Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

AppSense Teams Up With Enterprise Systems

August 21, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

AppSense today announced that it is partnering with Enterprise Systems to extend its VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) offerings to customers throughout the U.S. Southwest, particularly those in the healthcare market.

AppSense (previous coverage) is the longstanding policy and personalization management leader in the healthcare market, with customers such as Utah Heartland Health, Wellpoint, Banner Health and Catholic Health Initiatives, among others.

While both AppSense and Enterprise Systems share a strong relationship with Citrix, Rob Piwowarczyk, founder and president of Enterprise Systems, says he wanted to establish a partnership that leverages AppSense’s user environment management expertise for VDI and other delivery mechanisms, as well as its extensive experience with healthcare IT organizations.

AppSense recently reported a 50 percent increase in U.S. revenue for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2008 and is aggressively focusing on the U.S. market. AppSense software facilitates enterprise-scale adoption of VDI by enabling organizations to significantly reduce VDI implementation costs and easily personalize standardized virtual desktops. By decoupling both corporate policy and personalization data from the desktop, managing them independently and applying them on-demand, AppSense’s solution lets IT departments use a combination of desktop and application delivery methods, and transparently migrate users from physical to virtual desktops.

AppSense Revenues Growing Rapidly

July 25, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

AppSense, provider of user environment management solutions for large-scale environments, reported a 50 % increase in U.S. revenue for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2008. Its global business realized a 30 percent increase in worldwide revenue.

AppSense is aggressively focusing on the U.S. market, having doubled its investment in the U.S. over the last two quarters with increased investment planned again for the current fiscal year. New U.S. customers this fiscal year include JP Morgan Chase, Lowes, United Airlines, Wachovia, Wal-Mart, ESPN, Applied Materials, and CB Richard Ellis, among others. AppSense counts 15 of the top 20 banks worldwide as customers, with nine of them actively using AppSense software to personalize their virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments.

AppSense’s user environment management solution enables users to have the same look and feel, shortcuts and other settings on a virtual desktop that they had on their PC, while ensuring they adhere to company policies, such as accessing pre-determined printers, applications, networks, drivers and folders. This allows companies to gain the benefits of desktop standardization and automation, including savings in hardware, storage and management oversight, with no impact on a user’s experience.

AppSense’s solution lets IT use a combination of desktop and application delivery methods—such as VDI, presentation virtualization, streamed applications and local and provisioned desktops—and easily and transparently migrate users from a physical to a virtual desktop.

3PAR Launches Thin Copy Desktop for VMware VDI

July 21, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

3PAR announced today 3PAR Thin Copy Desktop for VMware VDI, an integrated virtual desktop provisioning and management solution for VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.

3PAR Thin Copy Desktop for VMware VDI is designed to let its customers automatically provision hundreds of high-performance virtual desktops that consume only a fraction of the bandwidth and storage capacity required with traditional storage.

3PAR says its Utility Storage enhances the benefits of implementing VDI on a traditional SAN by providing additional performance, simplified provisioning, and rapid recovery while reducing required capacity—benefits that are ideal for these next-generation virtualized environments.

3PAR Thin Copy Desktop for VMware VDI builds on 3PAR Virtual Copy to create a resilient utility computing infrastructure that maximizes the benefit of centralized desktop management. 3PAR Thin Copy Desktop offers high performance desktop booting, automated provisioning, and rapid desktop recovery while consuming 90% less capacity for desktop images.

3PAR also announced today enhancements to 3PAR Virtual Copy to support up to 128 read/writable snapshots per base volume and the ability to promote a child Virtual Copy snapshot to any of its read/writable parent snapshots. Up to 500 read-only snapshots per base volume also remain supported with these enhancements.

3PAR Thin Copy Desktop for VMware VDI comes with 3PAR Virtual Copy at no extra charge.

3PAR

Exclusive Video: VMware In A Nutshell, By Product Marketing Manager John Gilmartin

July 8, 2008 by Toon Vanagt Leave a Comment

So what’s VMware all about now on a technology level, now that their stock went tumbling and their CEO has been replaced? John Gilmartin, Group Manager, Product Marketing at VMware answered our questions on virtualization in general and their strategy and product portfolio in particular.

After defining virtualization and virtual machines, John dives deeper into what drives prospective virtualization customers (infrastructure consolidation, high availability, business continuity, disaster recovery?). He also shares more on their recently announced VMsafe initiative, which allows trusted partners to ‘peak’ into a Virtual Machine and identify threats from the outside of the operating systems and the applications they try to protect.

John underlines that VMware is offering features far beyond the basic data center consolidation needs; such as life cycle management, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), automated provisioning, fail over, disaster recovery and optimize the management tasks for a virtual infrastructure.

All this is part of VMware’s from-desktop-to-datacenter portfolio and makes VMware feel confident and well positioned to compete with Hyper-V from Microsoft.

Parallels + Quest = VDI Solution Bundle

June 24, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Quest Software and Parallels today announced a major deal by jointly launching a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) bundle that offers enterprises a centralized Windows desktop deployment and management platform.

The combination of Parallels Virtuozzo Containers server virtualization and Quest’s Provision Networks Virtual Access Suite (VAS) desktop brokering and management solution aims to simplify desktop and image management, improve security, address regulatory compliance and offer the most cost-efficient approach to terminal services.

Parallels Virtuozzo Containers enables users to run multiple workloads as isolated, simultaneously executing virtual environments. Since it is installed on top of the operating system (OS), the containers use the resources of the underlying host OS, rather than needing their own.

“By delivering up to three times the number of virtual desktops on each physical server, Parallels Virtuozzo Containers makes VDI a truly cost effective solution,” said Paul Ghostine, VP and General Manager of Quest Software’s Provision Networks division. “We see this partnership as an opportunity to further extend our leadership in the VDI space by giving customers a variety of platform choices for their desktop virtualization needs.”

The solution is priced $140 per concurrent desktop connection and it’s available now through sales channels of both companies.

Virtual Iron And 2X Hook Up For Strategic Alliance

June 2, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

2X, provider of Thin Client and Server Based Computing Software, and Virtual Iron have announced a strategic alliance to provide a complete Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and Application Publishing Solution.

The 2X / Virtual Iron virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution hosts individual Windows desktop PCs inside virtual machines running on servers in the data center. According to the join press release, this thin-client architecture is significantly easier to secure, maintain and support and it enables an organization’s complete Windows desktop environment to be securely accessed and serviced centrally.

The joint solution enables a fully isolated, customizable and secure environment where users are able to work with standard desktop operating systems and applications. Virtual desktops can be user-customized and provisioned on demand instantly, providing performance and user experience that are comparable to a desktop personal computer. This allows enterprises to replace physical desktops with virtual desktops for many usage scenarios such as call centers, offshore development, and secure, remote access.

[Source: Marketwire]