Technology Reseller v49

39 VIRTUAL DESKTOPS technologyreseller.co.uk in the MSP space, is the cost of running Azure. When we go into an MSP and tell them we’re going to save them 60% to 80% on the cost of running their customers on Azure, their ears prick up and their eyes open wide and they say ‘Wow, I didn’t know that was even possible. In fact, that’s what's been stopping me from moving to Azure in the first place’.” Landes cites a study of a 192-user environment, which shows that going to Microsoft's portal and deploying Azure Virtual Desktops for those 192 users in an unoptimised way costs about $26 per user, per month, but just $4.54 per user, per month if you use Nerdio auto scaling technology. “Saving around 80% per user, per month is a tremendous amount of money. Then, when you compare that to using Citrix or VMware which is just not able to do that, it’s a no brainer. Why would somebody want to pay $25, $50 per user, per month when you can pay $4.54?” Nerdio’s other major benefits are: n simpler day-to-day management of clients, epitomised by the concept of ‘three click management’, a belief that you should be able to do every task in Azure in no more than three clicks. Greater automation and the ability to manage all clients in a single pane of glass admin portal can significantly reduce help desk requirements and enable organisations to redeploy more expensive experienced technicians to higher value work; and n the ability to provision a complete AVD environment in less than an hour or connect to an existing deployment in minutes. “For an MSP who has never done anything in Azure before, it’s going to take two, three or four weeks of education and consulting to get a customer up and running. With Nerdio, they can deploy that customer automatically in 60 minutes or less without the need to hire a very expensive Azure engineer,” explains Landes. Partner recruitment Nerdio is a channel-first company and in the UK has several partners on the enterprise side and many more on the MSP side that are using Nerdio Manager to help build a more efficient AVD practice and make monthly recurring revenue from selling subscription-based cloud services. Landes says that Nerdio is particularly looking for IT system integrators with significant virtual desktop experience that have become dissatisfied with Citrix or VMware and would like to build an AVD practice instead. “A lot of partners around the world have grown up in the VDI space with the legacy providers, with Citrix and VMware, and the moves those companies have made money on the cost of running Azure, on the cost of their Azure infrastructure and on the cost of Azure compute and storage specifically,” explains Landes. “Our auto scaling engine allows a customer to do a number of things, for example turn on and turn off virtual machines when they’re not being used. Imagine you’re an MSP and you have a 20user doctor’s surgery and you know that at 7 p.m. every night the doctors and nurses and staff go home and don’t come back in again until 8 a.m. the following morning. Wouldn’t it be great if the system was intelligent enough to power down all those desktops at 7 O’clock so the meters don’t continue to spin in Azure? And wouldn’t it be great if the technology knew to turn those desktops back on the next morning so that when people come in at 8 O’clock they are ready to go. “That’s the basic concept of auto scaling, but we go much further than just turning on and off resources. We will change the type of storage that you have, so in the off-hours you don’t pay for premium storage but use standard storage, and there are many other optimisations that together can result in a customer or partner saving 60% to 80% on the cost of running Azure. “One of the biggest challenges customers and partners face, certainly continued... “What makes Azure Virtual Desktop unique, relative to other virtual desktop technologies, is that it’s a Microsoft-centric virtual desktop technology. If you’re using Office 365, it’s a very natural bridge to be able to use Microsoft’s virtual desktop technology as well.”

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