Riverbed White Paper Sample

Desktop Virtualization and Wide-Area Data Services

Introduction: The Trend toward desktop virtualization
Like other virtualization products, desktop virtualization holds the promise of dramatically simplified IT infrastructure, cost effective IT utilization and management, with greater security around enterprise data. Vendors such as VMware, Microsoft, and Citrix claim that they can provide enterprises with a new model of enterprise computing, whereby any thin client can be used to securely access company daapplications running on it.

As with most distributed computing models, desktop virtualization is faced with a serious performance challenge when enterprises attempt to use this technology to support distributed users who may be located across the country or across the globe. While some desktop virtualization products attempt to use communication protocols that are designed for wide area networks (WANs), even these products run into two fundamental challenges: bandwidth constraints often limit the amount of data or the number of users who can access virtualized desktops, and latency prevents the users’ applications from having local-like performance.

Wide-area data services (WDS) is a class of technology that has rapidly been adopted across enterprises in order to deal with the challenges of bandwidth limitations and latency over the WAN and enabling LAN-like performance for remote users. While WDS has had tremendous success in enabling server virtualization and remote site consolidation, typically WDS has not been deployed to support desktop virtualization environments.....