Sphere 3D Corp., a containerization, virtualization and data management solutions provider and parent company of Overland Storage and Tandberg Data, today announces the general availability of its V3 distributed Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) appliance family.  With this, the company is also introducing a new approach to architecting the fundamentals of VDI to outperform desktop centric appliances as well deliver proprietary failover capabilities. Sphere 3D calls this new approach a Distributed Desktop Hyperconvergence (DDH) architecture, and it enables simplified virtual desktop deployment and management while optimized for distributed environments.

Highlights

• Provides one of the industry's most comprehensive and complete solution portfolios that takes aim at making VDI accessible and appropriate for any customer, any workload with the ability to scale in any increment, whether it be 10 users or thousands.
• Purpose built for VDI, V3 delivers a simple turnkey appliance family for use cases including Remote Office / Branch Office (ROBO), Small/Midsize Businesses (SMB) and distributed enterprise environments.
• Seamlessly integrates with existing VMware solutions and existing VDI investments for streamlined deployment and enhanced VDI capabilities.
• Starts small with a list price of $15,000 and scales through workload optimized appliances that address a variety of workloads, including everything from simple task workers to professional graphics users.
• Integrates Sphere 3D's Desktop Cloud Orchestrator (DCO) software with VMware and NVIDIA technologies, providing desktop orchestration and automation from a centralized management platform.
• Built for desktop administrators to decentralize virtual desktops and provide an enhanced user experience.
• Introduces a Distributed Desktop Hyperconvergence (DDH) architecture to better align VDI with real world use cases.
• Slated to be able to leverage the VMware Horizon Air Hybrid-Mode capabilities for increased flexibility and expanded cloud capacity as part of VMware's hyper-converged appliance partnership. 
  

"The $2 billion hyper-convergence market defined in 2014 is estimated to grow tenfold to $20 billion by 2020," said David Floyer, chief technology officer and co-founder, Wikibon.  Mr. Floyer went on to add: "Sphere 3D's approach to Distributed Desktop Hyper-converged Infrastructure (HCI) is a unique contribution to the HCI ecosystem, with VDI being a leading-edge workload."

"With this launch of their V3 distributed hyperconverged appliance solutions, Sphere 3D has distinguished itself as a pioneer in delivering high performance desktops for the distributed enterprise and the SMB," said John Fanelli, vice president, NVIDIA GRID. "Sphere 3D's workload optimized business graphics and professional graphics offerings, powered by our NVIDIA GRID technology, are changing the business case of deployment and management of virtual workspaces by making high-performance virtualization available to a broader set of customer profiles."

"With our V3 product family, organizations can look to a purpose-built family of appliances that are pre-tuned for optimal VDI performance and leverage existing best-of-breed technologies.  Demands on IT departments for End User Computing (EUC) solutions have traditionally put a strain on budgets and IT resources and have prevented organizations from being able to match real world use cases of physical desktops with a Cloud computing solution," said Peter Bookman, Global Strategist of Sphere 3D. "Our new V3 solutions have been specifically engineered to match these use cases and provide the flexibility to de-risk VDI deployments through a simple building block approach that no longer requires a ‘one size fits all' approach."

The V3 appliance family comes pre-provisioned with Sphere 3D's Desktop Cloud Orchestrator (DCO) software and also leverages VMware's VMware vSphere virtualization and server management software, and VMware Virtual SAN enterprise-class shared storage solutions, along with GPU technology from NVIDIA, to take aim at making Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) accessible and applicable to business and branch offices of any size. The V3 all-flash appliances can start with a single appliance for VDI use or a 3-node configuration for a Virtual SAN cluster. Designed to stand alone or extend and simplify existing VMware customer environments, the V3 appliances can deliver key performance and capacity advantages from a single product family with one point of support.

Sphere 3D's DDH architecture is designed to simplify virtual desktop deployment and management for ROBO installations, and also reduces the cost and necessary infrastructure to support VDI.  DDH reduces VDI management overhead and complexity while creating desktop resilience and decreasing branch office infrastructure. DDH is also road-mapped to use application containerization to shift the focus from storage onto end user computing, resulting in an improved user experience.

V3 appliances with DCO provide hardware awareness with real time alerts of the state of the hardware and the ability to migrate end users, on a case by case basis, from appliance to appliance for optimal performance and availability.  In addition, the new V3 family is slated to be able to leverage the VMware Horizon Air Hybrid-Mode capabilities for increased flexibility and expanded Cloud capacity in the coming months.

Pricing and Availability

Entry systems for small and medium businesses and remote offices start at a U.S.-list price of $15,000. Options for performance-intensive or graphic-based workloads that can support more than 100 professional graphic users from a single appliance are also available. The product is available for purchase through Sphere 3D's Elite and Elite Pro FastTrack channel partners.