Cisco sneaks into the corporate laptop/desktop market with CIUS

I've been going slightly nuts since yesterday after Cisco announced the CIUS.  It looks like the perfect tablet for the sorts of things I really want a personal screen device for - communicating with other people.  This review by Erik Parker of InfoWorld is a pretty good read and it summarizes key advantages and disadvantages of CIUS.  If it can make the technology of video conferencing transparent to end users, it will be a big deal. 

But the hidden story to this is that Cisco is also making a play to get into the corporate desktop/laptop business with the CIUS.  The idea that companies could deploy these with VDI is definitely part of Cisco's grand plan for world domination. Whether or not the CIUS could replace laptop or desktop computers remains to be seen, but there are reasons to think they could eventually if the stars align. 

The arguments for VDI are strong, but there are still a lot of hurdles to overcome, such as back end storage performance to support boot storms. By the way, people looking at large VDI implementations might want to look at 3PAR's wide striping storage systems to get the sort of affordable IOPS needed to support large VDI environments. My previous post illustrates our design for massive throughput, which supports a huge number of IOPS without needing SSDs or requiring storage administrators to create special disk pools to isolate the VDI workload from other applications running in the same storage array.

Comments

[Robert Weilheim]

For VDI, if you assume 30 IOPS per user, 1000 users would require 30,000 IOPS. If you assume a 15K drive could service 200 IOPS, that's 150 disks. Seems to me that SSDs are needed for mid to large scale VDI projects. Certainly arrays that can wide strip help even out the load, but you can't really get past the sucky physics of spinning rusty plates.

[marc farley]

Thanks Robert, Yes, it takes a system with a fair number of drives and so you are assuming an enterprise environment with an enterprise-sized storage system. We have customers with fairly large numbers of VDI desktops running very well with 500+ drive arrays. I wouldn't characterize their environments as small by any means, but VDI is still fairly new and the calipers for determining small, medium and large environments are not very good.

A small amount of numbers tweaking makes the physics either easier to accommodate or harder depending on whether there are more or fewer IOPs per desktop. If the customer sees lower IOPS, say 20 per desktop, the number if IOPs and disk drives that you need also drops by a third. The same principle applies to customers seeing more IOPs, say 40, except they would need 25% more resources to handle the additional IOPs workload.

[Bill]

Marc-

I think you've missed the real reason that Cisco is releasing this. I suspect that they are entering this area for the same reason that they own Flip Video.

By getting more people online and uploading and downloading content, they drive more consumption of their cash cow: the core router business. This is to drive business consumption of bandwidth in the same way that Flip Video creates demand for home and internet bandwidth.

They are simply driving you to consume the bandwidth through their main products. It's really as simple as that.

[marc farley]

I totally agree. If there are video exchanges everywhere all the time, their core business will continue to grow.