This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will focus on scaling and developing a desktop-specific distributed grid to provide enterprise grade, highly available virtual desktop systems that are cost-competitive with PCs. To accomplish this objective the research and development will focus on three key areas. First it will focus on multiple ways to scale the solution including ways to distribute large desktop templates across the grid, develop self-managing software to automatically update, patch and repair the software that manages grid and support a hierarchy of grids that can be geographically distributed. Second, it will develop multi-tenancy mechanisms to securely house multiple customers on a grid thus making this a viable solution for managing and economically providing desktops as a service from a cloud. Finally, additional work to support multiple hypervisors and remote protocols will be developed to address market requirements for cost-effective virtualization technologies and to provide good user experience when deploying the solution across a cloud.
This takes advantage of a sizable and growing demand for virtual desktops that offer lower management costs and superior data security. Existing solutions on the market are 4 to 10 times the cost of regular PCs and require highly skilled personnel to operate, thus hampering their adoption. Kaviza?s approach, if successful, reduces that costs drastically and makes it possible for the desktop IT staff who procure and manage PCs today, to be able to install and deploy proposed solution within their budgets. Kaviza's solution, if successfully deployed, also has the potential for broad economic and environmental impact. First, it can reduce PC power consumption by up to 75% making offices more "green". Second, its lower cost and simpler management will make it possible to broadly deploy computational resources and bridge the digital divide.
Introduction Kaviza’s Small Business Innovation Research project’s focus was to develop a next generation virtual desktop solution. Virtual desktops are regular PCs that each run in a virtual machine housed on a server. They provide many advantages over PCs. For example, a single server can support multiple virtual desktops thus saving hardware, power and cooling costs. They are centrally managed thus drastically reducing management costs associated with regular PCs. Virtual desktops provide flexibility and mobility because users can access them from anywhere via thin clients, smart phones, and tablets. The access to virtual desktops can be controlled, with users prevented from copying files to USB devices or printing data available on the desktop, making them more secure. Unfortunately, existing virtual desktop solutions on the market cost at least twice as much as regular PCs and are too complex for PC administrator to deploy and operate. Solution Through the NSF SBIR grant, Kaviza has developed VDI-in-a-Box — a unique, next generation virtual desktop solution. VDI-in-a-Box is an all-in-one software appliance that enables Windows desktop administrators to deliver centrally managed virtual desktops for less than the cost of new PCs. VDI-in-a-Box eliminates over 60% of the infrastructure required by traditional virtual desktop solutions (a.k.a., VDI), including management servers and shared storage (SANs), by integrating connection brokering, desktop provisioning, load balancing, and user profile management and by leveraging off-the-shelf servers with direct-attached storage. Servers can be connected to form a highly available grid that scales simply by adding more servers; the grid automatically load balances and manages high availability. The key technological difference between Kaviza and other VDI solutions is that Kaviza developed new software from the ground up to create a VDI-specific logical shared storage system from the individual direct attached storage in a grid of off-the-shelf servers. Additionally, through innovative user interface coupled with underlying distributed algorithms, the grid was made to appear as one logical server whose capacity can be extended by simply joining additional servers on demand. This different architectural approach to VDI has several key ramifications: 1) It simplifies VDI. Skilled IT experts are no longer needed to deploy VDI. Desktop IT administrators and IT generalists who are not virtualization, network and storage experts and who manage PCs today can create a production ready, highly available VDI solution with VDI-in-a-Box. Adding more servers requires answering two security questions and VDI-in-a-Box does the rest. 2) It drastically reduces costs. Shared storage and high-speed networks required by all other solutions to provide a highly available solution account for nearly two-thirds of the cost of a VDI solution. VDI-in-a-Box provides a highly available solution without these components. 3) It eliminates login boot storms. When employees arriving at 9:00 in the morning all log in at the same time, VDI systems with shared storage are unable to handle the transient I/O surge unless they have a drastically overprovisioned storage system. Since VDI-in-a-Box does not use shared storage, it eliminates this central bottleneck and the resulting login boot storms. Commercialization Kaviza VDI-in-a-Box was packaged as an all-in-one virtual appliance and targeted at the existing PC market consisting of an installed base of roughly 500 million PCs with 84 million new PC purchases each year. To ensure profitability at the low price of $160 per virtual desktop, an inside sales and sales engineering team was used to sell to customers and sell indirectly through the channel. The simplicity of the product – deployed by the customer in hours instead of many days – made an inside sales approach viable. Kaviza leveraged social media, bloggers and webinars and a free 30-day trial download to generate demand and keep marketing costs low. The revolutionary new product won over 11 awards including "Best of" in its class at Synergy and VMworld, the leading virtualization conferences, and the Innovation Prize at CeBIT, the world’s largest IT conference. This notoriety enabled Kaviza to garner several large resellers including CDW, and it led to a Dell OEM of the solution. The product is especially successful in the education, services (e.g., accounting, legal), state and local governments, and the health services sectors. It also garnered many large customers because it was found to be very reliable and scalable. Current status Kaviza was acquired by Citrix in May of 2011, two and a half years after it was founded. The NSF grant was instrumental to Kaviza’s success. It provided the ability to experiment and bring to the market a vastly new approach to desktop virtualization – an approach that was shunned by the established IT vendors because it eliminated the need for costly infrastructure. Kaviza’s approach reduced costs and complexity and brought the advantages of desktop virtualization to an underserved part of the market, including schools, state governments and county hospitals, which did not otherwise have the money or the resources to modernize.
