LSI, EMC, Mellanox and Supermicro Join for Hyper-Converged VDI Appliance

LSI collaborates with EMC, Supermicro and Mellanox for a hyper-converged appliance supporting VMware virtual desktops, F5 and VMware collaborate on a number of efforts to provide secure access control for virtual desktop deployments, and Silver Peak enables VMware vCloud Hybrid Service with accelerated data transfers to the cloud.

LSI, EMC, Mellanox and Supermicro deliver converged appliance for virtual desktops. LSI announced it has collaborated with EMC, Mellanox and Supermicro to offer a high-performance virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) appliance for VMware Horizon View deployments. The appliance combines storage, compute and networking hardware in a single box to deliver a scalable hyper-converged system to meet the growing customer demand for desktop virtualization. It is designed to provide customers starting out with a few servers and a few hundred desktops with the ability to simply and efficiently scale-out VDI environments to meet changing business requirements. One hyper-converged appliance combines LSI Nytro 3.2TB PCIe flash accelerator cards, a Mellanox 40GbE interconnect solution, and Supermicro servers, powered by EMC ScaleIO software. The appliance is designed to accelerate VDI deployments, increase desktop performance and maximize VDI density per node at a fraction of the cost and complexity associated with traditional SAN-based storage infrastructures. “Maximizing the number of virtual desktops per server while providing real-time response to mobile users is essential to build an efficient VDI infrastructure that meets enterprise business needs,” said Kevin Deierling, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “Using Mellanox’s end-to-end 40GbE interconnect solution helps to eliminate the I/O bottlenecks that can hamper traditional VDI deployments, allowing organizations to achieve their business processes at a lower total cost of ownership.”

F5 and VMware collaborate. F5 Networks and VMware (VMW) announced a number of collaborative efforts designed to provide secure access control for customers’ virtual desktop deployments. New versions of the F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) solution will be brought to market which have been tailor-made to deliver secure access and optimized performance for VMware Horizon View. F5 also introduced a dedicated iApp and reference architecture to significantly speed deployments and provide prescriptive guidance on how these new solutions support VMware technologies. “F5 shares our commitment of helping customers prepare for and embrace the mobile-cloud era," said Sanjay Poonen, executive vice president and general manager, End-User Computing, VMware. "Adoption of VMware’s virtual desktop solutions continues to grow at a rapid pace, and with F5’s new offerings, customers have options of how to best combine technologies to enable mobile workforces to access their desktops and apps securely anytime and anywhere. I am excited about the strategic alignment and collaboration between VMware and F5, which will bring even richer solutions to our customers.”

Silver Peak powers vCloud Hybrid Service over long distances.  Silver Peak announced it has collaborated with VMware to offer its virtual WAN optimization software to support deployments on VMware vCloud Hybrid Service. Silver Peak accelerates data transfers to the cloud and provides an on-going LAN-like experience for cloud-hosted applications, enabling VMware vCloud Hybrid Service users to more quickly and easily transition to a public cloud or hybrid cloud environment.“The performance of any cloud application is directly related to the performance of the network,” said Marc Trimuschat, VP of alliances, Silver Peak. “Our unique competency in virtualized data acceleration has allowed us to quickly support vCloud Hybrid Service environments, and we are excited to be working with VMware to make the WAN cloud-ready for vCloud Hybrid Service customers.  Whether you plan to use vCloud Hybrid Service for hosting business applications or simply backing up data, our software installs quickly and easily to make your cloud resources feel like they are in the same building.”