We will now learn how the combination of HCI and VDI makes the task of deploying and maintaining the latest end-user devices far simpler -- and cheaper than ever before.
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Here to explore how a new digital and data-driven culture can emerge from uniting the desktop edge with the hyper-efficient
core are Tom Gillon, Director
of Network and User Services at County College of Morris (CCM) in
Randolph, New Jersey; Michael
Gilchrist, Assistant Director of Network Systems at County College of Morris (CCM), and Felise Katz, CEO
of PKA Technologies,
Inc. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: What
are the trends driving your needs at County College of Morris to modernize and
simplify your personal computer (PC) architecture?
Gillon: We
need to be flexible and agile in terms of getting software to the students,
when they need it, where they need it.
 |
| Gillon |
With physical infrastructure
that really isn’t possible. So we realized that VDI was the solution to meet
our goals -- to get the software where the students need it, when they need it,
and so that’s a top trend that got us to this point.
Gardner: And
is the simplicity of VDI deployments something you are looking at universally,
or is this more specific to just students?
Gillon: We
are looking to deploy VDI all throughout the college: Faculty, staff, and
students. We started out with a pilot of 300 units that we mostly put out in
labs and in common areas for the students. But now we are replacing older PCs
that the faculty and staff use as well.
Gardner: VDI
has been around for a while, and for the first few years there was a lot of
promise, but there was also some lag from complications in that certain apps
and media wouldn’t run properly; there were network degradation issues. We’ve
worked through a lot of that, but what are some of your top concerns, Michael,
when it comes to some of those higher-order infrastructure performance issues
that you have to conquer before you get to the proper payoff from VDI?
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Gilchrist: You
want to make sure that the user experience is the same as what they would
experience on a physical device, otherwise they will not accept it.
Just having the horse power --
nowadays these servers are so powerful, and now you can even get graphics processing units (GPUs) in there -- you can run stuff like AutoCAD
or Adobe
and still give the user the same experience that they would normally have on a
physical device. That’s what we are finding. Pretty good so far.
Gardner: Felise,
as a Hewlett Packard
Enterprise (HPE) Platinum Partner, you have been through this
journey before, so you know how it was rough-and-tumble there for a while with
VDI. How has that changed from your perspective at PKA Technologies?
Katz: When
HPE made the acquisition of SimpliVity that was the
moment that defined a huge game-changer because it enabled us, as a solution
provider, to bring the right technology to CCM. That was huge.
Gardner: When
you’re starting out on an IT transition, you have to keep the wings on the
airplane while you’re changing the engines, or vice versa. You have to keep
things going while you are doing change. Tom, how did you manage that? How did
you keep your students getting their apps? How have you been able to swap
things out in a way that hasn’t been disruptive?
Gillon: The
beauty of VDI is that we can switch out a lab completely with thin clients in
about an hour. And we didn’t realize that going in. We thought it would take us
most of the day. And then when we did it, we were like, “Oh my God, we are
done.” We were able to go in there first thing in the morning and knock it out
before the students even came in.
That really helped us to get
these devices out to where the students need them and to not be disruptive to
them.
That really helped us to get these devices out to where the students need them and not be disruptive to them.
Gillon: PKA
has the expertise in this area. We worked with them previously on an Aruba wireless
network deployment project, and we knew that’s who we wanted to work with,
because they were professional and thorough.
Moving to the thin client
systems deployments, we contacted PKA and they put together a solution that
worked well for us. We had not been aware of SimpliVity combined with HPE. They
determined that this would be the best path for us, and it turned out to be
true. They came in and we worked with HPE, setting this up and deploying it.
Michael did a lot of that work with HPE. It was very simple to do. We were
surprised at how simple it was.
Academic pressure
Gardner:
Felise, as a solution partner that specializes in higher education, what’s
different from working at a college campus environment from, say, a small- to
medium-sized business (SMB) or another type of enterprise? Is there something
specific about a college environment, such as the number of apps, the need for
certain people and groups in the college to have different roles within
responsibilities? How did it shake out?
Katz: That’s
an interesting question. As a solution provider, as an owner of a business, we
always put our best foot forward. It really doesn’t matter whether it’s an
academic institution or a commercial customer, it always has to be done in the
right way.
 |
| Katz |
As a matter of fact, in
academics it’s even more profound, and a lot more pressured, because you are
dealing with students, you are dealing with faculty, and you are dealing with
IT staff. Once we are in a “go” mode, we are under a lot of pressure. We have a
limited time span between semesters -- or vacations and holidays -- where we
have to be around to help them to get it up and running.
We have to make sure that the
customer is enabled. And with these guys at CCM, they were so fabulous to work
with. They enabled us to help them to do more with less -- and that’s what the
solution is all about. It’s all about simplification. It’s all about
modernization. It’s all about being more efficient. And as Michael said so
eloquently, it’s all about the experience for the students. That’s what we care
about.
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Gardner: Michael,
where are you on your VDI-enablement journey? We heard that you want to go
pervasively to VDI. What have you had to put in place -- in terms of servers in
the HPE SimpliVity HCI case -- to make that happen?
Gilchrist: So far,
we have six servers in total. Three servers in each of our two data centers
that we have on campus, for high redundancy. That’s going to allow us to cover
our initial pilot of 300 thin clients that we are putting out there.
As far as the performance of
the system goes, we are not even scratching the surface in terms of the
computing or RAM available for those first 300 endpoints.
When it comes to getting more
thin clients, I think we’re going to be able to initially tack on more thin
clients to the initial subset of six servers. And as we grow, the beauty of
SimpliVity is that we just buy another server, rack it up, and bolt it in -- and
that’s it. It’s just plug and play.
Gardner: In
order to assess how well this solution is working, let’s learn more about CCM.
It’s 50 years old. What’s this college all about?
Data-driven college transformation
Gillon: We
are located in North Central New Jersey. We have an enrollment of about 8,000
students per semester; that’s for credit. We also have a lot of non-credit
students coming and going as well.
As you said, we are 50-years-old,
and I’ve been there almost 23 years. I was the second person hired in the IT
Department.
I have seen a lot come and go,
and we actually just last year inaugurated our third college president, just three
presidents in 50 years. It’s a very stable environment, and it’s really a great
place to work.
Gardner: I
understand that you have had with this newest leadership more of a technical
and digital transformation focus. Tell us how the culture of the college has
changed and how that may have impacted your leaping into some of the more
modern infrastructure to support VDI.
Gillon: Our
new president is very data-driven. He wants data on everything, and frankly we
weren't in a position to provide that.
We also changed CIOs. Our new
CIO came in about a year after the new president, and he has also a strong data
background. He is more about data than technology. So, with that focus we
really knew that we had to get systems in place that are capable of quick
transitions, and this HCI system really did the job for us. We are looking to
expand further beyond that.
Gardner:
Felise, I have heard other people refer to hyperconverged infrastructure
architectures like SimpliVity as a gift that keeps giving. Clearly the reason
to get into this was to support the VDI, which is a difficult workload. But
there are also other benefits.
The simplification from HCI has uncomplicated their capability for growth and for scale.
Katz: It's
all of the above. But to me -- and I think to both Tom and Michael -- it's
really the simplification, because [HCI] has uncomplicated their capability for
growth and for scale.
Look, they are in a very
competitive business, okay, attracting students, as Tom said. That’s tough,
that's where they have to make the difference, they have to make a difference
when that student arrives on campus with his, I don’t know, how many devices,
right?
One student, five devices
Gillon: It
averages five now, I think.
Katz: Five
devices that come on board. How do you contend with that, besides having this
huge pipe for all the data and everything else that they have to enable? And
then you have new ways of learning that everybody has to step up and enable.
It's not just about a classroom; it’s a whole different world. And when you’re
in a rural part of New Jersey, where you’re looking to attract students, you
have to make sure you are at the top of your game.
Gardner:
Expectations are higher than ever, and the younger people are even more demanding
because they haven’t known anything else.
Katz: Yes,
just think about their Xbox, their cell phones, and more devices. It's just a
huge amount. And it's not only for them, it's also for your college staff.
Gardner: We
can’t have a conversation about IT infrastructure without getting into the speeds
and feeds a little bit. Tell us about your SimpliVity footprint, energy,
maintenance, and operating costs. What has this brought to you at CCM? You have
been doing this for 23 years, you know what a high-maintenance server can be
like. How has this changed your perspective on keeping a full-fledged
infrastructure up and running?
Ease into IT
Gillon: There
are tremendous benefits, and we are seeing that. The six servers that we have put
in, they are replacing a lot of other devices. If we would have gone with a
different solution, we would have had a rack full of servers to contend with.
With this solution, we are putting three devices in each of our server rooms to
handle the load of our initial 300 VDI deployments -- and hopefully more soon.
There are a lot of savings
involved, such as power. A lot of our time is being saved because we are not a
big shop. Besides Michael and myself, I have a network administrator, and another
systems administrator -- that’s it, four people. We just don't have the time to
do a lot of things we need to do -- and this system solves a lot of those
issues.
Gilchrist: From
a resources utilization standpoint, the deduplication and compression that the
SimpliVity system provides is just insane. I am logically provisioning hundreds
of terabytes of information in my VMware system -- and only using 1.5 terabytes
physically. And just the backup and restore, it's kind of fire and forget. You
put this stuff in place and it really does do what they say. You can restore
large virtual machines (VMs) in about one or two seconds and then have it back
up and running in case something goes haywire. It just makes my life a lot
easier.
I’m no longer having to worry
about, “Well, who was my back-up vendor? Or who is my storage area network (SAN)
vendor? And then there’s trying to combine all of those systems into one. Well,
HPE SimpliVity
just takes care of all of that. It’s a one-stop shop; it’s a no-brainer.
Gardner: All
in one, Felise, is that a fair characterization?
Get Your Gorilla
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Katz: That
is a very, very true assessment. My goal, my responsibility is to bring forward
the best solution for my customers and having HPE in my corner with this is
huge. It gives me the advantage to help my clients, and so we are able to put
together a really great solution for CCM.
Gardner: There
seems to be a natural progression with IT infrastructure adoption patterns. You
move from bare metal to virtualization, then you move from virtualization to HCI,
and then that puts you on a path to private cloud -- and then hybrid cloud. And
in doing this modernization, you get used to the programmatic approach to
infrastructure, so composable infrastructure.
Do you feel that this progression
is helping you modernize your organization? And where might that lead to, Tom?
Gillon: I do.
With the experience we are gaining with SimpliVity, we see that this can go
well beyond VDI, and we are excited about that. We are getting to a point where
our current infrastructure is getting a little long in the tooth. We need to
make some decisions, and right now the two of us are like, this is only
decision we want to make. This is the way we are going to go.
Gardner: I
have also read that VDI is like the New York of IT -- if you can do it there,
you can do it anywhere. So what next workloads do you have in mind? Is this enterprise
resource planning (ERP), is it business apps? What?
Gillon: All of
the above. We are definitely looking to put some of our server loads into the
VDI world, and just the benefits that SimpliVity gives to us in terms of
business continuity and redundancy, it really is a no-brainer for us.
And yes, ERP, we have our ERP
system currently virtualized, and the way Michael has things set up now, it's
going to be an easy transition for us when we get to that point.
Gardner: We
have talked a lot about the hardware, but we also have to factor in the
software. You have been using the VMware Horizon
approach to VDI and workspaces, and that’s great, but what about moving toward
cloud?
Do you want to have more choice
in your hypervisor? Does that set you on another path to make choices about
private cloud? What comes next in terms of what you support on such a great HCI
platform?
A cloudy future?
Gillon: We
have decisions to make when it comes to cloud. We are doing some things in the
cloud now, but there are some things we don't want to do in the cloud. And HPE
has a lot of solutions.
We recently attended a
discussion with the CEO of HPE [Antonio Neri]
about where they are headed, and they say hybrid is the way to go. You are
going to have some on-premises workloads, you are going to have some off-premises.
And that's where we see CCM going as well.
Gardner: What
advice would you give to other organizations that are maybe later in starting
out with VDI? What might save them a step or two?
Get yourself a good partner because there are so many things that you don't know about these systems.
Gilchrist: Yes,
they brought in the expertise. We didn’t know about SimpliVity, and once they
showed us everything that it can do, we were skeptical. But it just does it. We
are really happy with it, and I have to say, having a good partner is step
number one.
Gardner: Felise,
what recommendations do you have for organizations that are just now dipping
their toe into workloads like VDI? What is it about HCI in particular that they
should consider?
Look to the future
Katz: If
they are looking for flexible architecture, if they are looking for the
agility, to be able to make those moves down the road -- and that's where their
minds are – then they really have to do the due diligence. Tom, Michael and
their team did. They were able understand what their needs are, what right
requirements are for them -- not just for today but also going down the road to
the future.
When you adopt a new architecture,
you are displacing a lot of your older methodologies, too. It’s a different
world, a hybrid world. You need to be able to move, and to move the workloads
back and forth.
It’s a great time right now.
It's a great place to be because things are working, and they are clicking. We
have the reference architectures available now to help, but it’s really first
about doing their homework.
CCM is really a great team to
work with. It's really a pleasure, and it’s a lot of fun.
Choose an HCI
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And I would be remiss not to
say, I have a great team. From my sales to my technical: Strategic Account
Manager Angie Moncada,
Systems Engineer Patrick Shelley,
and Vice President of Technology Russ Chow,
they were just all-in with them. That makes a huge difference when you also
connect with HPE on the right solutions. So that’s really been great.
Listen to the podcast. Find it
on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
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