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Comment by l0c0b0x | Hacker News Reader

Holy mother of god!

I've been managing full 2,000 virtual desktops and about 100 servers... I've been looking for a way out! (out of licen$ing/$oul agreement with MS and VMWare).

Of course latency would be an issue, I wonder what solutions they have for low/limited-capacity clients.

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It says it's powered by PCoIP. I've tested one of the PCoIP hardware thin clients before, and it works really well across a WAN. An employee ran from his home a graphically intensive 3D render application at 1920x1080 on one of the EVGA thin clients. We didn't test it across a 3G connection or anything like that.

Yikes! Just looked at the pricing:

http://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/pricing/

Talk about high TCO! (yes, you still need the hardware to run this service). With office going online now, I'm wondering what their strategy is. This is really not what I was expecting.

Excluding your endpoints, do you have a current cost accounting of the entire infrastructure capex, opex, software licensing, and any professional services behind your existing 2000 seats? I work extensively in this field and the numbers they are throwing out are extremely competitive with existing on-premises View or XenDesktop implementations I've been involved with.

We're running on 4-5yr old hardware... and our maintenance contracts, even though high wouldn't amount the yearly costs to use this service. This is at least a decent option if you're planning on new infrastructure.

What about the costs of running the hardware - power, cooling, network switches, storage arrays, datacentre rental (or opportunity costs of using a server room versus more desk space for example)?

Not saying it still wouldn't work out cheaper for you, but worth bearing in mind.

This is their solution.

http://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/

I would imagine it's at least in the ball park if you have 100 servers..

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