Thin-client vendor Wyse Technology Inc. will expand the application management features in its terminal server management software.
At the Citrix Solutions Summit in Orlando, Fla., officials with the San Jose, Calif., company will unveil Wyse Expedian 3.0. Key new features of the software, which runs on all Microsoft Corp. Windows servers running Terminal Server and Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server, will include two additions to the software's Application Shaping offering, called Application Affinity and Application Priority, according to David Rand, director of corporate marketing.
With Application Affinity, IT administrators can assign particular applications to particular CPUs. The benefit is that a power-hungry application won't impact applications running on other processors, so users will see no degradation of performance, Rand said.
Application Priority is a way of enabling the system to redistribute bandwidth if an application that requires a lot of bandwidth is introduced into the server. As with Application Affinity, the benefit is that employees using other applications on the same terminal server won't see the performance drop because of the new application. The software also enables IT administrators to automatically schedule the bandwidth distribution. For example, one schedule can be set up for daytime work and another for nighttime work, said John Truitt, senior product manager at Wyse.
"The net effect is that everyone working on the CPU might experience a momentary slowdown, but after Application Priority kicks in, performance picks right back up again," Truitt said. "It will prevent that one person from slowing down performance for everyone else."
Rand said Wyse is also preparing to roll out the next version of Rapport, its software designed to manage such devices as thin client appliances, handheld devices and other mobile products. He said the new release will have some 40 new features, though he declined to elaborate.
Officials also are still investigating whether to integrate the company's Rapport and Alcatraz software offerings, Truitt said. Alcatraz enables IT administrators to put thin client capabilities onto their desktops by giving them access to applications housed on servers. Truitt said they are talking with customers to get a better gauge on which key features they would like to see integrated, and then they will determine whether to move down that path.
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