VDICow.com

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Today Performance Solutions Technology, LLC announces the release of MProCloud, the cloud version of ManagePro™, the company's flagship product. MProCloud delivers all the functionality inherent in the Windows desktop version of ManagePro, but as a cloud-based service to users anywhere on any device utilizing Citrix's Xenapp. A leap ahead from the traditional structural form and list-based designs in most SAAS or Cloud apps, MProCloud retains the rich experience of a desktop application, but is delivered with speed and simplicity in the cloud.

MProCloud stands apart from other online project and task management applications in how it helps users generate desired outcomes and results. First, it's designed with the work perspective that meeting deliverables through people and projects requires much more than the basic project management features of creating project structure, assigning resources and due dates. That's why MProCloud also includes great tools for early identification and resolution of issues, schedule slips and process problems...

Grazed from Virtualization Review. Author: Elias Khnaser.

Let's continue the cloud conversaton that I brought up in last week's blog, but this time on another topic that has garnered steam in the last few weeks among my customers: Desktop as a Service. Customers are now asking, why DaaS instead of VDI? I don't want to turn this blog into a comparison between them and this fight has been discussed to death in other forums. Still, I'd like to highlight a few things that DaaS needs before it is a viable alternative to VDI. The biggest hurdle is Microsoft licensing. At the moment, the company doesn't have a Service Provider License Agreement for its desktop operating system products and that means customers have to provide their own Microsoft licensing to their DaaS provider. I have a problem with that -- without one, it gets very complicated, even more so than VDI Besides, it then is no longer provided in an "as a service" model.

Here's another hurdle: DaaS providers are delivering Windows Remote Desktop Session Host desktops and accessorizing them with a Windows 7 theme, and that presents its own set of challenges with apps and other considerations. There is also the concern with data ownership and compliance. Most important, DaaS would be limited to SaaS applications or Windows applications that are self-sufficient, meaning they don't need access to the corporate data or back-end databases. These are just very quick nuggets of some show-stoppers that I see at the moment...

Grazed from Wired. Author: Leo Reiter.

Everywhere you look, there’s a push to consumerize IT. People want to use their own devices -- not just in their personal lives but also in their work roles. From email and calendars to file sharing and collaborating, employees are dictating the types of end user experience they want. If CIOs don’t acknowledge and support them, then employees will go around them, introducing serious security concerns. In an even worse scenario for companies in highly competitive industries, top performers will just choose to work elsewhere.

Of course, this puts CIOs in an unenviable position. Do you allow employees to bring their own devices and access business apps from them? Or do you put the company on lockdown, and risk them circumventing you and exposing your data in the process? How do you protect against security gaps while supporting a flexible BYOD policy?...

Grazed from ReadWriteWeb. Author: Matt Asay.

VMware has a firm if fading grip on the server virtualization market, but according to IDC analyst Al Gillen, virtualizaton serves as a convenient on-ramp to private cloud, which in turn leads to the public cloud. Is VMware paving IT's path to Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace and other public cloud providers? Not exactly.

Virtualization: Still Relevant, Mostly VMware

According to Gillen, who spoke at the Open Business Conference (OSBC) in San Francisco earlier this week, VMware continues to dominate the virtualization market, with just under 60% market share. VMware's installed base, coupled with CIO resistance to change, mean that VMware's hold on virtualization should persist for years. That's the good news...

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Rene Millman.

Microsoft is rumoured to be working on a pay-as-you-go Windows Desktop-as-a-service product. According to a report on ZDNet, the firm’s desktop virtualisation service, codenamed Mohoro, is in early development and looks set to launch in 2014. The service is set to be offered as a remote application aimed at enterprises running thin clients that want to run legacy apps in the cloud rather than on-premise.

"With Mohoro, you click a few buttons, deploy your apps, use Intune to push out configuration to all of your company's devices, and you're done," a source told the publication. The codename Mohoro is named after a town located on the island of Grande Comore in the Comoros Islands in the Indian Ocean. It gives a clue to where the development of the service is taking place, most likely Microsoft’s India Development Centre...

Grazed from LoginVSI. Author: PR Announcement.

Login VSI B.V. announces 4.0, a major new release of its flagship product Login VSI, the industry standard performance and scalability testing tool for Virtual Desktop Infrastructures and Server Based Computing environments.

The design of this new release has been driven by extensive customer feedback programs, and production testing projects executed at multiple customer and vendor sites, including the tests done for the acclaimed independent research project Virtual Reality Check. Login VSI 4.0 makes testing of VDI and SBC environments easier and more realistic than ever before...

Grazed from SilliconHills.  Author: Editorial Staff.

ZeroVM is creating the world’s first cloud hypervisor, which is a piece of software that creates and runs virtual machines.  The team from Israel has created an open source platform for cloud computing that is fast and efficient. The open source program runs on Openstack, the operating system for the cloud, which Rackspace created along with NASA.

The ZeroVM Team has spent the past week in Portland, Oregon at the Openstack Summit meeting with customers. They arrived back in San Antonio just in time to pitch ZeroVM at the TechStars Cloud Demo Day on Thursday.  Camuel Gilyadov, one of the team’s founders, presented the company. Its slide showing “5 Geeks with Russian accents,” got a big laugh...

Grazed from MyHostNews. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud is ideal for Virtual Desktop/Desktop Replacement. Most people, when they first hear about it don’t realize the power of cloud computing. Imagine all your servers, running all the time with limited downtime. Imagine all the machines in your business silently connected and ticking away, ready to share data at a moment’s notice. Imagine employees being able to access their work anywhere without the use of a VPN.

Cloud offers all of that and more. When you use cloud instead of a traditional desktop, you are gaining a whole host of features that aren’t possible with a traditional model. To start, cloud computing is incredibly fast and powerful. With traditional computing, the processing load is usually on the computer itself. This can cause certain tasks, like graphical tasks or compiling code, to take a long time. When you use the cloud, all of that processing power is offloaded onto a system vastly more powerful than a regular desktop. The entire process winds up taking a much shorter time than normal...

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Midokura, a global startup focused on network virtualization, today announced the general availability of MidoNet. MidoNet virtualizes the network stack for cloud platforms, such as OpenStack. First introduced last Fall to the U.S. market, this solution has been in development for three years. MidoNet is a distributed, decentralized, multi-layer software-defined virtual network solution specifically designed for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Midokura's approach not only adds automation that significantly reduces the human cost (OPEX) of managing the network, but also impacts the overall economics of cloud computing (CAPEX) by simplifying network requirements.

"We are excited to disrupt the market and offer the industry general access to our MidoNet network virtualization technology," said Dan Mihai Dumitriu, co-founder and CEO of Midokura. "Unlike other solutions out there, MidoNet pushes intelligence to the edge of the network, as it takes an overlay-based approach to network virtualization and sits on top of any IP-connected network. Given this, MidoNet makes it easier for enterprises to build fully featured, secure and scalable clouds."...

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Alex Barrett.

Until recently, IT pros responsible for servers, network components, storage infrastructure and applications could be forgiven for not thinking much about the future of desktops that run Windows. What happened on the desktop stayed on the desktop. But like a distant war that is suddenly being fought on native soil, Microsoft's struggles to revitalize and preserve its venerable desktop business are having an impact in the data center.

The assault on the Windows desktop is intense. Microsoft's OS business is under fire from Apple and consumer devices. The profitable Office productivity applications are under attack by countless new Software as a Service (SaaS), mobile and Web apps. Even back-end services such as Exchange, SharePoint and Active Directory are no longer safe from incursions by cloud-based products...