Considering VDI? A Hyperconverged Infrastructure is Your Best Bet for Big ROI

Still reeling from the economic impact of Covid-19, businesses across industries are looking for ways to cut costs and operate more efficiently. The importance of maximizing ROI from technology investments and reducing TCO has never been higher — and the pressure is on IT leaders to do more with less. 

However, remote working initiatives continue to tax networking infrastructure, as IT teams struggle to provide seamless access to corporate resources. Many organizations are making the switch from legacy 3-tier infrastructures to virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) and Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) models, which can help overcome the cost and challenges of managing distributed endpoint environments that rely on deploying and maintaining physical IT assets.

If the underlying infrastructure that supports a software-defined end-user computing model is weak, you can’t reap the benefits. Adopting a hyperconverged infrastructure creates a solid foundation that not only enables VDI and DaaS, but supports digital transformation, increased mobility, and remote working — all while delivering impressive ROI. 

The High Cost of Legacy Infrastructure

Although the initial financial outlay for setting up legacy infrastructure seems reasonable, once the physical assets are in place the costs can accumulate rapidly and include: support overhead, licensing fees, upgrades, storage provisioning and power and cooling. You have to pay for space to house the equipment and you may have to hire specialists to problem-solve the complex issues that arise from legacy infrastructure. Tracking and managing assets is extremely time-consuming and often requires installing agents on each device to provide essential visibility across the network. 

What happens when you need to scale to accommodate more users or a heavier workload? If you haven’t already overprovisioned, additional budget is spent on equipment, deployment and management. If you need to downsize later, resources sit idle, and are continuing to incur costs.

Not only are the costs high, but the user experience is poor. Updates are slow and problematic, and IT specialists can spend hundreds of hours every month just keeping everything running. Security is a huge issue, as visibility across the infrastructure is limited, and patches to eliminate vulnerabilities may take days or weeks to implement.

Not only are the costs high, but the user experience is poor. Updates are slow and problematic, and IT specialists can spend hundreds of hours every month just keeping everything running. Security is a huge issue, as visibility across the infrastructure is limited, and patches to eliminate vulnerabilities may take days or weeks to implement.

What if there’s a storage failure? Steven Kaplan, in his book, The ROI Story: A Guide for IT Leaders, tells of a company who experienced $1.2 million losses in downtime resulting from a failed SAN storage controller. The manufacturer's technician inadvertently replaced the wrong controller, and for an hour and a half, there was no storage available. Another concern is scalability — as a company grows, more and more controllers and disks must be added to the array, and at some point, a forklift overhaul is required, piling on more capital expenses and ongoing overhead.

When you consider the management costs and headaches of these legacy infrastructures, it’s obvious that they can’t support digital transformation initiatives that are not only trending among organizations, but becoming imperative in order to meet the needs of the modern, highly mobile, and increasingly remote workplace. 

Flexibility, Agility and Control

EUC computing solutions deliver secure access to applications on any device from any location, in a highly secure fashion, eliminating virtually all of the drawbacks of legacy infrastructures. A server-hosted VDI serves up complete desktop environments, running each instance on a virtual machine or hypervisor that shares CPU, memory, storage, and network resources. Applications are hosted and delivered via a cloud desktop offering that is accessible to users and admins through a self-service interface. The cost model is pay per-use, and it delivers workspaces and applications on-demand.

Delivered over a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), EUC provides the flexibility, agility and control that legacy infrastructures cannot, while eliminating administrative overhead. It automatically adjusts to the current workload — large or small — to ensure the right resources are allocated to virtual desktops, as needed. With HCI, there’s no need to overprovision the infrastructure upfront, and no risk of resources sitting unused, wasting your valuable budget.

But perhaps one of the most important benefits of this model is that it gives time back to your team. Time spent deploying and maintaining physical resources in legacy infrastructures mounts up quickly — and the skilled IT employees needed to support it are expensive. With HCI, time spent on maintenance tasks can be redirected to projects that drive value for your organization.

You Could Probably Benefit from 164% ROI

In an August 2020 study, Forrester analyzed the benefits, costs, and risks associated with deploying a Nutanix’s EUC solution and summarized their findings in the Total Economic Impact™ TEI report. The analysis revealed that over three years, organizations can realize an ROI of 164%, or a net present value (NPV) of $13 million. 

There were other dramatic benefits cited in the report: Deployment was 90% faster and capital expenditures were 35% lower than legacy 3-tier architectures. Forrester concluded that a drastically superior end-user experience and the ability to right-size rapidly would save thousands of hours and generate millions in improved performance, as well. (Forrester’s analysis was based on interviews with a number of Nutanix customers, but you can do the exercise for your organizations using this ROI calculator.)