Computerworld wrote an interesting article on 5 shortcomings they see with VMWare View4 - one of which is its high bandwidth requirements over WANs.  The article quotes Chris Wolf from Burton Group as saying Kaviza's VDI appliance approach overcomes this.  The article goes on to describe other shortcomings, including cost - although VMWare claims View4 can cost as little as $750/desktop, they concede this is assuming you deploy at least 2,048 users, and use the VMWare-Cisco-EMC storage-server-software package AND use a repurposed PC.  This means a minimum investment of $1.5M is needed to get such a price advantage, and you are still stuck with old PCs!

Kaviza, of course, delivers virtual desktops at a total cost (including hardware, software, storage) for under $500/PC, and this is true for both small (as little as 25 desktops) to very large (2,000+ desktops) deployments.  How does Kaviza accomplish this?

Kaviza is the only VDI vendor that has rearchitected the entire stack above the hypervisor to be focused on desktop virtualization, and hence runs on inexpensive commodity servers with direct-attached storage.  Kaviza lowers the infrastructure costs of VDI by about 1/3rd to 1/4th by eliminating the need for shared storage and multiple servers. 

Furthermore, as Chris points out, Kaviza offers total flexibility in deployment - you can place Kaviza VDI appliances at remote/branch offices and manage them centrally for better performance in bandwidth-constrained environments or co-locate all the servers centrally.  Kaviza provides this flexibility because Kaviza's Grid architecture is inherently distributed - it does not rely on centralized shared storage, thereby allowing the various appliances on a Grid to be distributed at different locations.

See how easy it is to setup and manage a Kaviza grid, download the free trial today!