Why use virtualisation?

With virtualisation, you can significantly increase and optimise the rate of use of the server and desktop resources that companies rely on. The "one application = one server" equation becomes obsolete.

Dynamic (as opposed to static) management of server and application resources makes it possible to meet increasingly high requirements for the service provided to users.

With its intelligent load-balancing functions, AppliDis Fusion can thus provide ideal optimisation of the number of servers required, hosting virtualisation services (SBC and VDI).

With virtualisation, you can reduce maintenance costs and overall costs of operation and ownership by around 40-70% in comparison to "standard" architectures.

• - Costs of acquisition: Desktops no longer need to be as powerful to run applications, and the arrival of a new, more "resource-hungry" application will have no effect on hardware. It is therefore possible to extend the life of desktops and, ultimately, replace them with thin terminals, which are more economical to buy and maintain.

• - Energy costs: energy costs are reduced from 125W to 15W, thanks to reduced deployment of software resources on desktops.

• - Maintenance costs: implementing a new application is transparent from the perspective of existing applications. Teams are freed up for other tasks. Patches and other updates are applied in the data centre. Updates are therefore instantaneous and simultaneous for everyone.  Similarly, the ability to "roll back" to an earlier version is immediate.

• - Operating costs: for most applications, bandwidth is considerably lower: RDP optimises the application display and transmits only keystrokes and mouse clicks. It becomes easy to incorporate mobility into the company's work practices:  no user data is associated with a given desktop, but is instead available in the data centre from any access point.

With its built-in redundancy systems and very high availability, virtualisation can eliminate the risks of interrupted services in the event of scheduled or unscheduled interruptions.

Every service – AppliDis Administration, AppliDis Application, AppliDis Web Portal, AppliDis Gateway – can be configured to ensure very high availability of each component, and therefore of the server farm as a whole.

With AppliDis Fusion 4, each service (administration, applications, Web portal, etc.) is duplicated. This redundancy makes it very easy to implement a Business Continuity Plan or Disaster Recovery Plan. This is because it becomes simple to share the components of a redundant architecture between several data centres and ensure very high availability for all company departments, even in the event that one of the production data centres goes offline.

The virtualisation of application services and desktops can achieve a significant reduction in overall electrical consumption from a desktop management infrastructure. The replacement of desktops by thin clients and the centralisation of servers, which optimises processor and memory use, play a major part in reducing the carbon footprint for this infrastructure.

A few examples of benefits with a "thin-client" infrastructure:

• Thin clients consume ten times less electricity than a standard desktop. They therefore dissipate less memory on the desktops, and deliver substantial power and air-conditioning savings.

• The hardware is totally silent, because it includes no ventilation, and contains no mechanical moving parts. A thin client therefore has a life cycle of more than 7 years, which considerably reduces the cost of recycling in your IT infrastructure.

• Its reduced configuration makes the IT administrator's life easier; for example, with simple, immediate "plug and play"-style replacement by the user.

By centralising application resources at the data centre, virtualisation plays a part in providing secure access to and use of the company's data. After all, it is much simpler to control access to data when it is collected in one single location than when it is distributed around all of the company's sites.

Access to applications and desktops is via remote screens. In this way it is easy for the administrator, via the administration console, to allow or restrict the movement of data files across the network.