Colt Technology Services, an IT service provider not to be confused with the iconic firearms manufacturer, is publishing new data about its massive virtual desktop infrastructure at VMworld Europe held this week in Barcelona.

Colt leverages Vblocks from VCE and Cisco UCS systems to support up to 20,000 virtual desktops. The firm runs the Atlantis ILIO VDI management software from Atlantis Computing to manage the whole thing, and credits major performance and cost-efficiency improvements to these technologies.

Colt can squeeze as many as 171 virtual desktops on a single USC blade  while only using two thirds of the CPU, according to program manager Brian Keats. In addition, Keats cites a 61 reduction in TCO and 23 percent less operating costs, while also calming that his company’s cloud-based View deployment has a much smaller footprint overall.

“The VMware professional services organization has worked closely with Colt to develop this unique VMware View deployment, which is one of the largest VMware View projects in Europe,” said Vittorio Viarengo, the vice president of VMware’s End-User Computing unit.

Colt has bragging rights for operating one of the largest View projects in Europe, as well as the single largest vCloud Suite 5.1 implementation on the continent.  The firm is offering vCloud-powered backup and recovery services from data centers spread across the UK, France, Spain and Germany.

Virtualization is huge, among not only cloud providers that need to stay on top of the latest trends in IT but but also organizations that  face pressure to better accommodate their users. One such a example is major school district which took part in a recent Wikibon study – it leverages vSphere to deliver a better PC experience to low income students and legacy machines in classrooms.