned with Sphere 3D’s Desktop Cloud Orchestrator (DCO) software and also leverages VMware’s VMware vSphere virtualization and server management software, and VMware Virtual SAN enterprise-class shared storage solutions, along with GPU technology from NVIDIA, to take aim at making Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) accessible and applicable to business and branch offices of any size. The V3 all-flash appliances can start with a single appliance for VDI use or a 3-node configuration for a Virtual SAN cluster. Designed to stand alone or extend and simplify existing VMware customer environments, the V3 appliances can deliver key performance and capacity advantages from a single product family with one point of support.

Sphere 3D’s DDH architecture is designed to simplify virtual desktop deployment and management for ROBO installations, and also reduces the cost and necessary infrastructure to support VDI. DDH reduces VDI management overhead and complexity while creating desktop resilience and decreasing branch office infrastructure. DDH is also road-mapped to use application containerization to shift the focus from storage onto end user computing, resulting in an improved user experience.

Organizations can start small, with as few as 10 virtual desktops, and easily and non-disruptively scale to thousands of users with a predictable, ‘pay-as-you-grow’ approach. The V3 appliances, available in a broad set of configurations, are workload optimized to ensure that typical over provisioning in VDI can be eliminated, while also providing multiple scale points. With the preinstalled DCO software on each appliance, organizations can also overcome the performance degradation of VDI in widely distributed deployments and eliminate distance limitations of traditional VDI architectures.