Why is Demand for Dedicated Hardware on the Rise?

26 November 2024

We continue to see strong demand for dedicated hardware instead of VDI, for certain users and workloads. Often this is driven by a desire for low latency and zero contention, but cost and complexity also play a part.

Here, we explore the trends and challenges that have led to this increase in demand, at a time when many organizations are focused on a ‘cloud first’ strategy.

Addressing the challenges

As an organization that focuses on some of the most demanding users and workloads in sectors such as Financial Services and Defense, we continue to see the same challenges in all of our customer engagements. Many of these organizations are pushing to move every user onto a virtual desktop, and ideally, these would be hosted in the public cloud and delivered as a service. The challenge of course, is that this strategy does not work for certain users and workloads.

Often this strong desire to virtualize has led organizations to push forward with these projects anyway, with the promise of greater resilience, stability and ease of management. In many cases, the result is a long and expensive evaluation process that generally ends with certain user groups retaining dedicated workstations. Sometimes these are mobile workstations, which have their own challenges in terms of support, security and management. Often they are simply tower workstations, installed under the desk, with all the traditional power, cooling, management and the resulting lack of flexibility.

Even where we do see this class of users moved onto some kind of virtual desktop, the result is not without compromise. The cost for high performance VDI can be huge – not just because you now have a small number of users sharing some very expensive hardware, but because of the extra support and subscription costs that are needed to deliver a great user experience. Additional technical resources and monitoring tools are often required, further damaging the overall TCO.

Replicating this experience in the public cloud is even more expensive and for many organizations, not considered a viable option.

The trend for devirtualization

When you also take into account the cost increases and uncertainty presented by the Broadcom acquisition of VMware, and the resulting separation of the EUC business into Omnissa, it’s no surprise that Gartner is highlighting devirtualization as a growing trend over the coming years.

This follows a recent increase in cloud repatriation and a growing recognition that the public cloud should be part of a broader hybrid cloud strategy, rather than the defacto location for every workload.

The summary is clear – VDI is great, but it’s not the right answer for every single end user and workload.

An enhanced solution

The Amulet Hotkey CoreStation product range is designed specifically to meet the requirements of these most challenging users and applications. Often referred to as ‘HDI’ or ‘bare metal VDI’, these products provide dedicated hardware in a form factor that is designed for the data center, and without the compromises that are typically associated with back-racking standard workstations.

While it is relatively small number of users fall into this category, they are almost unanimously business crucial. In the Financial Services sector, for example, this applies to the users that generate significant revenue and IP, such as traders and quants.

CoreStation offers a blended, hybrid approach that provides many of the advantages of VDI, but without the usual compromises in terms of performance and complexity.

This approach is designed to form part of a broader VDI strategy and sessions can be brokered to users through a variety of different protocols in the same way (and from the same end user devices) as a traditional virtual desktop. All with enterprise-grade management for 100% remote deployment, update and control.

CoreStation enables power users to access the resources they need, whenever they need them, without any compromise in performance.

Want to know more?

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