How It All Comes Together For Heavy Graphics Users
It has been a while since I had the opportunity to write about Desktop as a Service (six years to be precise) for the first time and things have changed so much in this area and on so many levels, that I think it’s worth mentioning some of these changes.
First, the user expectations in terms of their virtual desktop performance went from “as long as I can do my daily work, it’s fine” to “I want the same (or better) experience than my local desktop”. And, of course, from anywhere, anytime, on any device and highly secure, goes without saying.
Secondly, perception of the ‘Cloud’ amongst general (non-IT) population changed. It is not some scary place (controlled by evil beings from other dimension) anymore. People learned to trust Cloud providers with their data and processing needs.
Thirdly, Internet connection speeds and availability have increased sufficiently (yes, even here in Australia) to support virtual desktops consumerisation from the Cloud, as opposed to ‘old school’ virtual desktops when they are running in your on premise data center connected by high speed LAN.
Last, but not least, initial costs (capex) of starting your DaaS journey have dropped significantly, opening doors for small to mid-sized businesses to get onboard the DaaS wagon, previously reserved for enterprises only.
All of the above helped greatly to increase DaaS usability and adoption. But there were always one or more applications, that were ‘not quite right’ for DaaS or any kind of virtualisation. Usually, these were graphics intensive applications and no matter what kind of powerful beast you have running your virtual desktops in the backend, without proper graphics acceleration, these applications were simply not ready for virtualisation, successfully holding back broader DaaS adoption.
Luckily NVIDIA came to the rescue with their powerful GRID series GPUs enabling same level of professional visualisation capabilities from Data Centres, like they have been delivering for years on enterprise grade workstations with NVIDIA Quadro GPU.
With that last obstacle removed, DaaS is now ready to replace virtually (pun intended) any physical desktop running any kind of workload and application, like my colleague nicely described in his blog.
Combine that with recent Microsoft announcement about new Windows 10 licensing model, which enables Cloud Service Providers to build desktop OS based DaaS in public cloud (read more about it here) and the future for DaaS never looked better.
We at Byte understand these changes as well as customer needs. That is why we added CAD virtualisation to our bespoke DaaS solution OneSpace, so our clients can now run even most demanding CAD applications (AutoCAD, RevIt, Navisworks, etc) remotely from anywhere, anytime and on any device, thus increasing productivity through better collaboration and mobility, all while keeping company data secured and in one place.
Watch this space for more in-depth technical articles about underlying infrastructure, technology used and how it all comes together to form your new digital workspace. In the meantime, download “OneSpace Architecture Overview” whitepaper and see how it can help transform your business.
Microsoft Infrastructure and Cloud Subject Matter Expert
Enabling digital transformation using the best of Microsoft and Citrix technologies with strong focus on Cloud.