Nicola Sessions, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, NVIDIA
As today’s workforce grows increasingly mobile and businesses ramp-up their usage of cloud resources to complement on-premises IT, traditional models of IT delivery are quickly becoming outdated. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and NVIDIA® are partnering to offer a portfolio of GPU-accelerated virtualization solutions that enhance any workload, regardless of whether the business operates in an on-premises, private cloud, public cloud, or hybrid IT environment. These solutions are enabling every business to extend the reach of virtualization to every user, while also delivering an immersive and responsive user experience.
Virtualization helps today’s organizations more efficiently use IT resources, enhance the flexibility of existing hardware, reduce IT costs, and transition to a more agile IT model that provides computing resources on-demand. Mastering virtualization benefits the business in many ways, particularly because it is a key enabler of cloud computing. In order to capitalize on the tremendous competitive advantages offered by cloud computing, businesses are increasingly employing a hybrid IT approach that leverages the on-demand capacity and economic benefits of public cloud without sacrificing the security and control of on-premises IT.
Get the best of both worlds
While some businesses may feel like they must choose between on-premises or the cloud, this approach can actually make it even harder to address complex IT challenges and grow the business. Now, businesses can get the best of both worlds and radically improve their IT delivery – all without a major overhaul of their IT environments – with a hybrid approach. A successful hybrid IT approach focuses on blending all infrastructure types into a customized environment that benefits the business, using each delivery model where it’s most appropriate and effective. This means workloads dealing with internal operations or containing sensitive customer information can stay on-premises where the business can maintain complete visibility and control, and the cloud can be leveraged for workloads that are less sensitive to security, latency, or compliance risks.
Using hybrid IT to master virtualization
To succeed in this rapidly changing digital economy, businesses must continually make investments that strengthen their on-premises infrastructure while also offering them the flexibility to expand their cloud capabilities. The hybrid IT approach can help companies improve the management and control of their IT resources, which is a key step on the path to delivering a fully operational virtualized environment.
Deciding on the right mix of IT environments for the business can seem like a daunting task, but the flexibility offered by hybrid IT will provide high availability of resources to employees regardless of location, while also allowing the business to maintain full control of and visibility over operations. This will provide the agility and performance necessary to support a fleet of mobile or remote workers while also ensuring that business-critical data is protected.
The benefits of NVIDIA Virtual GPUs
Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) has been a preferred method of delivering desktops and apps to workers, but it can fall short for users that rely on complex graphics or video rendering. 3D user interface features work to dramatically enhance the user experience. Many of the applications commonly used by organizations today (Microsoft Office 2016/365, various web browsers, video/unified communication tools) increasingly require high-end graphics capabilities, which is driving the need for GPU utilization across the board. NVIDIA virtual GPUs (vGPUs) render graphics on a host server rather than on a physical endpoint device, allowing organizations to achieve the performance and power needed to accelerate their most demanding graphics workloads in a virtual environment that IT has complete control over.
Knowledge workers—mid to high range users who require rich web media content, office productivity application, and smooth video playback—need a vGPU-enabled environment to power a mix of workloads. NVIDIA Virtual GPU solutions help IT extend the reach of virtualization to every user, regardless of their location. NVIDIA vGPUs are able to run graphics-intensive applications that reside in the cloud versus on the endpoint device, making virtual workspaces available to every user while delivering an experience that rivals physical PCs. These powerful solutions are designed to meet the increasing graphics demands of modern applications, unlock worker productivity, and alleviate many of the challenges faced by today’s IT departments.
vGPU solutions from NVIDIA can help businesses:
• Enhance agility – By liberating users from the constraints of physical workstations or offices, IT can eliminate serialized workflows that inhibit agility and drive real-time collaboration.
• Support a diverse workforce – Provide support for every user type, including mobile users and remote offices, by centralizing the management of data and applications in the data center.
• Strengthen data security – Data and intellectual property are centrally stored in the data center, protecting it against breaches, loss, or damage.
NVIDIA vGPU solutions are comprised of both hardware and software licensing components: Software allows businesses to choose either NVIDIA GRID™ Virtual PC, GRID Virtual Apps, or NVIDIA Quadro® Virtual Data Center Workstation (Quadro vDWS), and the appropriate support, updates, and maintenance (SUMs) option for your needs. NVIDIA® Tesla® Data Center GPUs—Pascal and Maxwell-based GPU accelerators in certified server platforms—run the NVIDIA virtualization software. Businesses can choose from density-optimized, performance-optimized, or blade-optimized solutions.
HPE is a certified NVIDIA virtualization partner that offers a selection of enterprise-grade platforms that are ideal for organizations that need to deliver high-performance virtual workspaces. HPE’s ProLiant DL380 Gen10 servers provide support for NVIDIA vGPU software with NVIDIA Tesla M10 GPUs for graphics virtualization. HPE’s high performance computing (HPC) platforms deliver better user densities than competitive server solutions, which helps to dramatically cut the costs of deploying virtual machines. In fact, HPE Synergy supports up to 768 VDI sessions in a 10-rack unit. And all HPE HPC servers support the latest version of GRID and Quadro vDWS software, effectively combining the industry’s best-selling server platforms with the most advanced technology available for sharing vGPUs across multiple virtual desktops and applications.
Today’s businesses are incorporating vGPUs into their hybrid IT approach to provide seamless data access, enhance user experience (user interface speed), and drive dramatically higher levels of speed, scalability, and security. Find out more about how to master virtualization with a hybrid IT approach by following us on Twitter at @HPE_HPC and @NVIDIAVirt.