Co-authored by Nexenta Sales Engineers Matthew Leib, and Michael Letschin

Over the last few years, outsourcing has been the tail end of jokes and the premise of parody, movies, and prime time sitcoms, but still it remains critical for the economic well-being of many of the world’s largest companies. Call centers are being opened everywhere from Asia to Albuquerque, and the skyrocketing cost of continual change and deployments is one that must be contained. The use of virtual desktops is the only way to maintain a secure, repeatable environment for outsourced users.

 This sounds simple and, on a small scale, it could be, but these call centers and development centers could be using a desktop from an oil firm one hour and a credit card company the next. The ability to provision machines quickly and dynamically is critical. Rapid growth of a virtual infrastructure can wreak havoc on traditional storage configurations. NexentaVSA for View (NV4V) gives administrators the ability to not only quickly provision storage through a shared none architecture, but also monitor and calibrate the existing storage so that it is optimal for all users. NexentaVSA for View offers metrics that assist in sizing the environment for scale. These call centers require that desktops be able to write data quickly and securely. With consumer confidence at an all-time low in some industries, the difference between a quick customer response and a slow one resulting from desktop issues can be the difference in keeping or losing a customer.

Cost optimization, and the continued shifts in spending from legacy storage-based mega-suites to the more flexible open-source solutions, will continue to benefit disruptive software models, as organizations look for ways to shift spending from capital expenditures to operating expenditures. As Mason Uyeda, Director of Marketing, EUC at VMware outlined in his blog Simplified Storage Automation for VMware View, businesses are seeking vendors offering comprehensive solution with well thought-out virtualization capability. VMware has partnered with Nexenta to deliver a storage solution for the Business Process Desktop^TM to simplify the storage automation at scale, remove any guesswork involved in storage deployment and provide an integrated solution with VMware vSphere, vCenter and View platforms.  

Cost and speed are not the only issues that need to be addressed however; the security of the data the centers are accessing also is paramount. The global economy is no longer the “30 year watch” loyalty of the past. Workers can and do change jobs at a whim. When virtual desktops are not deployed, the personal data that often is accessed via these call centers could be at risk for corporate espionage, both intentionally and unintentionally. Imagine if that list of each person’s name, their mother’s maiden name, and first pet was taken from one company to another. This is just the smallest type of breach that could occur when the desktop is not secure. Security often can be as easy as limiting the sprawl of data and information. When desktops are kept centrally, and in a non-persistent basis, that secure information can be monitored and maintained. NexentaVSA for View is ideal for these non-persistent scenarios. The ability for a single endpoint to present multiple companies’ desktops allows for efficiency of scale we have not previously seen in business process outsourcing. The shared nothing architecture allows outsourcing companies to ramp from a small pool to a larger one simply by adding servers to a vSphere cluster. This is in contrast to the traditional need of waiting to procure more storage, plus more servers, and hope that the new spindles can handle the new workload. The type of predictive metrics provided within the NexentaVSA for View interface take the guesswork out of sizing your infrastructure, storage environment, growing it, and determining the storage and IOPS required.  When looking for secure, segmented, and quickly deployable virtual desktops in an outsourced environment, the easiest deployment for the first 100 or the next 2000 is NexentaVSA for View integrated with VMware View.