The View From NCS Technologies

The Air Force Research Laboratory has announced the next version of SecureView, which will include both the addition of several long-awaited features as well as the return of one of my favorite features, now in a brand-new package.

NCS is proud to announce the addition of HP Enterprise solutions to our diverse ecosystem.  Now more than ever NCS has the tools to provide solutions for nearly any IT need.  Whether you're deploying a VDI environment for your mobile workforce or adding compute capacity to your datacenter, NCS Technologies has the expertise to support your IT modernization project.

We're back from HIMSS 2016, and what a week we had! Many new visitors to the booth brought lots of interest and feedback. The time spent in the booth also offered plenty of opportunity to learn about our customers. 

At a recent trade show we showed off our latest NCS Technologies Vortex workstation running SecureView 2.1 with all the bells and whistles - Liquid-cooled Intel Core i7 processor, multiple high-end graphics cards, fiber NICs, 32GB of RAM, multiple monitors.

What You Can Do WithSecureView

SecureView is a multi-level virtual platform which allows a user to run multiple securely isolated environments (typically up to five or six environments up till now) on a single PC, provide hardware-enforced security and deliver superior virtualization in the most demanding environments. The virtual platform is made possible by extensive development work by the Air Force Research Laboratory, the open source community, Assured Information Security and NCS.

The great thing about the latest SecureView 2.1 is the ability to run more isolated environments than was previously possible. Our feedback is that analysts need to run 7, 8 or even 15 VMs in some cases to replace all of the physical PCs on the desktop.

Last week's VMWORLD 2015 was a big success!  NCS launched two new zero client products, Cirrus LT Plus 15" notebook and Cirrus DT WiFi desktop zero client.  And, we showcased our popular Cirrus LT 14" notebook zero client, which launched last year, and our enhanced end-to-end VDI solution.  The show was an impressive global gathering of those focused on virtualization, drawing 23,000+ people intensely interested in all things VMware and the ecosystem that supports them. 

We wrapped up booth operations today in Baltimore at the 2015 Defensive Cyber Operations Symposium and many conversations centered on the topic of virtualization.  Whether virtualizing the desktop in a datacenter environment (VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, etc.) or on a host workstation (OpenXT, SecureView) everyone recognizes the benefits of consolidation and centralizing management.

Secure, multi-level computing in government agencies has always been a challenge for end users and IT administrators. The idea of consolidating networks to fewer physical machines is not new, and has been addressed in different ways by various hardware and software approaches over the years. This blog addresses SecureView in this context.

SecureView, the Latest Approach

SecureView represents the latest approach to the multi-level network problem. SecureView is a multi-level virtual platform which allows a user to run multiple securely isolated environments on a single PC, provide hardware-enforced security and deliver superior virtualization in the most demanding environments. The virtual platform is made possible by extensive development work by the Air Force Research Laboratory, the open source community, Assured Information Security and NCS Technologies. Other programs such as DTS and SABER aimed to achieve similar goals but none of them do it as well. 

Over the last two years, in addition to standing up our internal Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, NCS successfully converted a number of older physical servers to virtual machines running in a VMware environment. Our primary reasons for doing this were a mix of aiming to reduce cooling costs and energy footprints, as well as replacing aging servers. 

Just back from a whirlwind week at HIMMS 2015!  While hospitals and other healthcare organizations have been early adopters of our Cirrus LT mobile zero client laptop, I went to Chicago this week a little uncertain about how widely adoption of VDI technology might occur.  By the afternoon of opening day, all of my uncertainty was gone.  We showed off Cirrus LT and gave a sneak peak of Cirrus DT WiFi, the latest addition to the NCS Technologies PCoIP mobile zero client family.

If you are considering migrating to a virtual desktop infrastructure but are afraid performance for your demanding users will suffer, a hyper-converged appliance might just be your answer. Most IT administrators are leery about moving their knowledge workers and powers users to a virtual environment because of historically poor performance associated with latency and bandwidth constraints. Recent advancements in Solid State Drives (SSDs), GPU technology, and more efficient network protocols coupled with improvements in the hypervisor’s file system have made moving these workloads to VDI not only possible but, in many cases, a better experience for the end user.