Citrix and HPE Team to Make Sense of the Core-Cloud-Edge Architecture

Transcript of a discussion on how Citrix and Hewlett Packard Enterprise are aligned to bring new capabilities to the coalescing architectures around data center core, hybrid cloud, and edge computing.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise. 

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on digital transformation success stories.

Gardner

One of the key elements of digital transformation is aligning the core, cloud, and edge using new architectures and efficiencies. New levels of simplicity are needed to satisfy the requirements of both the end user and IT operators.

The next BriefingsDirect IT solutions ecosystem profile interview examines how Citrix and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) are specifically aligned to help bring such digital transformation benefits to market.

To learn more about the venerable and always-innovative Citrix-HPE partnership, we are now joined by executives from these two key enterprise IT players. Please join me in welcoming Jim Luna, Senior Director for Global Alliances at Citrix. Welcome, Jim.

Jim Luna: Thanks, good to be here.

Gardner: We’re also here with Jeff Carlat, Senior Director of Global Alliances at HPE. Welcome, Jeff.

Jeff Carlat: Good to see you again, Dana.

Gardner: Jim, what trends are driving the need for innovation around mobile workspaces?

Luna

Luna: As customers embark through digital transformation they still need to access their apps, data, and desktops from anywhere. With the advent of 5G wireless, and new network connectivity, we need to allow customers to be able to get their data and apps from any device as well. So we see a transformation in the marketplace.

Carlat: We are also looking at a new workforce coming in, the millennials, and they realize the traditional way of going to your job is totally being changed. To be able to be at work anytime, anyplace, anywhere -- and removing the barriers of where work is – that is driving us to co-innovate. We are delivering solutions that allow the freedom to be more efficient anywhere.

Gardner: There’s a chicken-and-egg relationship. On one hand, the core, cloud, and edge can work in tandem to allow for safe, secure, and compliant data and applications sharing activities. And that encourages people to change their work behaviors, to become more productive. It’s hard to decide, which is leading which?

Work anywhere, anytime on any device 

Luna: Traditionally, people had a desktop with applications, and they wanted that particular image replicated throughout their environment. But with the advent of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications that are web-delivered, they now need more of a management workspace, if you will, that allows them to work with any type of application -- whether it’s being delivered locally, on-premises, or through a cloud-based SaaS application. Delivering a unified workspace anywhere becomes critical for them.

Carlat: We also have requirements around security -- increasing the security of data and personal files. This forces us to work together, to take that workspace but not have it sitting in a vulnerable laptop left in a Starbucks. Instead that desktop sits back in the comfort and safety of a locked-up data center.

Luna: People want a simple experience. They don’t want a complicated experience as they access their apps and data. So, simplicity becomes key. User experience (UX) becomes key. And choice becomes key as well.

Learn More About
the HPE-Citrix
Strategic Alliance

Carlat: On expectations of simplicity and UX, if I find it hard to log-in to SharePoint I may just give up and say, “Well, I’m not going to be using those services.” It’s so easy to just move to the next item on your list.

Like I said, with millennials, that’s the expectation. It’s a mandatory requirement. If we can’t deliver that ease of experience to them, others will.

Gardner: User expectations are higher. They want flexibility. They want to be more productive anywhere. We know the technologies are available to accomplish this.

What’s holding back organizations from executing? How are Citrix and HPE together forming a whole greater than the sum of the parts to help businesses execute on this vision?

Collaborate to simplify 

Luna: Traditionally it’s been the complexity of the deployment of the architecture -- both on the hardware side, as well as on the software side. The things that we are doing together are simplifying that process from a deployment perspective, from a manageability perspective, from a support perspective, as well as the other features of experience, security, and choice.

We are working to simplify the experience -- not just in terms of managing and deploying, but also to make sure that that end-user experience is simplified as well.

Gardner: Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) has been around for some time, but earlier there were issues around network capacity, and certain media formats lagged. These performance issues have been largely put to rest. How does that factor into accelerating mobile workspaces adoption?

Carlat

Carlat: In the 22 years of my IT experience at Compaq and HPE, I’ve seen the processor compute power increase significantly. The network, storage, and other inhibitors, from a technology standpoint, are pretty much gone now.

It moves the problem away from the infrastructure to the complexity issue. How do you unleash that potential in a manner that is easy to consume. That’s the next level.

Luna: One of the other things our partnership allows is more choice. With HPE infrastructure, we have a variety of different choices available to customers, according to their unique requirements. There is now choice in terms of the architecture that better suits their deployment requirements.

Gardner: We’ve heard about hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) helping people on deployments. We’ve heard about appliance models. Are these part of that new choice?

Carlat: Yes, that’s why we have come together. We are delivering workspace appliances with Citrix on top of our HPE SimpliVity HCI portfolio.

Not only is a customer going to capture the benefits of everything that’s gone into our SimpliVity HCI platform, but we marry it with the world that Citrix provides for VDI, virtual applications, and mobile desktops.

Luna: On one hand, we’re making it easier for established customers to manage their Citrix environments through a simplified management plane with Citrix Cloud Services. But by having the security of that data sitting locally on a SimpliVity appliance -- that’s really good for customers in terms of data governance, data control, and data security.

But there are other architectures for other segments, like in the financial services industry, where we have trader workstations that provide multi-monitor support and high graphics capabilities. So, choice is key.

By having the security of the data sitting locally on an HPE SimpliVity appliance -- that's good for customers in terms of governance, data control, and data security.

Carlat: Yes, as these traders are executing trades, any latency is going to eliminate your technology from being used. So there are very, very strict in requirements around latency or performance, as well as security. There are also benefits on total cost, space, and being able to deliver a very rich media environment. Sometimes it’s upward of six monitors, they have to be patched into this, too.

Through the capabilities we have coming together – of bridging our leading infrastructure with the Citrix portfolio -- it makes a magical combination that can be easily deployed, and it just works.

Gardner: As I mentioned, we want to provide more simplicity for IT operators. One of the things that Citrix has been working out for years is intelligent network capabilities. How Citrix is addressing simplicity around these requirements?

Cloud-control solutions

Luna: Citrix is moving to a cloud service model where these technologies are available through a cloud-control plane, whether that’s VDI, or gateway-as-a-service, or a load-balancer-as-a-service. All of those things can be provisioned from a central plane, on-premises or on a customer’s device. And those are solutions we can deliver whether it is on a standard HPE ProLiant DL380 server, or whether it’s SimpliVity HCI, or whether that’s on HPE Moonshot or a Synergy composable infrastructure environment. Those architectures simply can be delivered and managed through a cloud service onto HPE infrastructures.

Gardner: We’ve also been hearing about complexity of hybrid IT models. Not only we are asking folks to implement things like VDI in workspaces, but now they have to make choices about private, public cloud, or some combination.

How does the Citrix and HPE alliance help manage the gap between public and private cloud?

Learn More About
the HPE-Citrix
Strategic Alliance

Carlat: We are aligned, HPE and Citrix, in our view of how IT and consumers are going to bridge and use public cloud resources. We believe there is a right mix, a hybrid approach, where you are going to have both on-premises and the cloud.

At HPE we have several tools to help the brokering of applications between on-premises to off-premises. And we provide that flexibility and choice in an agnostic manner.

Luna: We’ve recognized that the world is a hybrid cloud world. The public cloud has a lot more complexity due to the number and choice of public cloud providers. So we are not only driving hybrid cloud solutions -- we also have value-added services such as HPE Pointnext that allows customers to incrementally define their architecture, better deploy that architecture, and better manage those services to allow for a better customer experience overall.

Gardner: We are also thinking nowadays about the edge for many kinds of devices, such as sensors on a factory floor. Is this an area where the alliance between Citrix and HPE can be brought to bear? How does the Internet of things (IoT) relate to what you do?

Explosion at the edge 

Carlat: We see exploding growth at the edge. And we define the edge as anything not in the data center. Increasingly more-and-more of the analytics and the insights will be derived at the edge. We are already doing a lot with Citrix.

A major financial institution with hundreds of thousands of clients is using the edge and our HPE and Citrix technologies together. This market is only going to grow -- and the requirements increase from scalability to usability.

The edge can also be grimy; it can be a very difficult physical environment. We take all of that into account across the whole solution stack to ensure that we are providing the expected experience.

Luna: Performance is key. As we look at the core to edge, we have a distributed model that allows for data to stay as close as possible to that end-customer -- and therefore provide the best performance and experience. And the best analytics.

We must consider, can we grab the data necessary that’s being accessed at that particular endpoint and transmit that data back? Can we provide telemetry to the customer for managing that environment and making that environment even better for the customer?

In our case, the Citrix Analytics Service is part of our offering. To pull that data and serve that up to the customer in a manner that they are able to manage in that environment is a plus.

Analytics offer insight

Gardner: Analytics certainly becomes an important requirement. We have analytics at the edge; we have analytics in the cloud. We are not just talking about delivering apps; we are talking about first managing data -- and then taking that data and making it actionable. How does the data and the data analysis factor into what you are doing?

Carlat: Increasingly we see the shift to a consumption-based delivery of IT.  Our HPE GreenLake services provide capabilities for customers to not be mired in maintaining and monitoring all the infrastructure -- but actually just consume it on an as-needed basis. So that’s a one-key element.

Luna: Citrix is coming out with a Citrix Analytics Service, and we started that with VDI. But now that is expanding across the entire set of product portfolios from ShareFile, to NetScaler, Gateways, Load Balancers, et cetera. The idea is to unify all that data so that it is seamless to the customer. Now, that combines with all the analytics data coming out of the infrastructure to provide the customer with a one-pane-of-glass view.

It all comes down to taking advantage of the technology and progress we have made together to deliver insights and business benefits without jacking up the complexity that acts as a barrier to adoption.

Carlat: Using the data and analytics allow you to derive insights, and more accurate insights. We want to give a competitive leg up to our customers, clients, and partners. Those who have a leg up win more, make more money, are more efficient, and have happier clients. Therefore it all comes down to taking advantage, if you will, of the technology and the progress we have and pushing the edge of that envelope, bringing it into a package that delivers insights and business benefit without jacking up the complexity that makes it be a barrier to adoption.

Luna: You’re really empowering the customer to have better knowledge about their environment. And with better knowledge comes better performance in their manageability overall.

Gardner: Where are organizations leveraging the HPE-Citrix alliance in such a way that we can point to them and say, this is how it works?

Real-world success stories 

Carlat: One example is in engineering design. Imagine the amount of horsepower it takes in workstations to do computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM). There’s solids modeling and major computational design elements. To purchase the infrastructure and have it at your desk can be quite expensive, and it can increase security risk.

Citrix and HPE have offerings, combined with our Edgeline and HCI systems, that provide the right experience, and really rich graphics and content. And we are able to provide that securely, with the data contained in a structured environment.

Luna: Another segment is healthcare. Because of HIPAA regulations, Citrix VDI is consumed in many healthcare organizations today, whether it’s large hospitals or clinics. That’s one of the environments where we see an opportunity to deliver on the power of both HPE and Citrix, by allowing that data to be secured and managed centrally yet providing the performance and the access on any device -- whether it’s the patient room, or the doctor’s clinic, or anywhere.

Gardner: Let’s look to the future. As we seek to head off complexity, how will HPE OneSphere bolster your alliance?

Trusted together over time

Luna: We are always looking at innovating together. We are looking at the possibilities for joint work and development. HPE OneSphere presents an opportunity where we provide a single pane of glass view of customers as they look to deploy Citrix workloads. That could be through a central management plane, like OneSphere, or going onto a public cloud and being able to compare pricing and workloads.

It can also be about managing a hybrid cloud through HPE infrastructure, and managing all of that seamlessly, whether it’s in a private-hybrid cloud environment or through a public cloud and providing analytics. So we are continuing to look at those solutions that provide innovation for our customers.

Gardner: Jeff it seems that the opportunity to manage a multi-cloud world is certainly an attractive opportunity for you going out to alliance partners like Citrix.

Learn More About
the HPE-Citrix
Strategic Alliance

Carlat: Yes, exactly. That’s an expectation of what consumers will be moving to in the future. It’s not a one-stop shop. We need to be agnostic. To me, HPE and Citrix are totally aligned to where we see the future going with regards to hybrid cloud. And by first having that commonality of strategy and vision, it just makes is easy to snap our stuff together and create these solutions that are delighting our customers.

Luna: I think at the end of the day our mission is to make Citrix hybrid cloud as best as possible on HPE gear and infrastructure, and that’s what we aim to deliver for our customers.

Gardner: And I suppose it’s important for us to point out that this isn’t a Johnny-come-lately relationship. You have been working together for some time. A great deal of the installed base for Citrix is on HPE kit.

Carlat: Yes, our relationship is built on 22 years of history between us. We’ve been blessed by customers desiring to land their infrastructure on HPE.

We have an installed base out there of customers who have chosen us in the past and continue to use us. For those customers, we want to provide them a seamless transformation to a new generation of architectures. The natural evolution is there for us to harvest, we just have to do it in ways that meet expectations around usability and experience.

A large portion of Citrix customers run today on HPE. That's a testament to the trust and collaboration within the partnership. It's been a good partnership.

Luna: A large portion of our customers today run their Citrix VDI environments on HPE infrastructure. That’s just a testament to the trust and the collaboration within the partnership. We have had innovation together over the years. That’s been collaboration between our teams, as well the leadership, in bringing new platforms and new solutions out to the marketplace. It’s been a good partnership.

Gardner: I’m afraid, we’ll have to leave it there. We’ve been exploring how Citrix and HPE are specifically aligned to help bring digital transformation benefits to the market, and we’ve learned how aligning the core cloud and edge by new architectures and efficiencies is finally being made possible.

So, please join me in thanking our guests, Jim Luna, Senior Director for Global Alliances at Citrix. Thank you, Jim.

Luna: It was good to be here.

Gardner: And Jeff Carlat has been with us. He is the Senior Director for Global Alliances at HPE. Thanks, Jeff.

Carlat: You bet. Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: And thanks as well to our audience for joining this special BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer digital transformation success story.

I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of Hewlett Packard Enterprise-sponsored interviews. Thanks again for listening. Please pass this along to your IT community -- and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise. 

Transcript of a discussion on how Citrix and Hewlett Packard Enterprise are aligned to bring new capabilities to the coalescing architectures around data center core, hybrid cloud, and edge computing. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2018. All rights reserved.

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Path to Modern PC Client Automation is Paved with Hyperconverged Infrastructure for New Jersey College

Transcript of a discussion on how the combination of hyperconverged infrastructure and virtual desktop infrastructure are making the task of deploying and maintaining the latest end-user workspaces far simpler and cheaper than ever.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on digital transformation success stories.

Our next hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) use case discussion explores how a New Jersey college has embarked on the time-saving, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) modernization journey. We will now hear how the combination of HCI and VDI are making the task of deploying and maintaining the latest end-user devices far simpler -- and cheaper than ever before.

Here to help us explore the embrace of a new digital and data-driven culture from the desktop to the hyper-efficient core, are our guests. Please join me in welcoming Tom Gillon, Director of Network and User Services at County College of Morris (CCM) in Randolph, New Jersey. Welcome, Tom.

Tom Gillon: Thank you.

Gardner: We are also with Michael Gilchrist, Assistant Director of Network Systems at County College of Morris (CCM). Welcome, Michael.

Michael Gilchrist: Thank you.

Gardner: And we are here with Felise Katz, CEO of PKA Technologies, Inc. Welcome, Felise.

Felise Katz: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: What are the trends driving your needs at County College of Morris to modernize and simplify your personal computer (PC) architecture?

Flexibility for all, always

Gillon: We need to be flexible and agile in terms of getting software to the students, when they need it, where they need it.

Gillon

With physical infrastructure that really isn’t possible. So we realized that VDI was the solution to meet our goals -- to get the software where the students need it, when they need it, and so that’s a top trend that got us to this point.

Gardner: And is the simplicity of VDI deployments something you are looking at universally, or is this more specific to just students?

Gillon: We are looking to deploy VDI all throughout the college: Faculty, staff, and students. We started out with a pilot of 300 units that we mostly put out in labs and in common areas for the students. But now we are replacing older PCs that the faculty and staff use as well.

Gardner: VDI has been around for a while, and for the first few years there was a lot of promise, but there was also some lag from complications in that certain apps and media wouldn’t run properly; there were network degradation issues. We’ve worked through a lot of that, but what are some of your top concerns, Michael, when it comes to some of those higher-order infrastructure performance issues that you have to conquer before you get to the proper payoff from VDI?

Get Your Gorilla Guide

To HCI Implementation Strategies

Gilchrist: You want to make sure that the user experience is the same as what they would experience on a physical device, otherwise they will not accept it.

Just having the horse power -- nowadays these servers are so powerful, and now you can even get graphics processing units (GPUs) in there -- you can run stuff like AutoCAD or Adobe and still give the user the same experience that they would normally have on a physical device. That’s what we are finding. Pretty good so far.

Gardner: Felise, as a Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Platinum Partner, you have been through this journey before, so you know how it was rough-and-tumble there for a while with VDI. How has that changed from your perspective at PKA Technologies?

Katz: When HPE made the acquisition of SimpliVity that was the moment that defined a huge game-changer because it enabled us, as a solution provider, to bring the right technology to CCM. That was huge.

Gardner: When you’re starting out on an IT transition, you have to keep the wings on the airplane while you’re changing the engines, or vice versa. You have to keep things going while you are doing change. Tom, how did you manage that? How did you keep your students getting their apps? How have you been able to swap things out in a way that hasn’t been disruptive?

Gillon: The beauty of VDI is that we can switch out a lab completely with thin clients in about an hour. And we didn’t realize that going in. We thought it would take us most of the day. And then when we did it, we were like, “Oh my God, we are done.” We were able to go in there first thing in the morning and knock it out before the students even came in.

That really helped us to get these devices out to where the students need them and to not be disruptive to them.

That really helped us to get these devices out to where the students need them and not be disruptive to them.

Gardner: Tom, how did it work from your perspective in terms of an orderly process? How was the support from your partners like PKA? Do you get to the point where this becomes routine?

Gillon: PKA has the expertise in this area. We worked with them previously on an Aruba wireless network deployment project, and we knew that’s who we wanted to work with, because they were professional and thorough.

Moving to the thin client systems deployments, we contacted PKA and they put together a solution that worked well for us. We had not been aware of SimpliVity combined with HPE. They determined that this would be the best path for us, and it turned out to be true. They came in and we worked with HPE, setting this up and deploying it. Michael did a lot of that work with HPE. It was very simple to do. We were surprised at how simple it was.

Academic pressure 

Gardner: Felise, as a solution partner that specializes in higher education, what’s different from working at a college campus environment from, say, a small- to medium-sized business (SMB) or another type of enterprise? Is there something specific about a college environment, such as the number of apps, the need for certain people and groups in the college to have different roles within responsibilities? How did it shake out?

Katz: That’s an interesting question. As a solution provider, as an owner of a business, we always put our best foot forward. It really doesn’t matter whether it’s an academic institution or a commercial customer, it always has to be done in the right way.

Katz

As a matter of fact, in academics it’s even more profound, and a lot more pressured, because you are dealing with students, you are dealing with faculty, and you are dealing with IT staff. Once we are in a “go” mode, we are under a lot of pressure. We have a limited time span between semesters -- or vacations and holidays -- where we have to be around to help them to get it up and running.

We have to make sure that the customer is enabled. And with these guys at CCM, they were so fabulous to work with. They enabled us to help them to do more with less -- and that’s what the solution is all about. It’s all about simplification. It’s all about modernization. It’s all about being more efficient. And as Michael said so eloquently, it’s all about the experience for the students. That’s what we care about.

Choose an HCI for VDI Solution

That’s Right for Your Needs

Gardner: Michael, where are you on your VDI-enablement journey? We heard that you want to go pervasively to VDI. What have you had to put in place -- in terms of servers in the HPE SimpliVity HCI case -- to make that happen?

Gilchrist: So far, we have six servers in total. Three servers in each of our two data centers that we have on campus, for high redundancy. That’s going to allow us to cover our initial pilot of 300 thin clients that we are putting out there.

As far as the performance of the system goes, we are not even scratching the surface in terms of the computing or RAM available for those first 300 endpoints.

When it comes to getting more thin clients, I think we’re going to be able to initially tack on more thin clients to the initial subset of six servers. And as we grow, the beauty of SimpliVity is that we just buy another server, rack it up, and bolt it in -- and that’s it. It’s just plug and play.

Gardner: In order to assess how well this solution is working, let’s learn more about CCM. It’s 50 years old. What’s this college all about?

Data-driven college transformation 

Gillon: We are located in North Central New Jersey. We have an enrollment of about 8,000 students per semester; that’s for credit. We also have a lot of non-credit students coming and going as well.

As you said, we are 50-years-old, and I’ve been there almost 23 years. I was the second person hired in the IT Department.

I have seen a lot come and go, and we actually just last year inaugurated our third college president, just three presidents in 50 years. It’s a very stable environment, and it’s really a great place to work.

Gardner: I understand that you have had with this newest leadership more of a technical and digital transformation focus. Tell us how the culture of the college has changed and how that may have impacted your leaping into some of the more modern infrastructure to support VDI.

Gillon: Our new president is very data-driven. He wants data on everything, and frankly we weren't in a position to provide that.

We also changed CIOs. Our new CIO came in about a year after the new president, and he has also a strong data background. He is more about data than technology. So, with that focus we really knew that we had to get systems in place that are capable of quick transitions, and this HCI system really did the job for us. We are looking to expand further beyond that.

Gardner: Felise, I have heard other people refer to hyperconverged infrastructure architectures like SimpliVity as a gift that keeps giving. Clearly the reason to get into this was to support the VDI, which is a difficult workload. But there are also other benefits.

The simplification from HCI has uncomplicated their capability for growth and for scale.

What have been some of the other benefits that you have been able to demonstrate to CCM that come with HCI? Is it the compression, the data storage savings, or a clear disaster recovery path that they hadn’t had before? What do you see as some of the ancillary benefits?

Katz: It's all of the above. But to me -- and I think to both Tom and Michael -- it's really the simplification, because [HCI] has uncomplicated their capability for growth and for scale.

Look, they are in a very competitive business, okay, attracting students, as Tom said. That’s tough, that's where they have to make the difference, they have to make a difference when that student arrives on campus with his, I don’t know, how many devices, right?

One student, five devices 

Gillon: It averages five now, I think.

Katz: Five devices that come on board. How do you contend with that, besides having this huge pipe for all the data and everything else that they have to enable? And then you have new ways of learning that everybody has to step up and enable. It's not just about a classroom; it’s a whole different world. And when you’re in a rural part of New Jersey, where you’re looking to attract students, you have to make sure you are at the top of your game.

Gardner: Expectations are higher than ever, and the younger people are even more demanding because they haven’t known anything else.

Katz: Yes, just think about their Xbox, their cell phones, and more devices. It's just a huge amount. And it's not only for them, it's also for your college staff.

Gardner: We can’t have a conversation about IT infrastructure without getting into the speeds and feeds a little bit. Tell us about your SimpliVity footprint, energy, maintenance, and operating costs. What has this brought to you at CCM? You have been doing this for 23 years, you know what a high-maintenance server can be like. How has this changed your perspective on keeping a full-fledged infrastructure up and running?

Ease into IT

Gillon: There are tremendous benefits, and we are seeing that. The six servers that we have put in, they are replacing a lot of other devices. If we would have gone with a different solution, we would have had a rack full of servers to contend with. With this solution, we are putting three devices in each of our server rooms to handle the load of our initial 300 VDI deployments -- and hopefully more soon.

There are a lot of savings involved, such as power. A lot of our time is being saved because we are not a big shop. Besides Michael and myself, I have a network administrator, and another systems administrator -- that’s it, four people. We just don't have the time to do a lot of things we need to do -- and this system solves a lot of those issues.

Gilchrist: From a resources utilization standpoint, the deduplication and compression that the SimpliVity system provides is just insane. I am logically provisioning hundreds of terabytes of information in my VMware system -- and only using 1.5 terabytes physically. And just the backup and restore, it's kind of fire and forget. You put this stuff in place and it really does do what they say. You can restore large virtual machines (VMs) in about one or two seconds and then have it back up and running in case something goes haywire. It just makes my life a lot easier.

I’m no longer having to worry about, “Well, who was my back-up vendor? Or who is my storage area network (SAN) vendor? And then there’s trying to combine all of those systems into one. Well, HPE SimpliVity just takes care of all of that. It’s a one-stop shop; it’s a no-brainer.

Gardner: All in one, Felise, is that a fair characterization?

Get Your Gorilla Guide

To HCI Implementation Strategies

Katz: That is a very, very true assessment. My goal, my responsibility is to bring forward the best solution for my customers and having HPE in my corner with this is huge. It gives me the advantage to help my clients, and so we are able to put together a really great solution for CCM.

Gardner: There seems to be a natural progression with IT infrastructure adoption patterns. You move from bare metal to virtualization, then you move from virtualization to HCI, and then that puts you on a path to private cloud -- and then hybrid cloud. And in doing this modernization, you get used to the programmatic approach to infrastructure, so composable infrastructure.

Do you feel that this progression is helping you modernize your organization? And where might that lead to, Tom?

Gillon: I do. With the experience we are gaining with SimpliVity, we see that this can go well beyond VDI, and we are excited about that. We are getting to a point where our current infrastructure is getting a little long in the tooth. We need to make some decisions, and right now the two of us are like, this is only decision we want to make. This is the way we are going to go.

Gardner: I have also read that VDI is like the New York of IT -- if you can do it there, you can do it anywhere. So what next workloads do you have in mind? Is this enterprise resource planning (ERP), is it business apps? What?

Gillon: All of the above. We are definitely looking to put some of our server loads into the VDI world, and just the benefits that SimpliVity gives to us in terms of business continuity and redundancy, it really is a no-brainer for us.

And yes, ERP, we have our ERP system currently virtualized, and the way Michael has things set up now, it's going to be an easy transition for us when we get to that point.

Gardner: We have talked a lot about the hardware, but we also have to factor in the software. You have been using the VMware Horizon approach to VDI and workspaces, and that’s great, but what about moving toward cloud?

Do you want to have more choice in your hypervisor? Does that set you on another path to make choices about private cloud? What comes next in terms of what you support on such a great HCI platform?

A cloudy future?

Gillon: We have decisions to make when it comes to cloud. We are doing some things in the cloud now, but there are some things we don't want to do in the cloud. And HPE has a lot of solutions.

We recently attended a discussion with the CEO of HPE [Antonio Neri] about where they are headed, and they say hybrid is the way to go. You are going to have some on-premises workloads, you are going to have some off-premises. And that's where we see CCM going as well.

Gardner: What advice would you give to other organizations that are maybe later in starting out with VDI? What might save them a step or two?

Get yourself a good partner because there are so many things that you don't know about these systems.

Gillon: First thing, get yourself a good partner because there are so many things that you don't know about these systems. And having a good partner like PKA, they brought a lot to the table. They could have easily provided a solution to us that was just a bunch of servers.

Gilchrist: Yes, they brought in the expertise. We didn’t know about SimpliVity, and once they showed us everything that it can do, we were skeptical. But it just does it. We are really happy with it, and I have to say, having a good partner is step number one.

Gardner: Felise, what recommendations do you have for organizations that are just now dipping their toe into workloads like VDI? What is it about HCI in particular that they should consider?

Look to the future 

Katz: If they are looking for flexible architecture, if they are looking for the agility, to be able to make those moves down the road -- and that's where their minds are – then they really have to do the due diligence. Tom, Michael and their team did. They were able understand what their needs are, what right requirements are for them -- not just for today but also going down the road to the future.

When you adopt a new architecture, you are displacing a lot of your older methodologies, too. It’s a different world, a hybrid world. You need to be able to move, and to move the workloads back and forth.

It’s a great time right now. It's a great place to be because things are working, and they are clicking. We have the reference architectures available now to help, but it’s really first about doing their homework.

CCM is really a great team to work with. It's really a pleasure, and it’s a lot of fun.

And I would be remiss not to say, I have a great team. From my sales to my technical: Strategic Account Manager Angie Moncada, Systems Engineer Patrick Shelley, and Vice President of Technology Russ Chow, they were just all-in with them. That makes a huge difference when you also connect with HPE on the right solutions. So that’s really been great.

Choose an HCI for VDI Solution

That’s Right for Your Needs

Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We’ve been exploring how a New Jersey college has embarked on a time-saving virtual desktop infrastructure modernization journey. And we have learned how the combination of HCI and VDI is making the task of deploying and maintaining the latest end-user devices far simpler and cheaper in practice than ever before.

So please join me in thanking our guests, Tom Gillon, Director of Network and User Services at County College of Morris in Randolph, New Jersey. Thank you, Tom.

Gillon: Thank you.

Gardner: And Michael Gilchrist, Assistant Director of Network Systems at County College of Morris. Thank you so much, Michael.

Gilchrist: Thank you for having me.

Gardner: And Felise Katz, CEO of PKA Technologies, an HPE Platinum Partner. Thank you.

Katz: Dana, thank you so much. It's really been a pleasure.

Gardner: And a big thank you to our audience as well for joining this BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer digital transformation success story discussion.

I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of Hewlett Packard Enterprise-sponsored interviews. Thanks again for listening. Please pass this on to your IT community and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Transcript of a discussion on how the combination of hyperconverged infrastructure and virtual desktop infrastructure are making the task of deploying and maintaining the latest end-user workspaces far simpler and cheaper than ever. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2018. All rights reserved.

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