Is virtualization the answer for the push to consolidate data centers? A growing number of agencies and IT experts think so.
Virtualization, for example, is enabling the Army's Program Executive Office for Aviation to run more than 100 virtual desktops on a converged storage and compute architecture, with an eye toward moving 80 percent of PEO Aviation's 3,500 desktop users to the virtualized environment. The project has so far allowed the office to replace 800 desktop computers with a single server.
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Moving to a virtualized desktop infrastructure, then, can be a source of significant savings, but it must be done right, according to Thomas Sasala, who helped spearhead an Army pilot program in 2009 as CTO of the Army IT Agency.
"Do not approach VDI as an IT thing. It is not an IT change—it is an organizational change commitment," Sasala said. "Stakeholder engagement, expectation management and change management are the most important things you can address when you're doing something like VDI."
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