Wyse VDA Accelerates Cloud Computing over Long Haul

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.”

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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.