Business Continuity for Remote and Mobile Users

The desktop IT staff at a leading energy company has been struggling to support thousands of field employees equipped with laptops. They are particularly concerned with business continuity and data protection issues. Many of these users are remote from an office with on-site IT troubleshooting and support. Additional challenges arise from the high latency and low bandwidth WAN connection at these remote sites.

When a laptop is damaged, lost or requires service, the mobile worker is faced with extended downtime until the problem is resolved. If the problem requires a new laptop, it could take a week or more until the laptop has been fully restored and the user is operating at his previous productivity level. Currently, each employee is encouraged to perform regular back-ups of their user data, but few do. The myriad of performance issues over the WAN also contributes to the difficulty in ensuring back-ups. The ability to quickly address problems, protect data and provide fast recovery of a user's PC (OS, applications, and user data) is a top priority for this energy company.

Objectives

• Speed issue resolution for field laptops
  

• Provide data protection and business continuity for laptops
  

• Perform fast desktop recovery in event of system or hardware failure
  

• Implement a solution that doesn't require high capital expenditure outlays
  

Finding a Solution

The IT staff investigated many potential solutions. They reviewed Desktop Virtualization solutions that centralize the desktop, applications and data, but they needed a solution that supported remote and mobile users.

• Server-hosted solutions lack acceptable end-user performance over the WAN and workable offline support. The amount of content that needs to be downloaded for restore and uploaded for protection purposes can take days given the network connectivity of field personnel.
  

• Client-hosted solutions lack sufficient centralization capabilities and user data protection (no capability to upload content into the data center for centralized back-up). IT was also concerned about complicating management and licensing with an additional OS on each laptop.
  

The Wanova Difference

Wanova is a dramatically different approach from other alternatives. Wanova's unique Distributed Desktop Virtualization (DDV) architecture provides the benefits of desktop virtualization without sacrificing the end-user experience for mobile workers. DDV manages the full desktop image directly on the end-user's hardware without requiring a hypervisor.

The IT staff was also impressed with the comprehensive business continuity features of Wanova. Not only is user data centralized and protected, but Wanova also protects the full desktop, personalization settings, and user-installed applications, and ensures that remote and mobile endpoints receive full protection.

Wanova enables quick recovery from system or software errors, hardware failures, and lost laptops. Wanova can achieve a desktop recovery or restore in minutes, something alternative solutions would need days to accomplish, given the limited network connectivity of remote field personnel. Wanova's ability to perform desktop streaming over the WAN is just one component in Wanova's patent-pending Distributed Desktop Optimization (DDO) technology. DDO also incorporates global deduplication and caching to optimize bi-directional content updates, resulting in a fast restore with remote end-users up and running in minutes.

Finally, Wanova avoids an expensive data center build-out. Wanova enables centralized management, but leverages endpoint processing. This architectural approach, coupled with Wanova's Global Data Reduction technology, provides highly efficient data center operations and footprint. Wanova's server density is 50X greater than server-hosted models, supporting up to 1000 desktops per server blade.

Data protection, fast recovery, and cost efficiency are important on-going issues for this energy company. The power of Wanova makes the choice obvious.