“White box” appliances have been all the rage recently as users have sought to separate the functionality of software from underlying hardware. Makers of integrated appliances inflate hardware costs in an effort to squeeze more out of customers who are locked in to the software functionality they need. Or so the logic goes.

But don’t be too quick to write off converged appliances. New research by Wikibon co-founder David Floyer finds that a converged solution for a midsized virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) project is significantly cheaper than a comparable white-box alternative, and even one-third less than a cloud-based solution.

Floyer’s analysis looks at a hands-on test of the Pivot3 platform from Pivot3 Inc., a company that has been shipping hyper-converged appliances since 2008. “Pivot3 has developed a very efficient platform to meet the demanding low-cost requirement of edge devices, combining virtualization, compute and storage services,” Floyer observes. In particular, the appliance significantly reduces storage and cluster management costs by making it easy for users to add storage with no operational overhead.

Wikibon tested two deployment scenarios: a one-time installation of 400 virtual desktops over three years and another deployment in which 120 desktops were added to the base 400-virtual-machine base at the beginning of years two and three. In both cases, the Pivot3 solution was compared to a white box alternative providing comparable functionality

Floyer’s conclusion: “The only important advantage of the white-box approach is the initial lower hardware cost.” Those relatively minor cost savings were more than offset by operational support, which is five times higher for the white-box processor than for the appliance. In fact, the Pivot3 box was cheaper in every other category by anywhere from 15 percent to 80 percent. Total cost savings for the 400-desktop scenario: $131,000, or about 35 percent.

Part of the cost-benefit Floyer observes is in elapsed time, which was reduced by a factor of about four in the 400-desktop scenario. Principal savings were in operational costs for procuring, installing and configuring additional hardware. The Pivot3 appliance handles most of these tasks automatically, he observes, whereas manual intervention was required with the plain-vanilla alternative. This fact contributed significantly to labor costs, which typically dwarf technology expenses in complex installations.

Savings were even greater in the second deployment scenario, in which the number of VDI desktops was increased by 120 each in years two and three. Savings in upgrade costs made the converged appliance even more compelling in that scenario, Floyer finds, with deployment times of just six days for the Pivot3 compared to 37 days for the white-box solution. Altogether, three-year costs for Pivot3 were $289,000, compared to $490,000 for the white box. That’s almost 41 percent.

In summary, “Using a white-box approach is 70 percent more expensive than using the Pivot3 converged application appliance for VDI,” Floyer concludes. Furthermore, “the $15/month/user cost for a desktop is very competitive with cloud services, which are about $20/month/user.” Which are compelling numbers for anyone who believes the conventional wisdom that cheaper boxes are better.

Floyer’s full analysis can be found on Wikibon Premium.