Desktop Environment Managers share several concerns about the challenges of managing a company’s desktop and laptop environment. Chiefly, they struggle with the maintenance of the separate images used to support both hardware and users. The quandary of simultaneously supporting operating systems during an upgrade is also a challenge.

At the heart of many of today’s high-value business applications are large repositories of business data stored on rotating magnetic disk. Although CPU performance is critical to the performance of many of these applications, I/O performance, or the ability to read and write data to and from the disk, is frequently even more critical. The more time an application spends waiting for data to be read from or written to disk, the more its performance will improve if I/O can happen with less delay.

There’s so much written and talked about, targeting “big IT”. It probably misses the mark, when it comes to the small and medium business (SMB) space. It’s likely that your server room doesn’t look like a massive datacenter as pictured on many IT brochures and magazine covers. You might only have a closet, with just a server or two and some communication equipment. Your IT budget might not be in the millions and you probably have to be smarter with investing the right amount, in the right technology, at the right time. In reality, it’s more challenging for you to make the right decisions to develop your business, foster creativity in your employees, and efficiently manage an IT infrastructure. That doesn’t mean IT is any less important or critical to your success.

At Kelser, I receive a fair number of inquiries related to VDI (Virtual-Desktop-Infrastructure). VDI is virtualizing the client (usually desktop) component of client-server computing. Using virtualization, your organization further abstracts users from the hardware layer and even OS layers. The use cases for VDI are just as unique as your organization itself.

On-premise private cloud Helping our clients tackle the question of how and when to leverage private cloud technologies for virtual workload hosting is a primary focus for Kelser in 2014. The server, storage, and network OEMs have offerings that range from single SKU solutions that are very easy to spec and order, to reference architectures that still need some final design and tuning.

VMware officially announced Horizon 5.3 (View) at VMworld EMEA (Barcelona). It’s a great evolutionary release to the product line. VMware is calling it: “VDI 2.0 Vision Delivered”. Here at Kelser we have several customers using View (excuse me, Horizon) and we use it internally as well. It’s been a stable platform that’s both powerful and easy to use. Here’s my top new features “round-up”. There are other important features which will have a more subtle impact on your environments: