Our marketing team's getting ready for Interop 2012!

We’re pretty excited about Interop 2012 at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Vegas. We’re going to be exhibiting lots of new software at booth #2633, so if you’re there, please do come see us. In addition to our Virtual Desktop Platform, we’ll be showcasing our brand new DaaSManager application, which is part of the free and open DaaSStack. Plus, we’ll show you the VideoOverIP protocol and the iPad version of our Fast Remote Desktop remote access app. It’s going to be great, so drop by!

Can you go VDI without expensive SANs? Here's how to save money on VDI storage...

It’s no secret that storage costs are a huge part of Virtual Desktop implementation budgets. Fancy SANs and storage management software can add big bucks to your VDI deployment. But do you really need this level of overkill? Will the lack of SAN hosted VMs hobble your users? Can you save money by thinking about storage solutions differently?

Our CEO, Amir Husain, recently wrote an article that was published in Network World and CIO Magazine asking (and answering) these very questions. Take a look… you might be able to use some of the ideas here to move to VDI while also minimizing your capital costs.

The Ainovo Novo7 tablet is based on Android Ice Cream Sandwich and promises to open doors to Cloud hosted VDI and virtual desktop computing... at only $99!

Well, almost. It’s currently sold out, but the Ainovo tablet running a MIPS processor at 1Ghz and featuring Android 4.0 (Ice cream sandwich) promises to be the best deal since HP discounted their touchpads to $99 when they announced end of life plans for the WebOS based device. Ainovo’s new offering looks pretty slick, and features 8 hours of battery life for continuous video playback, 25 hours for audio playback and is powered by a 444Mhz GPU, in addition to the MIPS processor. The 7 inch capacitive touch screen allows 1080p full frame playback and the device also features xFAT storage to allow for USB connectivity for storage devices. Additionally, for video conferencing and photography, Ainovo has added dual cameras, front and rear facing.

This is a pretty complete device, running a modern OS, a high speed processor and a capacitive touchscreen for $100 retail! As we said earlier in our post about the Kindle Fire tablet, the time for cheap endpoints has arrived. You will see a profusion of such devices which are powerful enough to connect to VMs in the Cloud and deliver a full fledged computing experience without needing to be based on x86 technology. Yes, you can’t run MS Word on this tablet directly, but with Cloud hosted VDI, you can!

This is another proof point that the market is rapidly heading in a direction which will be incredibly supportive of our strategy of delivering our powerful VideoOverIP protocol to an increasing number of processor architectures (x86, ARM, PowerPC, MIPS) and a variety of operating systems (Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, Windows Phone 7 etc.). If you’re looking at deploying tablets in your environment but want access to legacy Windows apps, or simply need access to more computing power on occasion than the tablet can deliver locally, give VDIworks a call! We’ve got an amazing remote computing software solution that will be a perfect solution for your project.

VMBlog got us to take out our crystal ball and talk about the future of virtualization!

VMBlog is one of the oldest, and one of our most favourite online virtualization publications. We’ve been fans for a while and have enjoyed their broad coverage of companies and technologies in the VDI space. Recently, VMBlog sat down to talk with Amir Husain, our President and CEO, about his views on the future of virtualization generally, and VDI specifically. The discussion was pretty interesting! Here’s an extract, followed by a link the VMBlog piece:

“One idea whose time I believe has finally arrived, is Desktops-as-a-Service. Under this model, the device will no longer primarily be an OS/application execution endpoint, but rather a visualization layer – a window into a virtual computer with unlimited capacity, growing and shrinking in an elastic fashion at some highly secure remote datacenter. Of course, end point devices will provide ever richer means of interaction via multi-touch gestures, visual cues ala Kinect, voice recognition ala Siri and numerous other methods. This means that processing at the endpoint will still occur, it will just be of a different nature. And this rich means of interaction will need to be “connected” to the actual applications hosted in the Cloud. Remoting protocols, as a consequence, will evolve considerably to enable richer forms of end user interaction, while working around latency challenges and making the entire end-to-end computing experience seamless.”

Click here to view the entire article.

Virtual Strategy Magazine held an extensive Q&A with VDIworks' CEO, Amir Husain, covering technology, product differentiation, go to market strategy and futures.

Virtual Strategy Magazine is one of the premier publications covering the virtualization industry. They recently conducted an extensive interview with our CEO, Amir Husain, on a variety of topics. Some interesting extracts are listed below, along with a link to the full interview:

VSM: It is never a one size fits all when it comes to customer requirements within an establishment. Is VDIworks only providing a solution for a niche market with specific needs or can VDIworks help companies in general with their management of physical, as well as virtual, resources?

AH: That’s a great question. As I explained previously, we believe that virtual resource management in of itself is almost meaningless. There is no such thing as a virtual resource in isolation. It needs a physical server, a Hypervisor, a physical network, a connection to a physical endpoint, and so on and so forth. Virtualization is wonderful as an abstraction and it has many benefits, but it does not replace the need for physical management. We understand that, and the design approach we’ve taken with our products mirrors that understanding. That’s precisely why we support management standards like WMI, IPMI, AMT and SNMP to provide integration with physical system components. Physical and virtual resources are both first-class managed assets in our management console.

VSM: Desktop as a service (DaaS) has created a lot of hype lately in the IT world. Is VDIworks coming up with a product related to it?

AH: This is a very exciting category and we believe its time is coming. As network capabilities improve, mobility increases due to tablets and alternative form factors taking off, and the Cloud becomes an acceptable backend even for the enterprise. There is no reason why desktops shouldn’t be delivered as a service.

To support this category, we have a very exciting product in the works that is now tantalizingly close to release. I can’t get into too much detail, but suffice to say, this upcoming application will deliver everything you need to host a DaaS solution in a single, unified offering. You will install this one application and you’ll get a broker, you’ll get an access gateway that eliminates the need for a VPN, you’ll get wonderfully rich web-based management capabilities, you’ll get Hypervisor control over VM provisioning, and a number of other features that make a private cloud based DaaS deployment, or a public cloud variation, incredibly simple to implement.

To read the full interview, visit this link.

Amazon's low-cost Kindle Fire means even more ubiquitous endpoints for Cloud Computing and VDI

The Amazon Kindle Fire is a low-cost ($200), well designed Android tablet with many of the bells and whistles available only in higher end products. First, it’s designed and built by Amazon, which is a great brand and has historically done a great job with the capabilities, support and ergonomics of their e-reader line. Second, the Kindle Fire finally breaks away from Amazon’s long tradition of using monochromatic e-paper display technology and actually introduces a touch capable colour screen. Finally, the device is no slouch; it’s powered by a dual core processor that keeps things zipping along at a fairly brisk pace. Of course, Amazon has tried to limit the new Kindle Fire to its own app store. Luckily these tie-ins to Amazon’s app eco-system can be conveniently sidestepped without root’ing the device or doing anything particularly unnatural! There was a great article that recently appeared on PC World which highlighted the fact that the Amazon Kindle Fire actually does allow users to use their Android phones to “sideload” all 250,000 of the Android Marketplace’s apps onto the Tablet.

With this sort of low-cost, high quality, top-brand backed tablet product out in the market, do VDI and Cloud Computing plays stand to benefit? We think the answer is a resounding YES! We’ve been waiting for endpoints of this nature for a while now. The low cost point means adoption will start to pick up in a serious way. Whether it’s the Fire or other Fire-like tablet devices, the point is, this market is going to be huge at sub $200 cost points. With tons of these devices out there, two things will happen a) People who have PCs will spend quite a bit of their time interacting with these tablets and will hence need access to the content and apps they usually use on their PCs b) People who have never had computers or don’t particularly need desktops, will start to use tablets like the Amazon Kindle Fire, as a primary computing device.

In both cases, access from these tablet endpoints to x86 apps running in the Cloud becomes an incredible necessity. It’s all fine and well to be able to read books and browse the web on a Tablet natively, but sometimes having access to Powerpoint presentations, the repository of notes you stored in MS OneNote at the office, or an x86 app that provides a forms-based interface to your corporate database(s) is necessary too! And rather than porting and rebuilding all these apps for every flavour of Tablet, it just makes all the sense in the world to run the app in the Cloud and deliver the experience to the endpoint (i.e. the Tablet) via an efficient remote desktop protocol.

We’ve had our Fast Remote Desktop product available for iPads for a few months now. The iPhone version is coming out soon. But what’s in the works are Android and other Tablet-focused versions that will allow us to deliver Cloud-hosted desktop experiences, your office apps, your Flash apps and your corporate computing stack straight to your tablet! We’re very excited about the possibilities products like the Kindle Fire will enable for VDIworks‘ entire family of products, and the value we’ll be able to deliver to our customers.

VDIworks is on the 2011 CRN Virtualization 100 and the "15 VDI vendors to watch" lists!

CRN Magazine recently placed us on their Virtualization 100 list, which was gratifying to say the least! But it only got better… because they followed up with a Top 15 list for which they surveyed the entire industry landscape to identify the most promising & interesting desktop virtualization businesses out there. We’re proud to tell you that we were on that list too! With the market virtually (no pun intended!) full of startups and mature businesses, all wanting to jump onto the virtualization and cloud bandwagons, it’s reassuring to know that we’re still recognized not only as one of the pioneers of our industry, but continue to be looked at as a leader in the field.

So here’s a big tip of our hat to CRN for the recognition, and thank you to all our partners and customers without whom this sort of recognition would be impossible! Stay tuned for more exciting news from us.

The upcoming version of VDIworks Fast Remote Desktop features iPhone support!

We’re very happy with the traction we’ve been able to generate with our VideoOverIP protocol. It’s attracted a lot of OEM interest and it will soon start to appear in various products marketed under different brands. We’ve also had an iPad version of the protocol available on iTunes for a few months now. However, we weren’t supporting iPhones in the past. We’ll that’s about to change… with a new upcoming release of Fast Remote Desktop, VDIworks will be adding support for iPhone devices as well. We’ve done a lot of work to ensure that the experience is smooth even when delivered to the smaller iPhone screen and we hope you’ll like what you see.

By adding iPhone support, we hope to grow our user base significantly. Adoption on the iPad has been very encouraging, and given that there are several times as many iPhones in the wild as iPads, we are looking forward to the opportunity at hand.

We’ll keep you updated with further developments and will be sharing demo videos and much more as soon as the product is approved by the iTunes store and available for download.

The host being used in this demonstration is an Intel Core II Duo system and the Thin client is a VIA based 800 Mhz device with 1 GB of RAM.

VDIworks Protocol Inspector lets you scan your environment for remote desktop and VDI protocols to conduct a quick desktop virtualization audit.

If you haven’t yet heard about our new Protocol Inspector utility, you might want to check it out. For administrators responsible for maintaining hundreds of thousands of workstations, VMs and Thin clients, one key challenge can simply be knowing which systems support which protocols! With so many protocols out there, and many integrated into the OS (e.g. RDP), how do you know which endpoints and hosts are accessible?

Protocol Inspector helps you tackle this conundrum… and more. PI is a simple utility that you can install in a few minutes and it doesn’t require any agents to be deployed on target VMs or Thin clients. You simply install it on a single network connected Windows system, then run a scan. It’ll discover all the nodes on your network and will analyze them to determine whether they run PCoIP, VideoOverIP, RGS, ICA, RDP or VNC. You’ll quickly be able to tell:

1. Which systems run which remote desktop protocols
2. The relative distribution of VDI/remote desktop protocols in your environment
3. Whether a single system is accessible via multiple VDI protocols (potential security issue?)
4. What percentage of your environment is running lower-performance vs. higher performance multimedia capable protocols
5. Whether certain systems are inoperational or “down”

Protocol Inspector will also allow you to view results in a table, sort them and print them out for quick assessments and spot checks on system/protocol availability.

We think Protocol Inspector will make for a very handy addition to the desktop virtualization professional’s arsenal. Regardless of whether you specialize in VMware, Xen/Citrix or Microsoft technologies, PI will help you quickly scan your environment and make sense of it, quickly.

You can obtain a copy of VDIworks Protocol Inspector here.