VMware Horizon 6 and how it can benefit you..

What is Horizon 6?

VMware Horizon 6 leverages the best of Horizon View and extends these benefits beyond VDI, providing end users with on place to securely access all their desktops, applications and online services, from any device. Horizon 6 allows organisations to deliver virtualised or remote desktops and applications through a single virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) platform and support end users with access to all their desktops and applications through a single unified workspace.

With Horizon 6, VMware have introduced six new key capabilities to help organisations deliver unlimited access to desktops and applications, at lower costs and with better performance. These enhancements help maximize operational efficiency and consolidate control.

The Key Features are:

Applications:

• Supports end users with robust access to SaaS apps, Web apps, packaged VMware ThinApp apps, RDSG-Hosted apps and Citrix XenApps, through a single unified workspace.
• Enhanced support for USB drives with RDSH-hosted apps and session-bases desktops for file storage, sharing and collaboration.
• Support for scanning and imaging devices with virtual desktops and RDSH-hosted applications.
• Client drive redirection to ensure simple drive mapping to a virtual desktop.
• Google Chrome client support.
• Client-free, HTML access to legacy Windows apps across more devices, including Google Chromebooks.

Virtual Networking:

• VMware NSX with Horizon 6 brings push-button simplicity to VDI Networking. IT administrators can create and change policies for end users within seconds.
• Policies dynamically follow the end user across devices and locations, without the need for time-consuming network provisioning or security rules. 
• Organisations can easily scale up or down, and each end user's network security policy will remain intact.
• Horizon 6 provides a highly extensible platform that integrates with industry leaders in antivirus, malware, intrusion prevention services and next-generation security policies, by extending security policies from the data center to the device.

Graphics:

• Immersive 3D graphics delivered from the cloud.
• VMware provides full support for the industry's leading ISV applications, including Siemens, ESRI and Autodesk.

Storage:

• Horizon 6 leverages optimised VMware Virtual SAN 6.0, ensuring that customers can easily scale out and support up to 4,000 Horizon 6 virtual desktops per cluster.
• Support for all-flash Virtual SAN ensures end users can enjoy great experience with the best possible TCO.
• Horizon 6 now supports Virtual Volumes VM-aware storage systems to simplify storage management and policy settings for VDI.

Scalable and Available:

• Horizon 6 allows organisations to design virtual desktops around a wide range of validated technology partners or leverage hyper-converged infrastructure with VMware EVO:RAIL, to linearly scale out desktops and apps on demand.
• Applications can be delivered in real time with VMware App Volumes, now integrated with Horizon 6.
• Organisations can ensure that end users enjoy high availability with continuous access to services, by leveraging the Cloud Pod Architecture available with Horizon 6.

Fed-Ready:

• Horizon 6 is designed and certified to meet the most demanding compliance regulations, including those of the U.S. Federal Government.
• Horizon 6 now provides Common Access Card support for simple and secure access to apps and desktops for agencies that require it.
• Horizon 6 also provides end-to-end support for IPv6 networks for simplified packet processing and address assignments.

Horizon 6 offers improved security, simplified operations and accelerated time-to-value, and is available in three editions, Standard, Advanced and Enterprise. For more information about VMware Horizon 6 or other VMware products please contact Practical Networks, a VMware Partner on 01723 587240.

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What is Desktop Virtualisation?

What is Desktop Virtualisation?

Desktop Virtualisation is a virtualisation technology used to separate a computer desktop environment from the physical computer. Similarly to Server Virtualisation, Desktop Virtualisation relies on a thin layer of software known as a hypervisor, which is run on bare-metal server hardware and provides a platform on which administrators can deploy and manage virtual machines.

Virtualised desktops are stored on centralised or remote servers and not on the physical machine being virtualised. The virtual desktop environments are "server" to users on the network, allowing them to remotely log in to access their desktop from any location.

Why Virtualise your Desktops?

Desktop Virtualisation offers numerous benefits to businesses, including; reducing costs, increasing efficiency, enabling flexible working and centralising management of user desktops.

Desktop Virtualisation offers numerous features to organisations of all shapes and sizes, ultimately resulting in a range of benefits. For more information about Desktop Virtualisation contact Practical Networks, a VMware partner on 01723 587240.

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3-2-1 Protect your Data!

 The 3-2-1 Backup Rule from Practical Networks

Data-loss is a major disaster for businesses of all shapes and size, with 43% of businesses that are faced with data-loss not surviving the hit.  Of the businesses that do backup their data, 34% never test their backups and of those who do, 77% find that their backups are ineffective!!  Data loss has numerous causes with the biggest cause being hardware failure, and with 10% of laptops and 6% of PC’s encountering data loss every year, is your business prepared? 

Data Loss - The causes:

It is important for businesses to have a backup strategy in place and the Practical Networks 3-2-1 rule is a perfect starting point. 

The 3-2-1 Backup Rule: 

3. You should have at least three copies of your data – your primary data and two backups, all stored in different places.

2. Your copies should be stored on two different types of media – ‘Media’ means hard disks, CDs, tapes, DVDs, online backup, etc. Using two or more different types of media will protect against different types of technology failures.

1. You should keep one backup copy offsite – The idea is to keep one copy away from the location of the primary backups, thus reducing the risk of losing all backups. In this case Cloud backup can be a good choice.

For more information about how to backup your data effectively call Andy on 01723 587240. 

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Cloud Backup - How can it benefit you?

Cloud backup is increasingly more popular within our current technological environment, so we are taking this opportunity to keep you up to speed with what cloud backup actually is and why there has been an increase in its popularity.

Data Backups

Before cloud backup we relied on local backup, local backup is simply a copy of data to be stored in a different location to the original data, most commonly on tapes or another hard drive. However this form of backup cannot be seen as an effective form of disaster recovery. In order for this to be an effective form of disaster recovery the tapes or hard drives containing the copies need to be stored in a secure offsite location, to ensure that in the event of a fire the copies of your data are not lost along with the originals. This is where cloud backup comes in.

What is Cloud Backup?

Cloud backup or remote backup, as it is also known as, works in the same way as local or tape backup, except that your data is copied to highly secure off site data storage facilities over the internet. This form of backup is completely automatic, thus providing a more effective form of disaster recovery than local backup, due to data being stored offsite.

Why Cloud Backup?

Backup of this type offers a number of benefits to businesses, such as:

·         You only pay for the storage (GBs) you need

·         It offers a large retention period allowing for retrieval of accidentally deleted or modified  files

·         Flexible, limitless storage that can be scaled up or down as you require

·         Backup data can be accessed from any computer, even on the move

·         Backups can be completely automated, no user intervention is required

·         Offsite storage adding an element of disaster recovery

·         Scalability – it can easily adapt to deal with business growth

·         Most online backup services have redundant systems in place, increasing the safety of your  data

If you want to know more about online backup and how it can benefit you, why not give Andy a call on:

01723 587240

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