Finish line approaches for Hyundai virtual desktop rollout

Head of IT at Hyundai Motor Company Australia expects to complete VDI deployment within the next two months

Bala Kothandaraman, general manager, ICT, Hyundai Motor Company Australia.

Bala Kothandaraman, general manager, ICT, Hyundai Motor Company Australia.

Hyundai's Australian subsidiary is close to completing a company-wide VDI rollout. Head of IT at Hyundai Motor Company Australia, Bala Kothandaraman, said that virtual desktops have been rolled out to around 45 per cent of the organisation's 200 end users, with the remainder to transition in two months.

"The solution for VDI was initially to replace our existing fleet of desktops but we've actually extended that to our mobile users as well," said Kawa Farid, Hyundai Australia's infrastructure manager.

Farid said that users should be able to access their desktop environment from any end point — "tablets, mobile phones and desktops."

The VDI deployment fits within the organisation's 'virtual first' strategy, which has been in place since 2010, Farid said.

"When we virtualized our server infrastructure back in 2010, we obviously saw the advantage of having agile and flexible infrastructure using virtualization," the infrastructure manager said.

"From then onwards whenever we're deploying an application we always check making that it's going to be able to run in a virtual environment.

"Obviously doesn't mean that everything can run or does run on virtualization. We do have certain applications that are still running in legacy, physical environment, but we prefer to use virtualization as much as we can."

Instead of using a traditional SAN, Hyundai opted for converged infrastructure from Nutanix to support the VDI deployment. The company initially deployed two Nutanix 6070 appliances, each of which has two nodes. More recently the company invested in a third dual-node appliance.

Nutanix set up shop in Australia in mid-2013. The San Jose-headquartered company last month announced an OEM deal with Dell under which the latter will sell a range of its own hardware equipped with Nutanix's software platform.

Hyundai was introduced to the Nutanix platform by IT service provider BEarena and invested in in the technology after conducting a proof of concept, Farid said. "Having compute and storage locally as opposed to the traditional SAN architecture is very attractive."

"We're using it for a mix of different workloads," Farid said.

"We've actually got a different range of database servers, Microsoft SQL servers, SharePoint as well as Microsoft Exchange plus additional file servers – we're really running pretty much all our infrastructure on the Nutanix boxes."

Follow Rohan on Twitter: @rohan_p

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Tags Case Studyvirtualizationvirtual desktopsVirtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)HyundaiCase studiesNutanix

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