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Five ways VDI technology is affected by storage

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Look into the use of microservers like HP Moonshot

Source:  iStock and HP

Hewlett-Packard's recent Moonshot line is basically a physical computing "cartridge" (like a modern day blade) which, when used with a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), provides a user-to-cartridge ratio of 1:1. Each user has his/her own physical CPU and hard drive.

HP Moonshot and other microservers are similar to VDI, but do not actually connect to a virtual machine (VM). Instead, they connect to a physical machine, without all the difficult capacity planning that comes with virtualization. Do you want to take that IOPS storage calculation of your plate? Done.

Since virtualization has been so big these past 10 years or so, VMs have gained a lot of attention. But Madden said hosted blades serve the same purpose just fine.

"VDI is about taking your desktop off your desk and putting it into the data center," he explained. "No one says it has to be a virtual machine."

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