VDI Discussions Are So 2010. Let’s Get Real About Cloud PC Performance!
What’s the formula for Cloud PC success? Well, if you’re pressed for time, you can skip right to the punchline in the last paragraph. If you have a few minutes though, we’re going to get real about virtual desktop performance, and there’s nothing more real than a customer’s experience.
Performance is Hot!
That’s right. It’s time to get real about virtual desktop performance. Now you can have far more meaningful conversations at all those end of summer barbecues. “VDI is passe’”, you can say to your friends with a flippant wave of your hand. Endless debates about whose VDI solution is better are all for naught. What’s hot? Aside from that spicy sauce on your Impossible Burger, Cloud PCs are hot. That’s a great conversation to have! Getting better-than-physical-PC performance is hot! Achieving that has never before been possible – now it is, and it can’t happen with traditional VDI.
Customer Experience is All That Matters
So what’s the formula for finally realizing all the benefits of virtual desktops? In a previous blog our CEO, Amitabh Sinha shared his thinking around the “New Math of VDI Performance – Better Than a PC!” It’s a great primer for the customer story I want to share with you now. Imagine that you’re a CAD Manager at a large engineering and architecture firm and you’re responsible for a team of engineers who design world-class airports, highways, bridges and buildings. Your company is growing fast, but your IT infrastructure can’t keep up. So you try on-premises virtual workstations and the performance makes your engineers less productive. Then you try a cloud workstation solution, and the performance is dismal. What do you do? If you’re Mead & Hunt, you stay with your cloud convictions. This is where perseverance pays off. Despite their previous disappointments, the team decided to try Workspot Cloud Workstations , and they were blown away by the results. When design engineers are working on a 3D model, they can’t wait around for their changes to render – it needs to happen immediately. Before becoming Mead & Hunt’s CAD Manager, Rebecca Yu was a user during six years of legacy VDI and cloud workstation solution evaluations. “You would do a command, and you would wait, and wait, and wait, and then eventually you would get a response,” says Yu. So when it came time to test Workspot, the real test was not comparing Workspot performance to the VDI solutions they had tried, because “good enough” was not going to cut it. The real test was conducting a side by side comparison of Workspot and a local, physical workstation. “We were really surprised by the fact that performance wasn’t just the same – Workspot was better,” said Rebecca. “I was totally blown away.”
Measuring the Milliseconds
In an article series on Cadalyst entitled “Harnessing the Cloud for CAD: The Case for Virtual Workstations”, Alex Herrera discusses the prospect of moving workstations to the cloud. “For extended graphical work, most user experiences will suffer when latency pushes beyond 150 ms, and many would set 100 ms as a safer limit… but much beyond that, and the prospect of remote computing, virtual workstation or otherwise, won’t be worth the aggravation,” says Herrera. After the successful performance comparison to the local workstation, Mead & Hunt deployed Workspot CloudWorkstations. CIO Andy Knauf said, “Workspot cloud workstations on top of Azure are able to provide that exact same experience, and a lot of times a better experience than we’d have locally because all of our data is in the cloud next to the workstation.” How does Mead & Hunt’s experience with Workspot cloud workstations compare to Herrera’s threshold? In most cases, Workspot customers are seeing under 25 ms latency, and one customer reports 12 ms. That’s not even detectible by humans. That is a phenomenal achievement for our customers!
The Formula for Cloud PC Success
Finally, the performance concerns that plague legacy VDI have been overcome, and we’re thrilled to share the formula with you: Workspot’s cloud-native virtual desktop control plane + Azure coverage in 60+ regions worldwide + data center-class hardware in Azure = unmatched cloud workstation performance that makes even the most demanding design engineers happy. Wow! Now, putting your PCs and workstations in the cloud is not only the best financial and security choice, but it’s also the best performance choice. Are you surprised?
You can learn more about Mead & Hunt’s journey to the cloud here, and be sure to watch the video to hear from Rebecca Yu, CAD Manager at Mead & Hunt, about her experience with Workspot.
Mead & Hunt’s CAD Manager, Rebecca Yu, has been deeply involved in evaluating virtual workstations. Watch the video to hear about her experience.
