Wanova, which was founded in April 2008, is launching the company and unveiling its Distributed Desktop Virtualization architecture. Officials said the new architecture addresses the needs of both IT administrations, who want central management capabilities, and mobile end users, who are demanding a better desktop experience than they're getting from other offerings from solutions from the likes of VMware and Citrix as well as the ability to work offline.
A startup is introducing a new desktop virtualization architecture
officials say gives businesses central management capabilities while
offering users a full desktop experience.
Sixteen-month-old Wanova, which came out of stealth mode Aug. 19, is
unveiling its DDV (Distributed Desktop Virtualization) architecture,
which among other benefits lets users work offline.
A key focus of the company and its offering is the growing legions
of mobile workers, said Issy Ben-Shaul, co-founder and CTO of Wanova.
"They need to be able to work offline," Ben-Shaul said in an interview, adding that they also need a full desktop experience.
Rather than put all of the desktop components in the data
center-leaving only a thin-client like device at the endpoint-Wanova's
DDV offers central management, but also the ability to run desktop
workloads at the endpoints, he said.
Other vendors also are looking to strike a balance between the needs
of the business and the end user. MokaFive in June unveiled
MokaFive Suite 2.0, designed to let businesses roll out a secure desktop image but also let end users customize their desktops.
For central management, Wanova's DDV offers CVD (Centralized Virtual
Desktop), which is housed in the data center. CVD holds the primary
copy of the desktop image, which enables virtualization administrators
to manage, edit, provision and update the image.
At the PC device-whether a desktop or notebook-is Wanova's DeskCache
client, which gives users a complete desktop experience and enables
them to run their workloads locally, Ben-Shaul said. This enables them
to work offline and improves the performance over other desktop
virtualization offerings, he said.
Wanova's DDO (Distributed Desktop Optimization) technology, which
offers real-time, bi-directional transfers between the CVD and
DeskCache, which means the central copy and the desktop image are
always in synch.
Wanova's DDV brings together network optimization, the streaming of
desktop images over the WAN and image layering capabilities to speed up
the transport of desktop workloads.
The architecture enables quick reimaging of a desktop over the WAN
in as short of time at 7 minutes, and to completely restore a PC over
the WAN in 10 minutes. It also can quickly send a single desktop image
to thousand of endpoints, Ben-Shaul said.
It also runs without the need of a hypervisor on the client, which
reduces the complexity and management headaches that come with other
desktop virtualization offerings, he said.
Jack Norris, vice president of marketing for Wanova, said another
advantage is that while traditional VDI (virtual desktop
infrastructure) offerings can host 20 to 40 virtual desktops on a
single physical server, Wanova's DDV can host as many as 1,000 virtual
desktops on a server.
"That really changes the economics and dynamics," Norris said.
Chris Wolf, an analyst with The Burton Group, said Wanova's
architecture shows promise. It offers the ability to stream virtual
desktops to the endpoints with little overhead, enables users to work
offline and the experience is transparent to users.
"On paper, this sounds very good," Wolf said. "We'll have to see how it does out in the wild."
He said there are businesses that have thousands of seats with
desktop virtualization technologies from such vendors as VMware and
Citrix Systems, but that desktop virtualization has yet to gain wide
adoption, despite the promise of
driving down operational and capital costs.
IT administrators are still trying to find solutions that offer
clear TCO, and are waiting for offerings that are needed to support
desktop virtualization environments, in such areas as storage,
management and support, Wolfe said.
Both Ben-Shaul and Norris said the desktop virtualization market is
a big one, noting that analyst firm Gartner has said the number of
virtual desktops can grow from about 300,000 in 2008 to 50 million or
more in 2013.
Be-Shaul said Wanova's DDV can not only compete with VDI solutions
already on the market, but can complement a business' existing virtual
desktop environment.
Wanova is launching with $13 million in A-round funding from
Greylock Partners, Carmel Ventures and Opus Capital. The company has
conducted a first round of trials for DDV over the past few weeks, and
is looking to expand the trials.
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