Clearspace Server Syndication Feed

Would anyone kill productivity?

juan.polo@intel.com — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 16:37:30 GMT

According to a recent article in Forbes this month, the days of the PC are numbered. Thinking about this, a tough question comes to my mind about why people so often like to “kill” whatever has come to be the core of our daily operations to improve business productivity and operations efficiency.

One of the reasons could be that killing something brings the opportunity to quickly reinvent its replacement. This gives some a chance to make several hundreds of thousands Euros or more spent on services and, sometimes, on more expensive platforms to re-think, re-architect and re-deploy the so transformed infrastructure.

But, as and IT decision maker, would you sacrifice biz productivity, as a result of IT transformation for the sake of it? I don’t think you would, but sometimes some misunderstandings or misinterpretation of technology relationships and implications take all of us to forget for moments what real business needs are and how these and IT challenges can be both addressed without sacrificing business performance and productivity.

The article from Forbes called “The Death of the PC” deems “Virtualization” as the best “big thing” in computing and envisions Desktop Virtualization as Act II to change and affect everyone in the industry of PC’s. The same article recognizes the limitations of virtualization: costs of virtual PC are 50% higher and there are also performance issues for rich media application, a gap which major software vendors are working on.

Those limitations are also pointed out by Gartner, who says that most of the hype surrounding cost-benefit related to thin client is bogus and that the current and projected adoption rates for thin client remain a small proportion of Biz PC state for years to come

The article is assuming that vendors will close the performance and costs gaps to remove today’s barrier to prevent virtualization adoption - and therefore - thin client to kill the PC. I would really doubt about this, not only because technology cost will decrease both in PC and server side (and CTO’s will dislike the idea of running “power point” workloads with limited business value on more expensive datacenter resources), but also because the inherent performance advantage of running new rich media applications and collaborative environments locally, will keep as long as PC technologies keep on evolving and those new applications become more demanding.

Even so, we agree that Desktop Virtualization will happen anyway and will bring great advantages for IT Management in terms of flexibility and control. We will see a significant growth in virtualization licenses throughout 2012 although probably less that the 60 mill licenses that IDC is predicting.

What Forbes article is missing is that Desktop Virtualization does not mean “server computing” and, moreover, server computing wouldn’t necessarily mean a Thin Client device in all scenarios. IDC predicts that more than 65% of desktop virtualization licenses deployed throughout 2012 will be client-side virtualization (application streaming, virtual containers, and others). This means that “virtualized” applications or “virtual PC” execution will take place in the physical PC, providing end users with rich PC experience and capabilities that end users demand while giving IT the centralization and control factors that IT demands to address complexity and increase flexibility and agility for applications delivery.

The reason for such phenomenon is that organizations will want to take advantage of technologies, but they will not sacrifice the productivity advantages that PC beings, simply because it is not necessary at all to sacrifice them (and, as client – side, Dynamic Virtual Clients Solutions mature this will become even more true).

Most CIO’s simply will not run the risk of coming back to a dumb “evolved green screen” terminal (to make it the “productivity” tool in hands of users and the first interface of these with biz application”), just for a 2 years enlargement of refresh cycle. That decision would definitely impact on user’s productivity, it wouldn’t provide mobility and it could tie down organization to technology obsolescence that prevents future evolution to new applications, interfaces and technology use models

How Dynamic Virtual Client Technologies help IT to address PC management challenges - Part I

juan.polo@intel.com — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 18:52:59 GMT

Dynamic Virtual Client Technologies – What are they, where are they going (Part 1)

In this video, Dave Buchholz and Clyde Hedrick explain how Intel IT is considering implementing Dynamic Virtual Client (DVC) technology that will provide a more robust and flexible platform that users want and that the enterprise needs. DVC technology uses containerized software appliances to abstract the OS, applications, user data and workspaces (both corporate and personal), and user-specific settings. Abstraction of components into virtual containers enables faster turnaround time on upgrades and new capability introduction, and provides greater flexibility and faster solution development at lower cost, while simplifying the platform IT has to manage.

Since two or three year ago, organizations are exploring desktop virtualization solutions to potentially increase flexibility and agility in desktop provisioning and user accessibility and to reduce complexity of platform distribution and management. However, there are limitations in the technology itself and in the current virtualization models that preclude the adoption of deployment of virtual desktop into the mainstream, beyond call centres and other specific areas.

Particularly, desktop virtualization technologies limit user mobility today and present limitations when running multimedia applications and, therefore, for the adoption of the new collaborative tools, VoIP, web casting, e-learning, etc. which are spreading in recent years. Even for conventional business management applications, the excessive latency that the infrastructure and virtualization software layers introduce, significantly impact user experience and conditions in many cases the viability of final deployments. Moreover, data centre infrastructure costs are triggered due to the server-hosted models which available today.

Consequently, the challenge is to enable the potential advantages of desktop virtualization, like flexibility, ubiquity and simplification of platform delivery (which result from centralization and abstraction) with those which bring the rich managed client architectures, in terms of mobility, performance, user experience and fully support and compatibility of applications.

We'll talk in following articles about Dynamic Virtual Clients, a set of technologies and solutions already which allow Enterprise to combine both set of advantages and capabilities: manageability and security targeted by IT departments - with the end user requirements of productivity and responsiveness.

The evolution of "Dynamic Virtual Clients" solutions in 2010 will consist in the extension from its current scope (Application virtualization/streaming, OS Streaming) towards the Virtual Containers models, by which one or more entire Desktop images are running on top a local bare-metal hypervisor on the Client and are managed and distributed on-demand through the appropriate OS Image Management, Streaming and Synchronization technologies.

There are solutions already announced from key ISVS in this area and the Intel vPro processor technology incorporate today, both in professional Desktop and Notebooks, hardware based optimization for the IO and processing hypervisor functions, as well as hardware based isolation capabilities to provide secure virtualization. The SW solutions will use these hardware capabilities to maximize performance and increase security of virtualized environments.