Gaining infrastructure flexibility in an unpredictable world

We all hope the pandemic will decline soon, but one thing that isn’t likely to abate is the trend towards home working. Many businesses have discovered that a significant proportion of their workforce would like to continue working from home, at least part of the time. Employees have come to enjoy a better home life balance, greater time flexibility, not having to commute, and saving money, among other things.

Many organisations will, therefore, continue to support home working in the future, to some degree. But a successful strategy involves addressing the complexities of a remote workforce alongside IT concerns such as application performance, data security and systems management, all while reducing costs.

Get it right, though, and you’ll gain greater infrastructure flexibility in a less predictable world where IT agility has become a requirement, not just an aspiration.

Getting the balance right

Having the right IT foundation means getting several things right. For example, it’s important to balance IT agility with stability, particularly in a changing world where remote workers rely on the network for their productivity and efficiency.

Robust security is also essential, especially with more people working from home. Recent high-profile cyberattacks have highlighted this once again.

Meanwhile, organisations need to balance making judicious IT investments with controlling their costs, with many industries suffering from lower demand and workforce and supply chain disruptions.

How VDI can help

Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) offers a solution to these issues, as it enables organisations to host remote, virtualised desktop environments cost-effectively from a central server. Traditional VDI has its drawbacks, however. While it keeps remote workers connected and productive, it has been difficult to deploy and expensive to maintain in the past.

However, modern VDI on hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is changing that. HCI virtualizes all the elements of conventional ‘hardware-defined’ systems, making things faster and easier from a deployment and management perspective.

Moreover, AMD EPYC™ processors are a game changer that can deliver the full benefits of VDI on HCI. They accelerate virtualised applications, help protect data in use on virtual machines (VMs) and can also reduce costs by hosting more users per server, often with faster ‘time to result’.

Addressing immediate needs

AMD’s VDI on HCI offers strong in-built security features. It does this by helping secure data inside the CPU and system memory. It’s also possible to encrypt VMs and even containers with AMD’s EPYC™ server processor technology [1].

AMD EPYC™ processor-based solutions can also help reduce TCO. HCI consolidates storage, networking, and compute into one easy-to-manage system and can therefore help lower capital and operational expenses.

The technology can simplify IT management, as HCI does not require a large IT team to manage it, which is a cost in itself. This frees up engineers to attack other problems.

AMD is quickly evolving its infrastructure technologies with the goal of making HCI and other solutions even more powerful. For example, it’s working with OEM, ISV and cloud partners, who are enabling and optimising the underlying AMD EPYC™ Processor technology for performance gains and to schedule work better, resulting in faster time to value.

Transform home working

Home working is here to stay. VDI on HCI, powered by AMD EPYC^TM processors, can give organisations the right building blocks for an agile and flexible workforce infrastructure. One that will provide home-based workers with more reliable, resilient and flexible workplaces.

Additionally, the compact and versatile nature of HCI hardware means organisations can deploy it to their advantage, whether on premises, at the Edge, or in the cloud. For example, Microsoft Azure is supporting challenging VDI CAD workloads in the cloud through the NVv4 VM on AMD CPUs and GPUs.

VDI on HCI can also be rolled out rapidly and flexibly enabling a fast time to value. It’s therefore possible to deliver scalability, simplicity, and performance today, as AMD EPYC™ processor-powered HCI solutions provide the scalability and simplicity of the cloud, with the performance of on-premise infrastructure.

For more Information visit AMD at: www.amd.com

[1] AMD Infinity Guard https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/infinity-guard