Achieving the goals of VDI mobility, scalability and consistency

The Banks Group has utilised the complete Liquidware Labs solution suite in their recent desktop transformation project. The Banks Group wanted mobility, scalability, consistency and robustness from their next generation desktops and also wanted to mitigate the recurring CAPEX expense involved in their 5-year cycle of hardware refreshes.

The Banks Group needed to migrate from Windows XP to Windows 7 and decided to simultaneously implement a virtualised desktop environment in order to address some of the management and scalability concerns they had. The company opted to go with stateless VDI pools in order to achieve these efficiencies, as Head of IT Jon Barnett, explained, “We wanted to implement a non-persistent virtual desktop environment, as with persistent virtual desktops you get all the complexity of VDI on the backend and still have to manage the end-user.”

The initial cost analysis highlighted that VDI would be more expensive than just a hardware refresh. “But the advantages of a more flexible IT environment for our work force which negated the need for continuous end point refreshes, made VDI a compelling option,” highlighted Mr. Barnett.

After conducting an in-depth assessment of the Banks Group estate with Liquidware Labs Stratusphere FIT, users were then migrated to Windows 7 and VMware Horizon View using ProfileUnity, “With ProfileUnity you can truly have a stateless virtual desktop – there’s no bloat in the virtual OS and it is storage efficient. Alongside this, ProfileUnity user environment management decreased our previous login times of over 8 minutes to less than 90 seconds. And I continue to monitor the user environment and their satisfaction with Stratusphere UX.”

Fraser Norman, UK Sales Manager, Liquidware Labs commented, “The Banks Group is a classic example of a customer looking at VDI to solve OS migration and endpoint refresh issues. The combination of Liquidware Labs, Windows 7 and VMware Horizon View has provided The Banks Group with a virtual desktop environment that delivers a really productive user experience.”

The new VDI environment has delivered the Banks Group with the following benefits:
· Mobility for their remote users, seamlessly supporting hot-desking and home working
· Improved user experience
· Agility across operating systems and applications
· Ongoing cost management
· In-depth visibility