Robin Wauters

NComputing today announced the launch and immediate availability of its Numo family of chips.

Numo is anambidextrous chip that will power consumer applications, such as accessing Google from a smart TV, as well as enterprise applications, such as using Microsoft Windows-based virtual desktops in bank branch offices. NComputing’s Numo provides maximum flexibility and choice as modern computing models continue their inevitable transformation and integration between traditional desktops and new models of cloud computing.

Numo, combined with NComputing vSpace virtualization software, supports Windows, Linux, and Android user experiences with full multimedia and wireless support. Devices powered by Numo have the ability to connect directly to the web and access Internet-based cloud services, eliminating the need for local servers, and take advantage of the rich growing population of Android applications. The integration of Numo-based devices and vSpace software enables ambidextrous operation — no-compromise local and cloud-based multimedia PC experience for consumers and enterprise — combined with low costs that are unmatched in the industry.

Enterprise devices powered by Numo include ultra low-cost virtual desktop thin clients, cloud-based workstations, network monitors, and mobile devices such as netbooks, notebooks, smartbooks and tablets. These devices, in combination with NComputing vSpace virtualization software (which integrates with Windows, Linux, Citrix and VMware VDI installations), provide the high-quality virtual desktops that have already seen rapid adoption with more than 600,000 commercial deployments. In the last quarter of 2009, NComputing virtual desktops won over 100,000 enterprise seats at leading retailers, financial institutions, call centers, manufacturers, and distribution operations, including the re-infrastructure of India’s entire Social Security and public healthcare system managed by ESIC with over 31,000 NComputing client workstations in the world’s largest virtual desktop and cloud based enterprise application deployment.

Consumer devices powered by Numo will include smart TV’s, cable and satellite set-top boxes, media players and ebooks. Numo lets each of these devices, optionally operating with Android 2.1 as the resident Operating System, access the web while also functioning as if they were rich multimedia-enabled Windows or Linux PCs.

Consumer and enterprise devices using Numo chips all benefit from a bundled single-user vSpace license, which enables many new markets, such as 1:1 VDI, network monitors, and TVs to access local or cloud-based services. Connecting a Numo-powered device to vSpace software on a local computer or cloud-based server enables it to “light up” with a virtualized Windows or Linux desktop.

As a case in point, NComputing’s partnership with LG Electronics enables the LG line of Network Monitors, which began shipping in 2009. Prototypes of the latest Numo-based Network Monitors were shown by LG at CES earlier this year where LG demonstrated 31 users simultaneously performing rich multimedia computing by accessing a single sub-$1,000 standard PC running vSpace and Microsoft Windows Server. NComputing will announce additional partners this summer, including industry leading PC, monitor, and TV manufacturers.

Numo is a highly integrated System-on-Chip (SoC) that features a dual-core ARM CPU; embedded media processors supporting dynamic bandwidth management, multiple protocols and codecs including UXP and H.264; Windows-compliant graphics subsystem and a complete complement of device interfaces for graphics, serial, parallel, USB, SD, I2S, I2C and more for integration with enterprise and consumer devices. NComputing plans to support Microsoft’s recently announced RemoteFX technology, when available.

NComputing is also announcing the first public showing of its first Numo-powered virtual desktop clients at Interop from April 25-29, 2010 in Las Vegas. At the conference, the company will be demonstrating rich multimedia functionality with VMware, Citrix, Windows, and Linux. NComputing will give away over 1,000 of these devices at the show to allow IT professionals the opportunity to experience this remarkable technology first hand. Numo-based virtual desktop clients will be available for purchase from NComputing and leading vendors in Q2 of 2010.

Cisco today announced that the Cisco Unified Computing System has achieved outstanding performance results in industry standard benchmarks for virtualized environments as well as other key data center applications.

Of the top results Cisco achieved, the VMware VMmark benchmark has special significance for customers by demonstrating that the Unified Computing System B250 M2 Server is capable of delivering the highest performing blade server for virtualization, regardless of the number of processor cores.

These record-breaking performance results were attained with the Cisco Unified Computing System, an evolutionary new data center architecture that bridges the silos in the data center by uniting compute, network, storage access, and virtualization resources in a single, energy-efficient system. This reduces IT infrastructure costs and complexity and helps extend capital assets and improve business agility.

Based on industry standards, the Unified Computing System is a key part of Cisco’s data center portfolio and Data Center 3.0 strategy.

• Cisco Unified Computing System B250 M2 Server set a new record with results of 35.83 @ 26 tiles in the VMware VMmark benchmark, which measures virtualization performance using a server consolidation workload. This represents a 42 percent improvement over the previous highest two-socket published result.  This means with the Cisco Unified Computing System, businesses can attain higher consolidation ratios in their virtualized environments with greater performance, which translates to greater return on investment, reduced total cost of ownership, and a more agile business that can deploy applications more rapidly and securely.
• Cisco Unified Computing System C250 M2 Server set a new record on the SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark, which measured application server performance, running Oracle WebLogic Server application.  The Cisco Unified Computing System increased performance by 30% compared to previously published two-socket single-node server results. This result translates into accelerated business productivity and agility.
• Cisco also achieved top results in several key High Performance Computing benchmarks including SPECfp_rate_base2006, SPECompM2001, SPECompL2001, and Linpack, as well as the compute intensive integer performance benchmark, SPECint_rate_base2006.
• Cisco began shipping the Cisco Unified Computing System in July 2009.  In less than a year, over 400 customers globally, across all vertical industry sectors, have adopted this innovative architecture because it reduces total cost of ownership– with up to 20 percent reduction in capital expenditures and up to 30% reduction in operational expenditures– increases scalability without adding complexity, and improves IT productivity and business agility.
• The Cisco Unified Computing System also helps to create greener data centers by reducing physical footprint, reducing number of components needed, and improving energy efficiency, which significantly reduces power and cooling costs.

Key Innovations in the Cisco Unified Computing System Include:

• Memory Extension Technology.  With the latest generation Intel processors, virtualized workloads can be bottlenecked by memory rather than CPU. Cisco memory extension technology provides four times the memory (up to 384GB) per server as legacy systems today. The Cisco Unified Computing System B250 M2 Server supports 48 DIMM slots that can be configured to deliver up to 384 GB of main memory using 8-GB DIMMs or up to 192 GB of main memory using lower-cost 4-GB DIMMs.  As in the 192GB VMware VMmark^TM benchmark cited above, this delivers unparalleled performance, dramatically reduced system cost, and significant scalability to meet future growth needs.
• Integrated, Cohesive System.  The Cisco Unified Computing System provides a cohesive integrated system that unites compute, network, storage access and virtualization into one single system.
• Optimized for a Unified Fabric.  Instead of multiple fabrics for network and storage traffic, the system provides one unified fabric to reduce the number of switches, adapters and cables and help simplify management.  One-half the support infrastructure is needed compared to legacy systems, reducing capital expenditures, while fewer components to power and cool results in greatly reduced operating expenditures.
• Embedded Management. Management is uniquely integrated into all the components of the system, enabling the entire solution to be managed as a single entity through the Cisco UCS Manager. IT administrators can easily manage 1-320 blades – all as one system.  Applications can be provisioned in minutes, compared to days or weeks.
• Virtual Interface Card (VIC). The UCS Virtual Interface Card provides hardware- based support for Cisco VN-Link technology, delivering unmatched performance for virtualized environments using VMware VMDirectPath technology (up to 30% improvement over software based solutions), centralized management through UCS Manager and Service Profiles, and unified fabric support.
• Service Profiles.  Service profiles help to automate provisioning and increase business agility, allowing data center managers to provision applications in minutes instead of days.  IT managers of storage, networking, compute and applications are able to collaborate on defining service profiles for applications. The service profile stays with the Virtual Machine as it moves, enhancing Virtual Machine portability.

Quest Software, provider of vWorkspace, a single virtualization solution for application delivery and desktop deployments, today announced plans to support Microsoft RemoteFX, a Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 feature currently under development, in future versions of Quest products.

Quest vWorkspace brings numerous benefits to customers centralizing desktops using Remote Desktop Virtualization Hosts with Microsoft Hyper-V and Remote Desktop Session hosts, including greater reductions in total cost of ownership, increased levels of user acceptance and faster rollouts of desktop virtualization projects. The addition of Microsoft RemoteFX into this technology stack raises these benefits to a higher level, increasing the adoption of desktop virtualization on the Windows platform.

Expand Networks has taken another significant step in its virtualized product strategy with the launch of ExpandView Virtual.

ExpandView is a fully featured centralized management system that overcomes the challenges associated with large scale deployment, configuration, proactive reporting and alerting across its range of physical and virtual Accelerator devices, and within physical or virtual environments.

The launch of ExpandView Virtual is a key element of Expand’s continued focus of giving enterprise IT the most flexible deployment options available as they look to take full advantage of the cost and complexity savings that a virtualized infrastructure offers. With ExpandView Virtual organizations are able to deploy on their hardware infrastructure of choice resulting in greater flexibility, simplicity and scalability.

ExpandView Virtual is an ideal solution for enterprises with a centralized datacenter environment running virtual servers. Its ability to be deployed as an image on a virtual machine overcomes the traditional challenges previously associated with installation, configuration and management presented by heterogeneous hardware environments and operating system configurations. Allowing for rapid provisioning, extreme scalability and ease of management enabling organizations to more effectively and efficiently deploy, configure and manage Expand Accelerators, be they virtual or physical, ExpandView Virtual thereby removes complexity, increases productivity and reduces total cost of ownership.

ExpandView Virtual is also well suited for telcos, managed service providers and cloud providers offering WAN optimization-as-a-service; grid computing solutions and cloud based services. With its powerful Virtual Customer Partitioning (VCP) capability, ExpandView Virtual enables services to scale easily; organizations are able to support as many Accelerators as required by running multiple instances of ExpandView Virtual. Enabling a virtual instance of ExpandView per customer on a single hardware platform decreases the dedicated hardware footprint, reduces cost and simplifies management for service providers.

Following the successful launch last year of its Virtual Accelerator (VACC), Expand continues to see heightened interest from its customers and the market around its product virtualization roadmap as organizations look to take advantage of the cost and complexity savings offered by a virtualized infrastructure. Expand’s WAN optimization strategy is fully focused on delivering real benefits to its customers by enabling major IT initiatives including branch office virtualization and consolidation and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).