On October 19, 2011, Pivot3, a maker of unified storage and compute appliances that were historically focused on surveillance systems, released its vSTAC VDI appliance, a purpose-build stackable server appliance that is aimed at providing out-of-the-box virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to the small enterprise. The appliance consists of commodity hardware, the VMware virtualization stack, and the vSTAC operating system (vSTAC OS). vSTAC OS provides the "wrapper" tying together the stacked appliances by providing core infrastructure features such as load balancing, high availability and most importantly, a built-in SAN.

 

This Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) impact brief explores the impact of this product release on the VDI market for enterprises under 1,000 employees.