Thin client technology vendor Wyse Technology today is releasing new
software designed to enable thin clients to access far-away data
centers without the associated degradation in performance.
The Wyse Virtual Desktop Accelerator is designed to make thin-client
computing -- using either thin client hardware or a repurposed PC --
viable for private networks over the long haul.
The technology is available for a free evaluation download for 30 days
and then is available for sale through Wyse’s channel partners, Jeff
McNaught, chief marketing officer and security officer at Wyse
Technology, tells Channel Insider. It works with both thin clients and
PCs running Windows XP Professional.
“Most solutions require that there is a close proximity to data
center,” says McNaught. “We can be several thousand miles away from the
data center.”
That’s a crucial difference for companies looking to have their global
operations served up by just two to three data centers instead of by 10
– a difference that can mean a savings of tens of millions of dollars,
according to McNaught.
For example, Amazon’s two data centers are located in Dublin and in
Virginia. That’s great if you are close to Dublin or Virginia, says
McNaught.
“But the further you move away from the data center, the more the
experience declines,” he says. This new technology is designed to fix
that problem.
Wyse is aiming the technology at two markets – enterprises that are
looking to globalize their thin client deployments, and small and
mid-sized businesses looking to move their operations to the private
cloud.
“Small legal firms and medical firms, for example, are very interested
in getting rid of their servers and moving the contents of them into
the cloud,” says McNaught.
And many customers are looking to use this technology on their older PCs, according to McNaught.
“Customers say they want to deploy this software across the company,
but many of their PCs are not fully depreciated, or they want to keep
them a few extra years to save some money,” he says. That’s why Wyse
has been supporting thin client technology on PCs for the last year and
a half, says McNaught.
“We initially did it as a test,” he says. “There was some concern that
if we supported PCs there would be less interest in thin clients. But
it made customers more interested in deploying Wyse-based solutions,
which helped us tremendously.”
The technology works by accelerating protocols such as Citrix ICA and
Microsoft RDP by up to three times, and using older techniques such as
tunneling, proxy servers and error correction. It’s software-based and
eliminates the need for hardware-based network accelerators.
The technology accelerates connections to Citrix XenApp, Citrix
XenDesktop, VMware View and Microsoft Terminal Server and Microsoft
Hyper-V VDI .
Following the 30-day evaluation, customers can buy the technology from
a Wyse channel partner for $59 per virtual machine or $1,799 per server
– regardless of the number of users.
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