Zero Client Laptop at Cloud Expo Europe

There is growing momentum for moving beyond old-style thin clients to implement the latest generation zero clients as a part of the evolution towards Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). A good example is the UK availability of Cirrus LT mobile PCoIP zero client laptop, announced earlier this week. Cirrus LT is optimized for the UK market and is being showcased this week at the Cloud Expo Europe held in London - the biggest and best attended cloud event in the world.

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.

Final Entry Of A Multi-Part Series

POWER USERS

Over the past week, I have been discussing the various kinds of workers who are likely to be impacted by virtualization. Power Users, like the more senior Knowledge Workers discussed in the last blog, generally are tough challenges for virtualization. These are the folks that require the power of a desktop, the proprietary peripherals, and resource intensive software applications. 

Multi-Part Blog Series

 Virtualization: The Many Types of Users

 In my experience, when a company expresses the intent to move toward virtualization, it is wise to ask them if they have a list of users and type of user that they intend to virtualize.

It seems that the minute that question leaves my mouth, a series of questions pop up, including what type of workers are there for VDI? Is there a type that shouldn’t be included or virtualized? What type of worker do you recommend we start with on the way to full virtualization?

Research on VDI, thin clients and desktop virtualization inevitably leads to articles on how to deal with latency issues and the end user experience. It only makes sense that pushing data on round trips between client and cloud servers could create some degradation in performance, especially involving bandwidth-hungy applications. Concerns about performance have concerned IT administrators and end users considering significant investments in desktop virtualizaiton products. And an Internet search of these issues uncovers thousands of articles and papers suggesting workarounds.

VDI and desktop virtualization are being implemented for many reasons these days, including strong security. Outside of the obvious needs in government, the intelligence community and the military, is there a need for desktop-virtualization-based strong security in the enterprise, such as healthcare and finance?

The short answer is, yes!  I have encountered a number of people who ask me “Who, besides intelligence agencies and military, really needs the level of strong security zero clients offer?”  Admittedly, I had the same question when we first began development work on our own zero client products, such as the Cirrus LT zero client laptop.  Fact is, there are many industries which are severely impacted by data theft every day.  More and more often we hear about security breaches and data leaks with catastrophic consequences.

Consider the healthcare industry.  Healthcare providers are constantly accessing sensitive patient records with very personal information.  Zero clients allow you to enable a remote or mobile worker and still comply with HIPAA, PHI and ePHI by restricting the ability to download and store data locally.  Nothing stored, nothing lost.

In doing market research I have come across a report on virtualization from a top tier industry analyst group. In order to project market trends, the report analyst lumped together thin clients and zero clients used in desktop virtualization. This would be like an auto report lumping together Civic sedans and CR-Z sport hybrids. Both are compact Hondas and both are fuel efficient, but users are probably looking for totally different driving experiences in these vehicles. So I believe the analyst in writing that particular research report on the virtualization market was not being as precise with his subscribers as he needed to be.

What is VDI?

The interest in virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is growing each year, as IT managers continually look for ways to decrease IT administrative complexity and lower hardware costs. While momentum for VDI grows, many IT administrators are just beginning to seriously consider evaluations and implementation.