Simon Bramfitt

Slow news day

Take a quick look at the following and see if you can work out what it has to do with thin-clients...

[Product X] offers users cutting edge foundational and architectural designs that will allow [Product X] users numerous options for future customization and product expansion. Like your organization, [Product X] has been designed to change, grow, and adapt to the evolving technology and service requirements of your business.

Regardless of your organization's size, [Product X] will tightly couple with the data generated by your business enterprise. The core of the [Product X] engine supports single computing and networked environments. In enterprise scenarios with large existing deployments, homogeneity is rare and [Product X]'s platform allows you to interoperate with the technologies offered by third-party healthcare vendors. With higher integration requirements, security systems must also be interoperable.

Any ideas?  Me neither. 

Yet if you look through Citrix's list of 'Citrix Ready Products' you will find that Product X listed under thin-clients. Only it's not, it's a healthcare data analytics app. Which it a bit a shame really because if there's anything we need more of today it's thin-clients with "cutting edge foundational and architectural designs" and "numerous options for future customization and product expansion".

Like I said, it's a slow news day.

My dog ate the backup tapes

My post from last week Virtualization in New Europe included a call for submissions for your best DR or business continuity story, the winner will receive a free past to the Burton Group Catalyst Europe conference in Prague.

We've already had a few good entries, but most have been recycled 'customer success' stories. Not exactly what I would call prize winning material. So come on people get with the spirit of the occasion would you. If you need a little inspiration, watch the re-run of last night's Oscar awards show, rent a copy of The Hurt Locker, then ask yourself would Kathryn Bigelow ever want to make a movie of my story and if the answer isn't yes, then it's time for a rewrite.

You want to win and get a free ticket to the hardest hitting IT conference in Europe this year, then you have to try a little harder.

Dell set to corner the market for desktop virtualization hardware

After selling the $500 (HOW MUCH?) FX100 zero-client for the last 18 months as part of its Remote Workstation package, Dell has finally acknowledged that the same Teradici PCoIP chipset that allows it to connect to the R5400 rack workstation will enable it to work with VMware View 4.0.  

If that wasn’t enough, Dell have also launched a marketing blitz pushing the new and rather desirable Latitude 13 laptops as being ”Ready for Virtualization”.

Does this mean that the Latitude 13 will be shipping with a client hypervisor some time soon, or just that it will have Citrix and VMware's respective desktop clients pre-installed.  Whatever the answer I guess Dell must be missing Ron Oglesby more than it knew.

Virtualization in New Europe

Regular readers of this blog will know that I've never made a secret of my enthusiasm for Project Virtual Reality Check. So with that said, I'm particularly happy to report that Ruben Spruijt will be in Prague this April to present the latest Project VRC benchmark results at the Burton Group Catalyst Europe Conference. We also have the incomparable Chris Wolf presenting Burton Group's selection criteria for server hosted desktop virtualization, as well as delivering a workshop on client virtualization. The only thing that spoils it for me is that while everyone else from Burton Group is heading off to Prague, I will be staying at home working on material for Catalyst North America. 

If, unlike me, you have the opportunity to attend Catalyst then Burton Group are offering a couple of cool incentives to help get you there. Take a look at the Burton Group data center team blog, where we are offering a free ticket to Catalyst to whoever submits the best DR story.  No DR story to share, then try using the promo code “INSIDER” during registration, you'll get full access to Catalyst EU for the discounted price of €995. And finally, we are so confident you will be enlightened and educated at Catalyst 2010, we are offering a full guarantee. If you are not satisfied with the quality of our conference content and if you don’t learn something that is useful to you, your Catalyst registration is free. Try asking for that anywhere else.

Microsoft Azure enables roll your own desktop in the cloud - Updated

Microsoft's head of marketing for Azure Prashant Ketkar, announced that Microsoft will be adding Remote Desktop Services and virtual machine support to Windows Azure. Without committing to a date Ketkar indicated that these new services were very high on the Azure team's list of priorities, expectations are that these could be available by the start of Q3 if not sooner.

Aside from pricing ($0.12 per hour) there's not much to say about this offering yet.  It's nothing that you couldn't do before with Amazon EC2.  But it's early days yet and between now and when the services launch it might offer something of real interest.  Until then it does nothing more that encourage Amazon to sharpen its pencil and come up with some better pricing.

Update to my initial post 

Microsoft have requested that that I make it clear that by extending Azure to support both RDP access and user developed virtual machines, they are not going to be providing any sort of DaaS offering themselves. 

This does not mean that it isn't going to be possible to do this yourself; the core capability is certainly there, just that MS don't want to get into the DaaS business. Either way, it will be interesting to see how this turns out. I'd be very interested to see just how many IT organisations will now consider Azure for either their core desktop platform or as part of a business continuity solution.