Nimble Storage became the latest storage vendor to participate in a reference architecture with Cisco Systems with the introduction Thursday of a VMware virtual desktop infrastructure solution.

The solution combines Cisco UCS B230 M2 blade servers, a Nimble CS220G-X2 storage array, dual redundant 10-Gbit Ethernet connections and the VMware View 5.1 VDI software to support up to 1,000 simultaneous users.

The street price for the new converged infrastructure solution is about $43 per user, said Radhika Krishnan, head of product marketing and alliances at San Jose, Calif.-based Nimble Storage. "Everything's included," she said. "All the software and features. There are no other SKUs that need to be purchased."

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The new solution is focused on ease of use and deployment for midmarket partners dealing with customers who have up to 2,000 users who could be migrated to VDI, Krishnan said.

"VDI has a requirement for scale," she said. "Customers typically start small, with 100 to 200 seats, but then want to grow. VMware and Nimble gives customers the ability to scale up with more flash memory and additional nodes."

The initial announcement of support for up to 1,000 simultaneous VDI users with the new Nimble-Cisco-VMware converged infrastructure doesn't mean that support is limited to only 1,000 users, Krishnan said.

"That number is based on the server horsepower we have in our lab," she said. "It will scale beyond that."

The solution is also not limited to only VDI deployments but can be applied to other customer workloads, she said.

PUBLISHED OCT. 18, 2012