Tinkering with the virtual desktop

>> The next step on the journey is what we call VMware View. And here, we're addressing the desktop environment. And the starting point for our view investments are that we, as an industry, have kind of got things back to front. We have been very focused on managing end devices and less on managing users. Hopefully, users, people remain. Devices come and go. And we need to enable IT organizations to equip their users with the capabilities that they need, the applications, the information, et cetera, and then have the system, the plumbing mapped back to whatever device the user happens to be using at that point of the day. So in this environment, we are providing a common management framework to address not only thin client devices, but also so-called thick client devices, like laptops, as well. Now, we've been very successful in deploying VDI and VMware View today. We have nearly or over a million desktops deployed at this point in time, mainly in those industries where people have been very concerned by security and compliance, where they have not wanted to leave states on the end point to buy or have the end user be able to muck about with the environment. So industries like financial services, the military, healthcare, education, et cetera. But to get to the next set of users who can really benefit from this, we have to be really focused on the cost. And desktop virtualization has to be done in an intelligent way, because this is about centralizing the storage and administration of users' environments. And if you're not careful, it will go from a world today, which is very brittle and hard to manage, but it relies on the world's cheapest storage, which is what you get in a laptop, and to a world which is much easier to manage, much more secure to deal with, but relies on the world's most expensive storage, which is what you find in the data center. So we really have to think through this journey very carefully and work very closely with our partners here to make sure that this inaudible makes not only sense in terms of what's good for the user, what's good for IT operations, but what makes things cost effective. And to that end, I'd like to invite up Steve Dupree from Hewlett-Packard to talk to us about how they have been thinking about desktop virtualization. Steve, great to have you here.

>> Good morning, Paul. Thanks for having us up this morning.

Applause Paul, I want to talk about a couple of things, top of mind, VDI virtual desktops and certainly some manageability. These are some breakthroughs that we've been working with VMware on recently, and we wanted to bring them to the audience this morning. As you know, VDI really is sort of this dam of cost and complexity that's really holding back the market. You talked about a million VDI seats. We think there's many millions more out there waiting for us to deploy. And this morning, I really want to show you what we're doing to break through that dam with VMware. We're introducing our HP's VDI reference architecture today. And that architecture is a combination of our--actually, there it is on the screen. And it's a combination of our converged infrastructure. At the heart of that is our Blage phonetic G6, powered by Intel's 5500 series Xeon processors. By the way, they've almost doubled their performance over the last year, generation to generation, with that processor. Also, you've got to get storage right. In this configuration, we have introducing an Auscuzy phonetic San phonetic n powered by our left-handed technology group. And it's really driving down the cost, taking fiber channel out. This chassis here you see is a chassis of 70 SAS hot plug drives, really building in the scaleability and the capacity that you need for VDI performance. Lastly, networking is very important to get it right. HP's secret sauce is Virtual Connect Flex 10 Technology. This is the only technology in the industry that really gives you the ability to dial up and dial down your network bandwidth to fit exactly the workload and the applications that are demanded by VDI.

>> Well, that's really important to think through computer storage and networking. Because, as we know, desktop virtualization imposes a different workload. Not only you have to get the storage crossed down, but you have to deal with the proverbial 8:00 boot problem when everybody shows up in the morning and wants to start their environments up, and you get this tremendous demand, burst of demand on the network and on the storage infrastructure as well.

>> Yes, yeah. And you really get it with this actual configuration. You get the bandwidth, you get the capacity.

>> How would customers come into contact with this reference architecture you've been working on?

>> So along with VMware and Intel, we're actually announcing today that we're going to have this in our global solution centers. We're staging it right now. It's going to be there in the fall. You can actually go there. You can kick the tires. You can run POCs, see your VMware, sales rep, your HP sales rep, and they can actually show you this. We're going to have it in the booth. You can actually get information and see it in our booth today. And later on in our actual keynote, we'll be talking about.

>> Great. We're actually going to do a two-for-one here, because I want to go back to one of the themes we had earlier, which was integration of our respective management requirements. And I know we've been doing some really exciting work there too.

>> We have been. It's really exciting. For the first time, we're going to actually see merging the physical and the virtual environments together in one management console. And we're introducing today, we're announcing today insight control for VMware View. And I want to show you the product today, yeah. Here you have the actual vCenter screen we know and love. And here, up in the right-hand corner, you can see something new that's different. It's HP insight software. And this is actually the integration point for HP and VMware in vCenter. Here, for the first time, you can actually see something you've never seen before, which is full, physical manageability of your environment within vCenter.

>> So somebody can drill through, all the way from their virtual, down to the physical within one context now.

>> Yes, they can. And you can see here, it's really simple, nice, easy to use. On the left-hand side here, HP's management. You're looking at right now the health status for the server. I can also go into the configuration and see a lot of details, power management, logs. Here, I can click on infrastructure. Drop down, you can see the actual health there of my enclosures. Let's take a quick look over here at power management. You can see here the infrastructure actually shows me some things. Also, if you'll look down at the bottom here, there's some very new features here. Launch onboard administrator system, insight manager, insight power manager. From vCenter, we can actually launch these in context. So if you're actually working through an event or alert or something in vCenter, you can actually launch this and it will take you directly to the area in which you want to look at.

>> Great. I'm sure customers will like that.

>> Yeah, we think so. It's the first time, you know, sitting in one's seat, you don't have to actually go to a lot of different consoles. You've got one console. You don't have to pick up the phone. Really simplifies the environment for our customers.

>> Thanks. We appreciate the work together.

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