During the 1970s and 80s, the marketplace transition from green-screen terminals with the mainframe to decentralized PCs meant performance enhancements in multimedia, lower hardware costs and mobility of information technology resources. Over the long run, however, consumers discovered that the benefits of personal computers were often outweighed by the costs of management and maintenance. Businesses and organizations have discovered that there are clear, sometimes significant, downsides with the decentralized PC computing approach. Consequently, they began to re-evaluate how their technology assets are deployed and managed in a PC-decentralized environment.

DOWNLOAD WHITEPAPER HERE

Such evaluations often reveal that more than 70 percent of the total cost of ownership in a desktop computing scenario is focused on equipment purchase, deployment, repair, maintenance, upgrading and replacement. With approximately 496 million PCs distributed across IT sites, the costs can be very substantial. With growth in company size, IT organizations are constantly seeking bigger budgets, larger staffs and more space just to keep up.

Despite these factors, studies have also determined that desktop resource utilization rates are alarmingly low, and that an abundant amount of hardware capacity sits idle for prolonged periods. Overall, while capacity utilization on Windows/Intel servers is generally only between eight and 15 percent, for the desktops accessing those servers, it is a paltry three to five percent.

To address this issue of improving capacity utilization, more and more companies and information technology departments are implementing infrastructure solutions, such as server and storage consolidation through virtualization. With the promise of a new day rising upon the desktop environment, companies are taking a “return-to-the-mainframe” mentality, leveraging these same solutions, and in many cases, the same IT skills, to re-deploy desktops. Via mainframe-inspired System x x86 server hardware located within the datacenter, the entire desktop operating system and application stack can be virtualized, delivering the complete multimedia experience that users have become accustomed to, but without the security concerns and spiraling management costs of the traditional ‘fat client’ PC approach.

To read Mainline’s Full White Paper Click Here.

Desktop Virtualization for Infrastructure Optimization
Desktop virtualization is truly changing the way companies deploy desktops, delivering on the promise of flexible, efficient, secure and easy-to-manage infrastructure and thin-client solutions. Mainline and VMware are leading the way in desktop virtualization by bringing together all solution components, including thin client devices, software and services in one bundled solution. This means you work with one solution provider.