Top 3 Reasons Why Your Business Should Implement CDI: Zero Clients

Introduction

Please note that this is the first of a three-part series on how Centralized Desktop Infrastructure (CDI) benefits your business.

The CDI range includes three major solution components: Zero Clients, PCoIP Blade PCs and Sentral Management Software. In this post, we shall look at how our Zero Clients offer end-to-end VDI management. Before that, let’s briefly examine VDI to better understand how it works with CDI.    

What is VDI?

Virtual desktop infrastructure VDI is the process of hosting a desktop OS on a remote central server inside a data center. The functionality of VDI depends on the hypervisor. It is a software program that allows IT to set up and manage multiple virtual machines on computer hardware. Many OS environments can exist at the same time in one machine. This is because the hypervisor promotes server consolidation by isolating a PC’s OS and applications from the physical hardware. Virtualization organizes parts of the desktop environment within the data center and delivers both OS and applications on demand. IT can simply add applications from the data center when needed and the OS will always be in full compliance.

Also, you do not locally install the OS on a PC hard drive in a VDI setup. IT deploys the OS on a remote server and users can conveniently access it through that desktop. This makes the desktop itself redundant as users can access time and mission critical systems whenever they need to.

Enter CDI

Next, let’s look at how CDI and VDI together make for a complete IT strategy. ClearCube is the first OEM to design CDI solutions for broad business needs and use cases. The CDI range reduces clutter by easing IT systems maintenance and manageability without compromising on performance. As discussed, CDI comes in three groups: Zero Clients, PCoIP Blade PCs and Sentral Management Software. In this post, we shall focus on how Zero Clients address a common IT pain point. This will provide a step-by-step understanding of how important a Zero Client is for VDI.

The Hassle of PCs: A Short Case Study

Imagine an office with PCs that take up too much space, produce noise and heat and are open to virus attacks. What’s more, they are difficult to manage and often have to be repaired or replaced.Now, let’s bring your business plan into the picture. Assume that you are expanding operations and your IT team must design the infrastructure plan of a new tech support center. Why is a PC setup unlikely to support this venture? The thing is: you must set minimum cost and downtime benchmarks from the get-go. So, in this case, moving to VDI makes sense. Firstly, it delivers secure, reliable and highly available virtual desktops. The nature of work in places like tech support centers also needs staff to be agile and responsive at all times.

So, what other option than VDI as a smart IT strategy to guide your long-term goals? Even better, using Zero Clients to support VDI is one of the best decisions you can ever make. Let’s find out why.

Zero Clients to the Rescue

Every VDI planning begins with choosing the ideal Thin Client or Zero Client to display the desktop in the data center. PCoIP Zero Clients contain chips that receive encrypted pixels from the host system and perform image decompression and decoding at the hardware level.  So, there is no need to setup and configure separate PCs for every user. They can simply connect to a virtual PC from a Thin or Zero Client anywhere and anytime.

Generally, companies prefer the latter as they offer high performance and uncompromising security at every level. These devices are also easier to manage and maintain as compared to other VDI resources.

Now, let’s revisit your business situation.

Clearly, you have outgrown your PC setup because it no longer serves your needs. Your IT team proposes VDI and now you would like to know more about how it can support your plan.So, let’s suppose you set up Zero Clients at the tech support center. This enables you to deliver reliable desktop services and achieve high availability, data security and IT resilience. Also, IT can update security patches on virtualized workstations and set the same configuration parameters across them all to save time.

Key Takeaway

Zero Clients lock down data, simplify desktop maintenance, ease backend management and deliver great user experience.

Are you looking for powerful and reliable Zero Clients? If so, your search ends here. ClearCube offers the largest range of stateless, secure and VMware-ready Zero Client solutions. These devices have non-writable storage, no memory, CPU, moving parts or operating system to patch and manage. For these very reasons, they provide airtight security on high side networks for enterprise-class VDI environments.

For example, ClearCube CD9552 uses VMware Horizon to broker a connection to PCoIP Blade PC and SmartVDI resources. This is useful especially for dedicated 1:1 users. All they need to do is use hardware accelerated PCoIP chips to run mission critical and GPU intensive applications.   

Click here to get your Free Demo unit on our VDI Clients. This will help you further understand how they actually work in practice. Also, feel free to contact us anytime for more information on virtualization software.

This ends part one of our CDI trilogy. Please stay tuned for part two which will be all about our powerful PCoIP Blade PCs.