Overland Storage, Inc., a trusted global provider of unified data management and protection solutions across the data lifecycle, today announced the launch of its V3 hyper-converged virtual desktop appliance to address the rapidly growing virtualisation and cloud markets.

Developed in partnership with Sphere3D, the V3 Appliances are the first in a series of planned turn-key solutions that will expand Overland's product portfolio. The ‘purpose-built’ V3 Appliance delivers an easy-to-deploy virtual desktop solution with simplified management tools and lower total cost of ownership.

"VDI workloads are well served by hyper-converged solutions, however the management of desktops across diverse environments remains challenging," said Terri McClure, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. "With the Desktop Cloud Orchestrator management software and V3 Appliance, Overland is focused on the right pain points for end users considering VDI."

The addition of V3 virtual desktop appliances expands the value proposition that Overland Storage's worldwide channel partners can offer to customers who want to overcome many of the management, complexity and performance weaknesses of physical desktops and traditional virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions.

The V3 Appliance is a hyper-converged infrastructure that integrates compute, storage and network interface, as well as the required hypervisor infrastructure and is managed by the Desktop Cloud Orchestrator management software. This becomes a single turn-key appliance solution that delivers high-availability failover architecture, eliminates performance bottlenecks and installation problems, and provides predictable scalability and cost for VDI deployments.

Overland Storage now offers two models of V3 virtual desktop appliances that are delivered pre-provisioned and ready to quickly and easily install into an existing VMware environment in less than a day. Each V3 solution can accommodate either 100 or 200 desktops per appliance, and effortlessly scales to 10,000 desktops. The ease of deployment, operational simplicity and performance improvements of the V3 Appliance can reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) by $1 million over three years based on a 1,000 user physical desktop environment.

"V3 desktop virtualisation delivered cost savings and flexibility that were simply impossible to achieve with our physical engineering workstation infrastructure," said John McConnell, IT Manager, University of Texas at Dallas School of Engineering. "Additionally, we now deploy engineering lab desktops with dramatically greater speed and efficiency than a traditional physical desktop deployment."

Unique benefits of the V3 Appliance:

• Ease & Flexibility of Deployment: The purpose-built, all-in-one V3 Appliance incorporates storage, compute and management in a single rack-mounted chassis. V3 Appliances can be deployed and managed in a public, private, or hybrid model and scale up and out for industry-leading flexibility when deployed locally or in a data centre.
• Breakthrough Operational Simplicity: The V3 Desktop Cloud Orchestrator (DCO) management software streamlines virtual desktop pool administration with dynamic provisioning for maximum resource utilization, failover for high availability, and the flexibility to migrate pools between public and private clouds.
• Predictable and Consistent Performance: By removing legacy VDI bottlenecks, the V3 virtual desktop appliance maintains consistent levels of performance for each V3 user, typically two to eight times faster than physical PCs.
• Secure Desktop Computing: The V3 Appliance architecture delivers highly-secure desktop computing because no data is stored on, or transferred to, the user's desktop. Administrators have the ability to control access in real time.
• Scalability: VDI typically requires additional storage for user data. Overland Storage completes the V3 virtual desktop solution with optional SnapServer and SnapScale storage solutions that deliver cost-effective, reliable and infinitely-scalable performance and capacity.

"Today's requirements in mobility and cloud computing are driving a new set of challenges and complexities for global IT organisations," said Eric Kelly, President and CEO of Overland Storage. "By combining our enterprise-class scalable storage portfolio with the new turn-key V3 appliance and breakthrough Desktop Cloud Orchestrator software, our global channel partners can now deliver virtual desktop solutions that overcome the cost and complexity of traditional VDI solutions."

Price & Availability

Two models of the V3 Appliance are available from authorized Overland Storage channel partners. The V100 and V200 V3 Appliance models are optimized to serve up to 100 and 200 virtual desktops, respectively and can scale to thousands of desktops. Pricing starts at $US60,000 MSRP.