An Intelligent VDI Solution for Education

By Dan Newton, CEO – HiveIO Inc.

When you look at the history of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), its potential was significant. Use cases aligned perfectly across many industries, including federal and government, retail, banking, energy, healthcare, and education sectors. Despite this clear potential, VDI has historically fallen short of delivering on its promise due to complexity and cost.

As an example, for education, there are truly meaningful and tangible benefits to deploying VDI:

• Security becomes far easier to maintain.
• The ability to meet remote learning and visiting teacher needs is enhanced.
• A consistent user experience is provided on thin clients, “bring your own devices,” or the latest Chromebooks.
• Cost-effective delivery of GPUs becomes achievable for specialized learning.

In such a seemingly ideal vertical, why has VDI stopped short of delivering? Typical VDI solutions are unbearably complex and extremely costly. Incumbents have acquired and bolted on capabilities and modules, often stitching together functionality haphazardly.

The Problem with Traditional VDI for Education

Today, “simplification” is often used to describe a solution’s value, but the existing “complexity” is rarely explained. This is particularly true if you consider an education-based technology team, which operates under ever-increasing funding pressures.

Whether I’m talking to a head of IT at a specialist teaching organization, a Director of IT at a medium-sized school with multiple teaching responsibilities, a CIO of a large school district, or a Professor at a higher education institute, the complexity challenges are consistently the same:

• Multiple vendors involved, or numerous products and teams from the same vendor.
• Numerous support lines to call for assistance, leading to wasted time.
• Different management layers in the stack, making maintenance and support time-consuming.
• Vendors often struggle to succinctly articulate their licensing model, causing budget confusion.

What never fails to impress me, regardless of the school, college, or university, is the technology team’s deep desire to be creative, to innovate, and to be a driving force in delivering learning to students. They truly want to achieve the vision and mission for their community. This drive makes finding an efficient VDI for education solution even more critical.

Hive Fabric: The VDI Solution Education Needs

HiveIO has partnered with schools that have deployed Hive Fabric for VDI. Each member of their IT team has reduced the time spent supporting legacy and incumbent solutions by 6-8 hours per week. In a one-person IT team, that can mean an additional 32 hours a month spent innovating for students. For a four-person team, that’s 128 hours creatively driving their school’s vision and mission.

I have seen Professors in higher education institutions walk into their next lecture, select the lecture template, the number of students, and instantly provide VDI environments for each student in their next cybersecurity lecture. Lecturers and students get immediate access to a VDI solution that works for them. The IT team gains more time to spend on other priority projects.

The ability to deploy Hive Fabric on any x86 commodity infrastructure means that HiveIO has enabled education organizations to use existing infrastructure. In a world where IT dollars tend to decrease, the impending need to refresh equipment is often delayed as the hunt for budget dollars falls short. HiveIO has partnered with schools that have successfully extended the life of existing servers by deploying Hive Fabric, saving thousands of dollars they may or may not have had.

Delivering on the VDI Promise for Education

Hive Fabric delivers on the VDI promise. It offers a simplified, easy-to-use deployment. Using an intelligent AI and ML-ready Message Bus, Hive Fabric makes data-driven decisions. This removes much of the traditional complexity associated with the day-to-day maintenance and support of a VDI solution. With a single partner, no additional management infrastructure, a licensing model we can explain in two minutes, and one support line to call, we are truly helping education organizations realize the full potential of VDI.

Most importantly, we are enabling education organizations to focus on the vision and mission for their students and their community.

Learn more about HiveIO’s partnership with the Sunnyside Unified School District: Case Study