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Dell Precision Appliance for Wyse: workstation virtualization for the rest of us

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Last week, Dell announced the industry’s first ever ISV-certified virtual workstation appliance called the  Dell Precision Appliance for Wyse. The announcement pairs the industry-leading Dell Precision and Wyse brands and reinforces Dell’s leadership in both the workstation and desktop virtualization categories. With this new appliance-based solution, we are now raising the bar in terms of simplification and time to value for a whole new set of customers, many of whom may not have the resources or skills to adopt workstation virtualization.

So why is virtualization technology important?  Simply put, the days of every user having a full stand-alone computer operating in isolation is coming to an end Even smaller customers need to collaborate within a team, share information, work on the road or from home, and protect ever increasing volumes of mission-critical intellectual property.  Virtualization gets this data away from the edge of the network where it is vulnerable and difficult to manage and puts it into a secure, central location.

The benefits are numerous. Here at Dell we talk to customers every day and know the value of virtualization in real world situations. For example:

  • An architecture firm on the East Coast is dealing with design files that are close to a terabyte in size. Copying information from file servers to local workstations causes a significant delay in their workflow. By moving the data and workstations back into a data center with centrally managed storage and a fast network backbone they intend to cut hours of wasted time from their development process.
  • Another customer with racks of 1:1 remote workstations has run out datacenter space. By adopting a virtualization solution, they will dramatically reduce the footprint of their equipment  and delay the need to expand the data center for several years.
  • Can’t finish a project due to snow days? A customer in the Northeast has been locked out of work for many days this year due to snow. Having the ability to access a virtual workstation from home would buy them back valuable productive time as well as enable other remote working scenarios.
  • For most customers, the need to secure the data is universal. By implementing a virtualized workstation solution, customers can centrally manage the security of their IP and greatly reduce the likelihood of theft or leakage on endpoints that are hard to track and manage.

With the release of the new Dell Precision Appliance for Wyse, we will take what has been a complex and difficult integration task and make it as simple as buying a new workstation. The appliance can be deployed in just five minutes once powered on. It is based on VMware hypervisor technology and supports the latest graphics and remote workstation technology from NVIDIA and Teradici respectively to deliver “no compromise” performance and reliability to the most power-hungry users. In addition to excellent technical performance, we are also working closely with our ISV application partners to certify their applications on the appliance so that customers can run their key workloads with confidence.

At Dell, we are continuously innovating to provide new solutions to meet our customers’ evolving needs. We are excited to make workstation virtualization easy to deploy and run for a new set of customers who are looking to be more mobile and collaborative in graphics-intensive work environments.

About the Author: Mike Moser

Mike Moser brings a unique blend of deep technical expertise balanced with years of business and IT strategy experience. Mike is a graduate from the University of Illinois at Champaign/Urbana’s electrical engineering program with a B.S. in computer engineering. His IT industry experience spans over 30 years in both engineering and senior level business focused roles. He began his career as a hardware engineer with Digital Equipment Corporation. From there he spent several years as an IT manager at a major consumer goods manufacturer and led IT strategic technology planning teams and director level application development responsibilities. Based on those experiences Mike took on the role of product management for data center management products focused on systems and database management products for both distribution and mainframe environments at a major systems management software ISV. More recently, Mike has been deeply involved Dell’s client virtualization product group, with product management responsibilities in both the data center solutions side of the portfolio and more recently, as the product manager for Dell Wyse’s industry leading ThinOS client firmware platform.