In some instances there is no doubt that a picture is worth a thousand words. This is the case with the picture below from client virtualization company Desktone. It succinctly illustrates Desktone’s proposition, which it calls “Desktops as a Service” .
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I was quite surprised by Desktone when they presented this to me – it’s the kind of proposition you’d have expected to emerge in time, but not this early in the nascent client virtualization market. Anyway the idea, as illustrated above, is this:
- You virtualize your desktops wherever they are, replacing them with thin clients and mobile “thinnish” clients.
- All your software remains in the data center under your control, whether its desktop apps (Office Apps, etc.) or client/server apps.
- The virtualization takes place in the cloud, which means at one or more data centers run by service providers. They house the server hardware and support it accordingly.
I’ve covered the various species of client virtualization in Does Client Virtualization Make Sense? and this qualifies as a new one. Many of the business advantages are the same (cuts desktop TCO and support effort in a big way, etc. ), but there are some advantages that are true differentiators.
- The upfront investment is very low and it transforms most client computing costs from fixed to variable (from capital expenditure to operational expenditure)
- Quick to deploy and easy to scale incremental.
- It is particularly attractive to companies who are running out of data center space.
- It’s feasible that is approach will cut TCO even further (yet to be proven in large deployments).
Desktone’s Virtual-D Platform provides the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) that you would otherwise have to build for any client virtualization solution. It is hypervisor agnostic, currently
supporting VMware ESX, but soon to support Xen and Microsoft’s Hyper-V. As regards client virtualization protocols, it currently supports RDP.
Judith Hurwitz has also written about Desktone in The Desktop as a Service: Can Desktone be a Focal Point? We were both impressed and we are both inclined to believe that Desktone will gain traction.
This is a posting in the Virtualization Focus Series. Click here to see an index of such postings.