Shannon McFarland – CCIE #5245

Desktop as a Service (DaaS) is one of the many cloud service components that is really just VDI but with a cloud-sounding acronym.  I know customers who call their internal VDI deployments a DaaS service and I also know cloud purist who say DaaS only applies to the public cloud.  Whatever.  I care nothing about nomenclature.

What I do care about is usable services that customers can use for solving business and technical problems.  In small, medium and large VDI deployments we find that the complexity of design, deployment and ongoing management ends up being nearly as painful as the traditional thick desktop model, at least for a while.

I am starting to hear more and more from customers of all sizes that they would like to move to VDI for all of the traditional advantages, but only they don’t want to own or manage the environment that supports it.  Here come public cloud DaaS offerings and our discussion.

Companies like Desktone, CSC’s Dynamic Desktop service and others are providing a desktop in the public cloud.  The feedback from customers I have talked to ranges from barely usable to a completely acceptable service for certain user groups. In the very small amount of time that I have devoted to looking at some of these offerings I have found that the traditional issues that are found in old-school VDI deployments equally apply to these new DaaS offerings, but in some cases are compounded by the variability of the Internet.

User Experience

We know this is the make or break element of any VDI or Terminal Services-style deployment.  It comes down to display protocol performance, compute performance and back-end storage.  In some of the DaaS offerings, the display protocol has to deal with the variability of the Internet (loss/latency/jitter/bandwidth).  We know that even the best performing display protocols that also have the usual goodies bolted on the network to help them out (i.e. WAN optimization), still offer less-than-acceptable user experience in many cases.  Take this already tough situation and dump it over a public Internet connection and things get interesting, fast.

In addition to display protocols you have to wonder how powerful the compute design is and how extravagant the storage is when the provider has to balance a reasonable price for the service with an upfront deployment of what should be a highly scalable service.  Is the SAN going to be that kick ass (acceptable IO, tiered storage capabilities, etc.)?  Will the compute be able to keep up with anything other than task worker loads?

Can the DaaS provider offer dedicated links to enterprises where they have more control over the network variables?  Sure, some providers are but this cannot scale and only adds more to the cost model making it more attractive for the enterprise to keep this whole thing on their network.  If a traditional SP got into the DaaS business then offered a network service just for DaaS then this may make more sense.

Storage/Data Privacy

It’s the cloud. It’s not your cloud, but the providers cloud and you are just buying time on it. So, now you have a desktop to connect to, but where do you go now?  You probably need to access enterprise applications (i.e. SAP, Oracle, call center apps) and not just Office. You either use this desktop to go back to your own environment or other SaaS application or you have local apps on that desktop that access local data.  That local data is the issue.  Who has access to it?  Does the DaaS provider do encryption at rest?  Inflight?

This is one of the usual issues with the whole public cloud debate – who has access to my super critical data?

Companies like Box (http://www.box.net/features/security) and Oxygen Cloud (http://www.oxygencloud.com/features/security) and others do encryption in flight (over IP) and at rest.  But these guys are probably not appropriate for DaaS due to the IO requirements.  High-end storage vendors like EMC, NetApp, Hitachi and many others do this too and they meet the availability, scalability and IO requirements, but at a price.

It is a balancing act with cost, performance, privacy of data and scale.  I don’t have the answers and I don’t think anyone does – at least not all of them.

Use Cases

Who is DaaS for?  Given a group of task workers such as call center agents seems good as the resource requirements and number of apps is low, but if you want to integrated voice into the equation then it gets rough due to rich media, QoS and all of the stuff in the user experience section.  Where does the call center apps reside.  Are they SaaS-able so the desktop can just access them via a browser connecting to another SaaS provider?  Is the DaaS provider going to host enterprise-class applications on-premises (doubtful)?

Power/Knowledge Workers have the same requirements as task workers in addition to a much larger list of applications and probably a much higher need for a butt-kicking user experience due to the diversity of apps and rich media uses.

Summary

Am I rambling?  You bet.  I am just now getting into research mode on what is out there and what is available.  I am hearing about this from customers on an alarmingly growing rate and need to have some answers on what is real, what is a pipe dream and/or what is real, but out in the future.

I welcome comments of any kind on any questions I have asked and any that I have not.  I am very much in the I don’t know what I don’t know mode.

More to come on this topic.

Shannon