A few years ago the thought of thin clients replacing real PCs in large financial and public sector organizations would have been laughable. Thin clients were viewed with great promise buyt continually failed to deliver on the user experience needed by, “knowledge workers.”
Now the corporate desktop PC is viewed as your grandfather’s computer. We now live in a broadband world and corporate networks have gotten much better and more efficient. The full promise of, “Cloud”, which is nothing but Internet backed server based computing, is all of a sudden all the rage. And rightly so. Almost everyone uses the “Cloud” every day.
As for the utility of VDI, I personally use a virtual desktop on a thin client every day. I authenticate and I have my desktop in seconds. It’s the ultimate mobility in my building too, since we have thin clients everywhere so I (and everyone else here) can get my desktop anywhere, without carrying a PC. My desktop even looks cool as its small, light and fast and it can display high resolution dual screen. Most importantly, there’s no data stored on it.
VDI is getting better faster everyday with the big software companies like Microsoft, VMware, and Citrix investing in and continually releasing advancements to their access protocols. This, combined with the hardware powerhouses like Dell who are releasing newer and better products rapidly makes this the critical inflection point for companies looking to move to VDI.
Finally, and to me this is the most intriguing and important development coming, cloud service companies are now beginning to offer hosted desktop services for as little as $60 a month.
So is VDI better than a desktop PC? What do you think? Let me know.
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