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Industry Moves: Sun Microsystems Desktop Virtualization Expert Jefferi Holland Joins Systems Alliance

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Systems Alliance, a regional systems integrator providing high-value IT and business consulting services, today announced Jefferi V. Holland, formerly a senior desktop virtualization specialist and senior pre-sales engineer with Sun Microsystems, has joined the company as a senior technical architect.

With nearly 25 years of experience, Holland will lead the expansion of Systems Alliance’s consulting practice focused on desktop virtualization and thin-client computing.

Before joining Systems Alliance, Holland was an 11-year employee of Sun Microsystems, where for the past five years he was a senior technical specialist for the US Software Practice, responsible for architecting, recommending and deploying Sun’s virtual desktop technology. In this role, Holland developed virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions for commercial and public-sector clients including United Airlines, Detroit Water and Sewage and the University of Alabama at Birmingham Hospital.

Prior to Sun, Holland was manager of engineering computer services at the University of Michigan-Dearborn College of Engineering, a systems engineer for Bundy Corporation, and an engineer at General Dynamics Land Systems Division Vehicle Systems Laboratory. He received a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Detroit Mercy.

Unidesk Files Patent On Composite Virtualization Desktop Management Technology

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Unidesk earlier this week announced the filing of a patent application with the US Patent and Trademark Office on its technology for simplifying the management of hosted virtual desktops and virtualized notebooks and PCs in corporate computing environments.

Unidesk Composite Virtualization technology, the centerpiece of the company’s first patent for a “Managed Desktop System,” will dramatically reduce the operational costs of desktop management and support for enterprise IT organizations, while providing unprecedented customization, personalization, and mobility benefits for desktop users.

Unidesk’s patent application consists of 42 distinct claims that describe the company’s unique ability to disaggregate desktops into separately manageable containers. With Unidesk Composite Virtualization technology, IT can provision, patch, package, version, and rollback operating system images such as Microsoft Windows; IT-delivered applications; and, user-installed applications and data independent of each other. By dynamically synthesizing these containers into completely personal desktops whenever users demand, Unidesk’s patent-pending technology will greatly simplify the management of hosted virtual desktop solutions such as Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View, as well as PCs and notebooks virtualized with Type 1 and Type 2 client hypervisors, while satisfying even the most demanding desktop use cases.

Additional information on how Unidesk will reduce the cost of desktop operations, maximize worker productivity, improve edge security, increase data availability, and facilitate compliance will be available when the company launches its first product based on Composite Virtualization later this year.

Parallels, HP, NVIDIA virtualize GPUs with Workstation Extreme

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Parallels is launching “Parallels Workstation Extreme”, a desktop workstation virtualization offering developed jointly with HP and NVIDIA.

Workstation Extreme is aimed at graphic workstations such as those used on stock trading floors (think: massive multimonitor support) and in 3D animation studios (where several power hungry applications usually don’t like to share resources).

Parallels Workstation Extreme offers desktop virtualization with near-native performance (backed by impressive SPECviewperf numbers) and support for very large VMs (Up to 12 virtual CPUs and 64 GB of RAM per VM). It is built around the latest technology from Intel and NVIDIA. It uses the Intel Xeon 5500 series of CPUs, better known as the “Nehalem” line, which increases the amount of physical RAM that’s supported per machine, and VT-d to allow direct I/O paths to be passed through a hypervisor.

This technology used by the NVIDIA SLI Multi-OS technology incorporated in the latest NVIDIA Quatro cards, also announced today. Using SLI Multi-OS the multiple GPUs available on the system can be virtualized just like traditional CPUs. This allows high-end graphics programs like CAD, CAE and 3D rendering applications to be virtualized and still use the raw geometric number crunching chips provided by the machine. (In traditional desktop virtualization products, the video adapter is emulated, dramatically reducing 3D graphics power.)

Parallels blends this all together with its FastLane architecture, and offers this as a bundled solution on HP Z800 workstations.

Target audiences for this product are digital content creators, design engineers, software developers and testers, sales and training professionals and those working with data modeling in a range of vertical sectors, including finance, government, science, engineering, manufacturing, and oil and gas.

Parallels Workstation Extreme runs on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3, Windows XP or Vista (all 64-bit). Supported Guest Operating Systems at the time of release are RHEL 4.7 & 5.3 64-bit, Fedora 10 64-bit and the same 64 bit Windows flavors.

More info can be found on the Parallels website.

Vucci Emerges As Virtual Utility Computing Services Company

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Utah-based Vucci Technology Solutions is working to change the way businesses interact with IT. Offering virtual utility computing services, managed service applications and virtual desktops, Vucci takes the traditionally cost-inefficient sector of IT and turns it into a profit center.

Vucci is an IT solutions provider that offers innovative technology services for enterprise-level businesses, healthcare, education and government. Vucci’s solutions allow businesses to consolidate, virtualize, and assess IT needs in a more cost effective way turning IT into a profit center for stronger return on investment (ROI).

With a strong list of clients that include The Generations Network, J.P. Morgan, University Health Care and Utah Valley University (UVU), Vucci leverages its IT expertise to enterprise-level businesses by providing virtualization technology designed to simplify IT.

Vucci services include:

  • Virtualization
  • Architecture Design & Implementation
  • Data Center Transformation
  • Capacity Planning & Server Consolidation
  • Business Continuity & Availability

Vucci provides the experience and the proven expertise to train its customers on how to be more efficient with consolidated information technology resources to drive overall productivity and increase revenue and agility within an organization.

Here Comes Citrix XenDesktop 3

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Citrix Systems today announced Citrix XenDesktop 3, the newest release of its desktop virtualization solution. XenDesktop 3, a key component of the Citrix Delivery Center product family, incorporates several of the company’s new Citrix HDX technologies, giving virtual desktop users a richer “high-definition” experience with enhanced support for multimedia, audio and video.

XenDesktop 3 also dramatically improves scalability, hosting twice as many virtual desktops per server as previous versions. And with version 3, XenDesktop becomes the first product on the market to deliver Microsoft Windows desktops from a common set of centrally managed images that can be run either in the datacenter (hosted), or directly on a PC or thin client device (local). This new capability gives IT organizations far more flexibility, reducing desktop management costs by making efficient use of distributed processing power across both servers and end point devices.

XenDesktop 3 includes several enhancements that dramatically improve virtual machine density and efficiency in the datacenter, allowing customers to host up to twice as many hosted virtual desktops per server as previous versions.  These new optimizations cut server acquisition costs in half and dramatically reduce ongoing management and power consumption costs, allowing significantly larger deployments than before at no additional cost.

With version 3, XenDesktop becomes the first solution on the market to deliver both hosted virtual desktops and local streamed desktops from a single image store, leveraging the same delivery infrastructure. Most virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions on the market offer only hosted virtual desktops, in which each desktop runs inside a virtual machine in the datacenter.

Adding support for local streamed desktops lets XenDesktop administrators stream desktops from the same golden master images, and execute them locally on any network-connected endpoint capable of running a desktop operating system. This powerful combination adds significant flexibility and cost savings, allowing IT to centrally manage desktops for office workers and run them wherever it makes the most sense, leveraging the distributed processing power of both servers and endpoint devices.

XenDesktop 3 also includes a variety of new features to support simpler management, easier user personalization and enhanced security. Most significant among these new features is fully integrated user profile management, making it far easier for IT to provide a consistent, personalized experience for each unique user every time they log in. Version 3 also includes broad support for smart card security authentication systems which are widely adopted throughout government, financial services and healthcare organizations.  XenDesktop not only enables this added level of security for gaining general access to the desktop environment, it also ensures that this information is seamlessly and transparently passed through to individual applications within each virtual desktop.

Citrix XenDesktop 3 will be generally available from authorized Citrix partners in February 2009, and from the Citrix website at http://www.citrix.com/xendesktop. Suggested retail pricing begins at $75 per concurrent user.

Pano Logic Raises Follow-Up Financing To The Tune Of $6 Million

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Pano Logic today announced it has closed an extension to its Series B round of $6 million led by Foundation Capital and Goldman Sachs. This funding brings the total Series B financing to $18 million, and completes a year of expansion for Pano Logic, which experienced quarter-over-quarter growth and has received extensive industry recognition since bringing its first product to market in late 2007.

Over the course of 2008, Pano Logic has significantly increased its install base and signed more than 150 partners including one of the leading distributors, Avnet. Additionally, the Pano Virtual Desktop Solution received a SearchServerVirtualization.com Product of the Year award, the red dot 2008, and Good Design 2008 product design awards. Pano Logic was also named a finalist for the 2008 Red Herring North America 100 Awards, which recognizes startups that will lead the next wave of disruption and innovation.