BUILD THE BUSINESS CASE Optimize a VDI Project with Converged Compute and Storage table of contents + Calculate Capital and Operational Expenditures for Standard Desktops.... 1 + Capital and Operational Expenditures with VDI and Centralized Storage.... 1 + Capital and Operational Expenditures with Nutanix Data Center Infrastructure Solution.... 2 + The Bottom Line.... 4 A TechTarget White Paper brought to you by
So you have decided to go ahead with a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) project. How do you build a business case for selecting the optimal solution? 1. Calculate Capital and Operational Expenditures for Standard Desktops To establish a baseline for the business case, start by assessing the cost of the pre-vdi environment. While organizational circumstances may differ, studies by Gartner and others have shown that a typical organization with about 3,000 desktops and laptops connected on a network will spend about $600 per user per year for hardware and software capital expenses. As shown below, operational expenses include IT support costs of about $1,000 per user and downtime costing another $1,000 for end users. Network costs total about $500 per user per year. So total cost per user in the standard environment is $3,100 per year. For the 3,000-user organization, $9.3 million is required to maintain the standard networked desktop environment. Capital Expense Hardware/Software Network Operating Expense IT Support Downtime Total Cost Source: Gartner and industry surveys Annual Standard Desktop Costs Per User 3,000 Users $600 $1,800,000 $500 $1,500,000 Per User 3,000 Users $1,000 $3,000,000 $1,000 $3,000,000 $3,100 $9,300,000 2. Capital and Operational Expenditures with VDI and Centralized Storage As the table below demonstrates, a VDI project immediately provides cost savings by eliminating the need for IT to constantly touch the desktop or laptop devices for upgrades, repairs and general management. So decreases in IT operational expense and end-user downtime provide instant savings, amounting to 53%, for a total cost of about $4.4 million for the 3,000-user 1
scenario. Actual hardware costs are lower, but software costs more than make up for it as VDI clients and servers are deployed (according to IT organization surveys), keeping costs at $600 per user. Data center costs increase to $190,000, based on four rackable servers with 48 GB of RAM and the SAN providing 20 TB of storage. Annual VDI and Central Storage Costs Capital Expense Per User 3,000 Users Hardware/Software $600 $1.8 million Network $502 $1.506 million Servers $19 $57,000 Storage $40 $120,000 Power and Cooling $5 $15,000 Operating Expense Per User 3,000 Users IT Support $200 $600,000 Downtime $100 $300,000 Total Cost $1,466 $4,395,000 Source: Gartner, Nutanix and industry surveys 3. Capital and Operational Expenditures with Nutanix Data Center Infrastructure Solution However, with reduced desktop management time, IT organizations can achieve greater cost savings than 53%. With traditional VDI, organizations exchange the costs of hands-on desktop management and the resulting user downtime for the costs of more data center servers and increased storage, power, cooling and administration. However, applying data center infrastructure solutions such as Nutanix can yield even greater capital and operational savings. Nutanix is a converged server and storage appliance that supports out-of-the-box data center virtualization. Applied to a VDI project, Nutanix architecture delivers the benefits of traditional VDI with separate servers and centralized storage, but on a converged platform and at a lower cost for the data center and IT administration. In the calculation below, per-user hardware, software and network costs are not considered, as they remain constant. Nutanix supports standard VDI solutions, 2
including VMware View and Citirix XenDesktop. But the implementation of VMware s hypervisor and vblocks within the Nutanix scale-out distributed converged servers and storage eliminates the SAN and greatly reduces administration costs. So these costs are examined in the calculation. The Nutanix combination of out-of-the-box standard virtualization features, enabled by a converged server and storage architecture, available in an appliance with plug-and-play installation, allows an IT administrator to provision VDI in 30 minutes. This capability is far faster than the standard server and SAN infrastructure deployment time, saving operational costs and enabling time-to-productivity savings for VDI projects. This fast time-to-value translates into OPEX savings as well as CAPEX savings resulting from reduced data center rack space requirements and simplified capacity optimization and scalability. Nutanix enables VDI almost immediately, with the assurance that it can scale as needs change and desktops are added, without high up-front costs. As the comparison table below demonstrates, Nutanix converged approach results in a 36% CAPEX savings by replacing independent server and SAN equipment with its clustered node fabric of appliances. This includes an 80% savings in power and cooling. The calculation does not include other intangible savings, such as increased rack space availability for other applications. Annual Costs of Traditional VDI vs. Nutanix CAPEX Per User 3,000 Users Per User 3,000 Users Savings Servers $19 $57,000 Storage $40 $120,000 Power and Cooling $40 $120,000 32% CAPEX Total $64 $192,000 $41 $122,200 $36 OPEX Per User 3,000 Users Per User 3,000 Users Savings IT Support $200 $600,000 $100 $300,000 50% Downtime $100 $300,000 $10 $30,000 90% OPEX Total $300 $900,000 $110 $330,000 63% Combined Total $364 $1,092,000 $151 $452,200 59% Source: Nutanix and industry surveys $5 $15,000 $1 $2,200 $80,000 3
The table also demonstrates another 63% cost savings in operational expense based on a 50% reduction in IT administration and 90% reduction in downtime. These savings are derived from ease of management, based on the simpler monitoring and control requirements of the Nutanix solution vs. those of extensive SAN environments and, more important, the resilience of Nutanix to prevent downtime or data loss. Distributed architecture and locally stored and replicated data allow Nutanix to perform more efficiently, avoid boot storms and continue to perform even if a node crashes without causing the entire VDI implementation to stop performing. Downtime due to SAN controller and network bottlenecks is one of the costliest challenges of traditional VDI and leads to even more cost inflation through overprovisioning and scalability limitations. Additional intangible savings include the ability to increase time to value for VDI projects. Nutanix enables IT organizations to move from proof of concept to production with a 30-minute provisioning window. That time savings could be used to prove the business case for VDI and reap its benefits much sooner than with the traditional approach, which requires securing and deploying a capital-intensive SAN and server infrastructure. The Bottom Line VDI itself provides a 53% cost savings over traditional desktop environments, and the Nutanix data center infrastructure solution applied to VDI provides an additional 59% total cost savings over traditional VDI implementations. 4