Virtual Computer | NxTop Virtual Desktop Review
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Virtual Computer | NxTop Virtual Desktop Review
by TeamDesktop » Mon May 10, 2010 6:09 am
Virtual Computer | NxTop Virtual Desktop Review
by Guise, Idoia and Henry
Company Introduction
We liked this company the second we met them because Virtual Computer are not like other tech companies with normal people working in them and also because they have an aura of 'special' wrapped around them which is driven by the sustained applause they are currently getting from the desktop virtualization technical community.
If we had to pick a word to describe what the people at Virtual Computer feel about their technology it would be pride.
In fact Virtual Computer was presented with the Pricewaterhouse Coopers Award in the Cloud Computing category of the 6th Annual MITX Technology Awards and were the darlings of vmworld 2009, their virtual desktop technology NxTop a finalist for the Best in the Desktop Virtualization category. They didn't actually win, which we thought was criminal and we should know, we are proper desktop people as opposed to those who know about virtual servers and therefore think they automatically understand the virtual desktop.
Virtual Computer were the first company in the world to release a very 'niche' and relatively unknown kind of desktop virtualization technology which can simply be called a 'client-side' virtual desktop or if you want to be really specific, a type-1 bare-metal client-side hypervisor (1) capable of running multiple virtual desktops side by side on the same machine. We will explain this concept a little later, we just wanted to illustrate that what Virtual Computer was doing is very special and very revolutionary.
Well it WAS revolutionary at the time, since then Virtual Computers technology has since become mainstream, used in countless global desktop deployments and has been adopted as the future by VMware (2), Citrix (3) and everybody else.
Remember that Virtual Computer have been around since late 2007 (4) and also that the desktop virtualization space had not been around for much longer at this point if you could in fact call it a 'space'. Back in the bad old days of 2008 when our space had just been born and nobody quite knew what a virtual desktop was, Virtual Computer were there talking lots of sense about virtual desktops and putting their money into a revolutionary kind of virtual desktop and then proceeded to make magic happen with their technology. Damn right they are proud of themselves, we feel proud just to be allowed to review their desktops.
To give you some kind of idea of how important this technology is, when Virtual Computer invented the NxTop Virtual Desktop (5), based on the open source server virtualization software Xen (6), every other major tech player in the space followed suit but STILL nobody has managed to get a working product out of the door yet other than Virtual Computer. In fact Virtual Computer are so far ahead of their competitors, its looking to us like they are going to seize an awfully large portion of the enterprise desktop market from right under their very noses.
What is interesting is how everybody responded to NXtop being released for the first time. Citrix clearly noticed and they immediately invested in Virtual Computer (7) and then hired the Chairman of Xen.org, Mr Ian Pratt (8) to head up their Citrix XenClient project code named 'Project Independence'(9). VMware didn't really have much of a clue what was going on with desktops back then but started bleating about their revolutionary client-side virtual desktop technology almost immediately and began looking for people to buy who could achieve their ambition. There was also a diligent and very hard-working bunch of Israeli gentleman called Neocleus (10) who were not saying anything at the time and working hard to get their version of this technology released and to market.
This is an important virtual desktop technology. In fact we will go further and say that Virtual Computer's NxTop us likely to change the face of the corporate desktop globally in 2010 and beyond. Our review team was fortunate enough to get unprecedented first-hand access to the next-generation release of NXtop Virtual Desktop technology before almost anyone else outside of the development team and we were blow away by what we saw.
Virtual Computer are so far ahead of their time that they STILL do not have a serious competitor in sight, VMware is still three quarters away from releasing anything remotely worth testing in the real world and Citrix are having kittens about their own version of what we think is an original concept, invented by Virtual Computer. We have said it before and we will say it again because too many people talk about fairytales in our space enough as it is.
In this world, the real world in which we live, there is only ONE company with a client-side virtual desktop technology worth a salt and that's Virtual Computer. There is only ONE company that has released multiple alpha generation releases of this kind of technology and deployed it in the real world, in live production environments and that's Virtual Computer. There is only one company with this technology that can count Fortune 500 companies in its engagements and client list and that is Virtual Computer. There is only one company with this kind of technology that has tens and tens of thousands of real-world virtual desktop deployments under its belt and again, that's Virtual Computer.
We keep having to tell Citrix and VMware people the same thing, its becoming annoying now but we will say it again. If your tech is not out of beta, if its not got real-world desktops deployed in production environments in any serious way, if its not got technical engineers accredited on the platform globally and is supported by a highly motivated and elite team of virtual desktop people who are technically accredited and supported by a global network of offices then ITS A FAIRYTALE. We would like to remind our readers not to buy into the huge amount of hype that the virtual desktop space seems to automatically generate for some strange reason and base their desktop infrastructure decisions on fact rather than fiction.
Virtual Computer is a highly specialized kind of virtual desktop company with multi-national enterprise clients globally, technology partnerships (11) with Dell (12) and Lenovo (13) to ship machines with their virtual desktop technology pre-loaded, on demand for their channel partners and serious financing in place from two major Venture Capital firms (14). Even Citrix themselves have invested hard cash into this company which is kind of weird when you think about it. We are positive Ian Pratt tries not to think about this, or at least not in his public presentations about XenClient anyway.
So now we have firmly established that we are not talking about a fairytale virtual desktop technology or company and that we are in fact talking about a serious contender for the title of "Best Virtual Desktop Technology" and perhaps even "Best Desktop Infrastructure" of 2009/2010, perhaps everybody can now stop believing the hype and begin to understand that the future is already here and is deploying virtual desktops amongst us in the form of NxTop`s 2.x release and in offices near you in large quantities.
Virtual Computer is headed up by a serious management team. Their CEO and President Dan Mc Call (15) was the recipient of the prestigious Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year award (16) and we often see him talking about technology and virtual desktops in Business Week, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and USA Today.
Their CTO is a gentleman called Alex Vasilevsky (17) who appears to me some kind of high-technology grand-wizard with a reputation for inventing "world-first" products and co-founding and acting as the CTO of Virtual Iron (18) where he basically invented the technology behind their revolutionary server virtualization platform. He has also accumulated an insane amount of prestigious awards for his technologies and is the primary inventor or lots of global patents (19). He is the one ring that rules them on the technical front over at Virtual Computer.
Peter Marconi (20) their Global VP of Engineering of has two decades of experience in the technology space with an impressive array of companies which he either co-founded or led and we really cannot list all of Peter's (21) and the rest of the management teams wide-ranging achievements in this review because it would become ridiculously long and we would leave ourselves open to the charge that we found this management team very sexy indeed.
We are huge fans of the people we became familiar with throughout the course of our review process over at Virtual Computer, especially their VP of Global Sales, Mr Sandrijn Stead (22) who is probably almost single-handedly responsible for driving Virtual Computers technologies into the real-world desktop environments of large-scale enterprise deployments globally.
Sandrijn Stead has a reputation of being a master-strategist and just to be sure of this, we actually made him sit through a personality test which correctly identified his personality trait as "Field-Marshall" (23).
Bill Gates was a Field-Marshall too, as was Napoleon Bonaparte, Margaret Thatcher and Hilary Clinton (24) which is a little worrying when you think about it. Don't mess with Desktop Field-Marshall Stead, his personality type is rare.
More than anything we like Sandrijn Stead because he likes dogs and we have dogs in our office when we write our reviews and why wouldn't we ? In our minds any man who loves dogs is a good man. Sandrijn Stead founded the Stead Animal Rescue Trust (24), is friends with the Himalaya Rescue Dog Squad Nepal team (25) and is definitely what you would call a doggy person. We would know because we are proper doggy people too.
In case you happen to be reading this review and wondering why we have digressed into dogs, get used to it this is how we roll, we also play video games on our virtual desktops a lot too, sometimes with our dogs. We like dogs and we like to promote doggy people.
God help your company if we happen to review you and you have cats in your office, we cannot guarantee that we would be impartial and independent although in principal we have nothing against cats or their owners. Its a tribal thing and we are all smiling as one of us writes this, there are three people collaborating on this review in real-time.
We go on and on about how good Virtual Computer are, but you have to appreciate that we were given unprecedented, never-before access to their company, their technologies and their thinking. Throughout the course of our review process, we spent time with their global sales teams discussing huge desktop pilots they are engaged in. We spoke to Eric Shoemaker the Director of USA Sales , Colin Lim the Director of Sales Asia pacific, Stuart Quinsey the Director of Sales EMEA and of course Field-Marshall Stead.
That's an awful lot of salesmen when you think about it but what we found really refreshing is that they are actually selling something that they are proud of and intimate with. Our only criticism of Virtual Computers global sales teams is there do not seem to be any Females in the upper-levels of sales management which we did not like, especially considering that some of the finest salespeople in the world are females and also that Field-Marshall Stead shares the same personality-type as Margaret Thatcher and Hilary Clinton.
Anything the sales guys told us was tempered by solid technical desktop superheroes starting with Richard Cassidy who we liked a lot. We spent a lot more time with Virtual Computer's global engineering team which is solid like a rock in desktop people terms. They have a dream team of global virtual desktop superhero engineers starting with Tom Reed in the USA , Martin Kyprianides in EMEA and Andrew Bycroft in ASIA (again, where are the girls?).
We do not pull punches in our reviews and the issue had to be raised. In short our message is that you and everyone else in the space give more females access to the upper-reaches of our space over the long term. Don't think about it, just do it and they will not let you down. That's a desktop superhero promise.
We would be doing Virtual Computers team a grave injustice if we did not mention the countless technical and sales support team members scattered around the four corners of the earth who dealt with the 15 odd other people who took part in this review scattered around the world and who called Virtual Computers local telephone number asking for support at funny hours because they were being stupid.
We got unprecedented access on a global-scale and a complete snapshot of their entire client engagements, that's how confident these guys are in their virtual desktop technology and proud they are of their Fortune 500 type clients. They were excited as hell to let us into their company to review their technologies which is exactly what you would expect from a world-class global technology provider with a serious amount of clients.
Together these guys represent one of the finest, most talented, well financed and most powerful teams we have come across yet in the virtual desktop space and we are seriously impressed with Virtual Computer's NxTop virtual desktop and desktop infrastructure technology.
We know a world beating technology when we see one and we would know, we are real virtual desktop people talking to some of the biggest companies and players in our space about exactly this kind of thing.
That's probably the best company introduction you are ever likely to see on this review site for a long, long time unless we come across some kind of über-advanced virtual desktop technology from the future that takes Virtual Computers title as Virtual Desktop Review's "Best Virtual Desktop Technology of 2009-2010".
They don't get to have that title because they paid us for it, they don't get it because they were really nice to us, they don't get it because we think we know about virtual desktops here at Virtual Desktop Review.
Virtual Computer get the title because 'WE', the many desktop people who write this review are serious virtual desktop people who know about virtual desktop tech and deployments in the real world and also because Virtual Computer is a company that is genuinely changing the global landscape of the corporate, enterprise and SME market in a big way. Virtual Computer are serious desktop super heroes seeking to redress the 'balance of the force' in the virtual desktop space and we applaud their efforts.
In fact we celebrate their efforts and cheer them on as they as a team march forward with pride into the destiny they created for themselves out of nothing but their thinking, the sexiest management team on earth, Sandrijn Stead's Field-Marshalling, solid desktop Jedi techies and a multi-lingual and very global team of very special desktop people, all trained and accredited on the NxTop virtual desktop infrastructure. Awesome.
If Virtual Computer were a girl called Genevieve or a boy called Moses, some members of our review team would marry Virtual Computer without hesitation or stopping to ask what their mother thinks. VC are that sexy.
What is a client-side virtual desktop ?
But why are they so sexy ? That will be because of their wonderful virtual desktops and their magical desktop infrastructure.
NxTop, is magic.
Remember that to the untrained mind, any significantly advanced high-technology appears to work by magic.
Before we go on to explain exactly what NxTop is, its best to provide a little background on the technology and this is where it can get confusing so bear with us. The virtual desktop technologies in our space can be very roughly and with strong resistence from their owners, be thrown into two categories from the end user perspective.
Client-Side Virtual Desktops and Server-Side Virtual Desktops. Simple.
Simply put, if your virtual desktop is delivered/streamed/presented to you from a remote server over the internet it is a 'server-side' virtual desktop.
A good example of a server-side virtual desktop would be ThinkGrid's hosted virtual desktop offering. You rent the very latest virtual desktop from Thinkgrid and they pre-install it with the applications you need and push it down to you wherever you are. Your desktop in this instance 'lives' on the central server. You can trust ThinkGrid to monitor, back-up, manage and store that desktop on their central server infrastructure, which is perfect for a lot of desktop users who are constantly connected to the internet.
But what if you are not connected to the internet a lot of the time ? Forget 3G the service is too patchy. Forget wi-fi it is not yet everywhere as the more mobile amongst us already know. A server-side virtual desktop is not resident on your local machine.
What if you need constant and critical access to your desktop regardless of the network conditions ? You need a Client-Side Virtual Desktop and this is where NxTop comes in.
Technically speaking NxTop is a type-1, bare-metal client-side hypervisor and the first one of its kind in production with real desktop users working on it. You do not really need to understand what a hypervisor is unless you have a deep interest in a vibrant community of desktop and server professionals who constantly argue amongst themselves and the patience to make sense of what they are saying.
If you want to learn a little more about hypervisors and the different types without feeling like you are losing your mind, please visit our parent website, which is a community-driven project and the virtual desktop sectors first client-facing source of information on our technologies aimed at newcomers to our space. The Virtual Desktop Forum.
If you are spanish, we also maintain the Spanish speaking worlds only source of information, news and explanations of these technologies in native Spanish. El Foro de Escritorios Virtuales just in case you were wondering what virtual desktop was in Spanish.
You don't really need to know about hypervisors because its incredibly boring and who cares as long as they work ? But in case you do insist, In the case of a client-side virtual desktop, the hypervisor is a piece of software that allows you to run multiple virtual desktops on the same machine, side-by-side. This means you can have multiple but completely separate virtual desktops on the same laptop or PC and you can hotkey between them using them at the same time.
When we talk about client-side virtual desktops the best way to describe this technology is to describe a use case.
Company | The largest national provider of Financial Services in a major Western Country.
This company had a huge problem. They have 250+ guys running around with powerful laptops containing highly sensitive information and a further 1500 people working on high-end desktop PC's in offices scattered around the world. If you are in charge of the management, security and administration of those desktops, this basically means that no matter how well you do your job, at some point you are going to get into big trouble.
If a sophisticated team of intelligent criminal hackers decide they want the data on those desktops then they are looking at an organization with multiple vulnerabilities in that each and every one of those 'traditional' desktops is not virtual, is anchored to the underlying hardware and worse, represents one weak link for potential attackers to attack which then gives them access to the rest of the desktop network. If hackers don't get your desktops, script kiddies running botnets and pushing out trojans in email or through compromised websites would. Those desktops are ultimately highly vulnerable because the users consider the desktops to be their own thing and quite rightly too.
Desktop users are the people who have to go to work every day and actually use the desktops, actually run applications on the the desktops in a million different ways. They want to install their own programs, communicate with their friends by email and surf the net when they aren't working. If you stop desktop users from being able to do this they revolt, but if on the other hand you weaken IT central's grip on the desktops then you have problems.
How do we deal with this issue ? The answer is a No-Compromise Solution. The desktop user does not have to compromise, they can treat the machine as if it were their own and IT central do not have to compromise because they have all of their desktop users on highly locked down corporate desktops. In case you wondering, we know that last statement doesn't make much sense unless we put it into context.
A no-compromise solution would be to run TWO completely separate virtual desktops, side-by-side on the same laptop. One desktop running Windows XP Professional 64bit and the second running Windows 7 with all of the bells and whistles. The XP desktop is the 'corporate' virtual desktop, its a locked down, no admin access, no user rights, restricted web-browsing and e-communication and HORRIBLE to use for anything other than work in short bursts.
Then you have the Windows 7 Home Premium virtual desktop running right alongside the XP desktop which can be reached by using a 'hot key' so you can flip between the two virtual desktops in an instant and use them as if they were both running natively on your machine. The Windows 7 desktop is the 'personal' desktop where the user can do whatever they like on it.
This is a no-compromise solution, everybody in the equation gets what they want and even better, it doesn't matter if the user breaks their personal desktop because of viruses, trojans, botnets or hackers because their second 'corporate' virtual desktop always loads, always works and will never be affected by whatever goes down on the 'personal' Windows 7 desktop. Magic.
When we say no-compromise we meant perfect. Multiple instances of completely separate virtual desktops running 'native' and side by side on the same machine. Magic.
So in pilot at the company, 50 mobile desktop users were pulled out of circulation and given new laptops running client-side virtual desktops together side-by-side on the same machine. Instantly all of the users were happy because they had been using horrible locked down corporate desktops that they could not do anything personal on at all. All of a sudden they are given a new machine on which they can play to their hearts content. Magic.
And off they skipped like happy children with new toys, the happiest corporate desktop users that you ever saw in your life. As they left the building a line of IT central support desk staff and management waved a hearty goodbye to the desktop users with real emotion because the chances that they would ever have to see those desktop users again had just shrunk to practically zero. Magic.
Now at this company if one of their people out in the field has problems, IT central can just pull the virtual desktop out of the machine, fix it and push it back down the pipe out of the cloud and onto the laptop fully-repaired. Even better IT central have taken responsibility for the constant back-up of the 'corporate' virtual desktops completely out of the hands of the desktop user which is wonderful really because even technical professionals forget to back up their efforts a lot of the time. Whenever the desktop user is connected to the desktop, NxTop drip feeds a steady stream of back-ups to the cloud server consuming very little bandwidth and processing power in doing so. Magic.
Say for example that IT central decide that they need to update/patch or install new applications on every single one of those machines, they do not have to call the laptops or the users back into base, they just push the updates/patches and installs down onto the desktops automatically and all at the same time. If a desktop is acting strangely, it can be sucked back up into the cloud, fixed and then pushed back down to the desktop user out of the cloud all fresh and ready to go. Magic.
All of this makes life for IT central very easy indeed, I mean can you imagine going back to the old days when you had to run around offices with installation CD's and floppy disks ? It sounds like one of the levels in Dante's inferno.
You know effectively have complete control over your mobile desktop workforce, dramatically increased their productivity, tightened up your corporate desktop acreage and given the users exactly what they wanted in doing so and I think we can now begin to understand the power of client-side virtual desktops. Client-Side Virtual desktops are desktops that 'live' on your local PC or laptop and are resident to that machine. You don't need a decent internet connection to use client-side virtual desktops.
But what about data security ?
The short answer is that your business data has never been safer. There are levels of security inherent and operating at the lowest levels of the machine. We talked earlier on about hypervisors, NxTop is a hypervisor that lets you mount multiple virtual desktops, side by side and on the same machine. Think of the hypervisor as "the operating system" because in a way it actually is the operating system in that it is the lowest level piece of software operating on the machine.
NxTop secures your data with varying levels of security. The hypervisor works in tandem with the Intel's Trusted Execution Technology which simply provides hardware-based mechanisms that help protect against software-based attacks and protects the confidentiality and integrity of data stored on the machines virtual desktops. NxTop will not even run, let alone 'mount' your virtual desktops if it doesn't get the right fingerprint swipe or RFID chip in close proximity to the physical machine. That's ignoring the fact that most people with the confines of the technology world (a huge umbrella) do not even know what a hypervisor is let alone hot to attack one.
Corporate bad ass next-generation security tech. Nice, we want it.
So whoever steals the laptop or desktop machine can not only get NxTop working, they will also not be able to pull your highly encrypted virtual desktops out of the machine. We were going to say Magic again, but it gets better by venturing into the realms of James Bond type tech in that you can set it up so that the desktops self-destruct at a certain time of the day unless they 'report' back to Q in the underground NOC
Alternatively, Q can quite simply send a kill-pill down to a machine anytime he likes which initiates a self-destruct sequence, which first digitally shreds your encrypted virtual desktops and then proceeds to destroy itself. Kill-Pill Magic.
NOW. Virtual Computer vigorously denied what we are about to say. This is not an authorized part of the review and we have not laid eyes on anything like we are about to describe in any way shape or form. At no point did any member of Virtual Computers team suggest to us that what we are about to describe exists, ever has existed or is ever likely to exist. We haven't heard any rumors either to this effect, in fact it would be safe to say what we are telling you is a fairytale which is fine in the right context.
We have strong reasons, based on nothing but pure speculation, to believe that Virtual Computer are working with the intelligence agencies (probably the CIA and MI5) to release a James Bond version of their virtual desktop magic which actually detonates a small concealed ribbon of C4 plastic explosive upon receipt of a kill-pill and really does self-destruct the actual machine completely. How cool would that be ?
They MUST be working on James Bond versions of NxTop in some underground and highly-secure NOC detonating high-explosives contained within laptops and PC's in controlled environments for R&D purposes, they MUST be.
We here at Virtual Desktop Review urge Virtual Computer to immediately licence a sweet high-end gamers laptop with the James Bond people to make it an official James Bond virtual desktop machine, embed it with C4 for real kill-pill action and send us five of the machines over so that we can test them and review the kill-pill effect in HD video for our website visitors.
If the laptop is lost and/or self destructs, remember that there is an exact 'snapshot' back-up of the 'lost' virtual desktop back at IT central. Tell them your machine blew up and have them slap your previous virtual desktop image back onto a shiny new laptop and Fed-ex you the machine containing the exact same virtual desktops as the old one. Or walk into a store, buy a laptop of your choice, download and install NxTop and then phone home to have them push your virtual desktop back-ups to you out of the cloud. No data lost, everybody happy. Magic.
That in a nutshell is what client-side virtual desktops are about. Simply put the NxTop client-side virtual desktop solution allows you to manage an extremely large amount of desktops centrally in a highly-effective way, whilst at the same time completely securing your data in every conceivable manner, in order to mitigate against the problems that can occur when you have large quantities of desktops 'out in the wild'.
There is a huge added bonus in that you don't have to upset any of your desktop users either, you give them everything that they want and put the 'personal' back into computing. If you do that for 10,000 desktops spread across a global organizations desktop acreage, if you successfully steered that project through from the initial assessment to actual deployment across all 10,000 desktops then you would be crowned king by the users of your organization and your colleagues would begin call you a desktop superhero. Magic.
Virtual Computer and their partners Dell and Lenovo are wrapped up in some very large-scale deployments indeed, this is not a technology just for mobile workers. Think 40,000 desktop global deployments and you will begin to glimpse the power of NxTop and its potential. Magic.
Desktop users rejoice ! Virtual Computer are giving you exactly what you want ! One desktop for banking, paypal, important stuff and another for everything else which you can blow up to your hearts content and then rewind back to the last point it was working on demand. Did we say this was magic ?
Virtual Computer have showed the world how to realize the dream of client-side virtual desktop computing and Dell and Lenovo support them in their project. You wouldn't want any other partners really, these guys are beginning to dominate the global client-side virtual desktop market before their competitors even got out of bed. Microsoft may have just decided that they want to get in on the virtual desktop market, but the big boys over at Virtual Computer are already in the space before anybody and they brought Dell and Lenovo to the party too.
Virtual Computer are already beavering away making their second gen version better and they have more than a years head-start on their competition, have already released their alpha 2.x version, and have the finest client-side talent in the world on their team.
Virtual Computer are not about fairy-tales in any way, shape or form. They do not run around the world hyping up the cloud and shouting about desktop virtualization, virtual desktops, VDI, DVI, their competitors or their clients, instead they work with the quiet, proud, dignity of people with a definite purpose and who are realizing their potential. Field-Marshall Stead keeps his troops focused.
Their people just work diligently through the night all round the planet, on five different continents, chasing the sun and delivering some of the largest desktop deployments we have ever seen in the virtual desktop world in the offices of some of the biggest businesses in their respective countries. Fact, not magic.
Whilst we are on the subject of serious client-side virtual desktop technology, we think its about time we began our review.
Virtual Desktop Review
WE HAVE A GREAT VIDEO OF US TESTING HIGH-END HD VIDEO AND HD COMPUTER GAMES ON NXTOP DESKTOPS THAT WE CAN USE AND WE HAVE LOTS OF IDEAS GLEANED FROM OUR TECHNICAL TRAINING ABOUT THE ACTUAL TECH REVIEW. WE ARE TRYING TO WORK OUT THE BEST WAY TO DESCRIBE TECH TO NEWCOMERS TO OUR SPACE IN A WAY THEY WILL UNDERSTAND AND RELATE TO.
Virtual Desktop Management Suite Review
WE HAVE A GREAT VIDEO OF US MANAGING LOTS OF DIFFERENT VIRTUAL DESKTOPS THAT WE CAN USE AND WE HAVE LOTS OF IDEAS GLEANED FROM OUR TECHNICAL TRAINING ABOUT THE ACTUAL TECH REVIEW. WE ARE TRYING TO WORK OUT THE BEST WAY TO DESCRIBE TECH TO NEWCOMERS TO OUR SPACE IN A WAY THEY WILL UNDERSTAND AND RELATE TO.
References
Herein Virtual Computer Inc. will be referred to as 'VC'.
(1) Virtual Desktop Forum | The type-1 client-side bare-metal hypervisor explained
(2) VC Competitors | VMware : http://www.vmware.com/
(3) VC Competitors | Citrix : http://www.citrix.com/lang/English/home.asp
(4) VC Origins | Virtual Computer Inc. : http://www.virtualcomputer.com/About+us
(5) VC Technology | NxTop : http://www.virtualcomputer.com/Products+page
(6) Open-Sorce Virtualization | Xen.org : http://www.xen.org/
(7) VC Origins | VC Investors : http://www.virtualcomputer.com/About/investors
(8) Linkedin Profile | Ian Pratt | Chairman of Xen.org : http://uk.linkedin.com/in/ianpratt
(9) VC Competitor | Citrix | Project Independence : http://community.citrix.com/pages/viewp ... d=63177816
(10) VC Competitor | Neocleus : http://www.neocleus.com/
(11) VC Partners | http://www.virtualcomputer.com/Partners
(12) VC Partners | Dell : http://www.dell.com/
(13) VC Partners | Lenovo : http://www.lenovo.com/
(14) VC Investors | Citrix, Flybridge, Highland : http://www.virtualcomputer.com/About/investors
(15) VC Management | Linkedin Profile | Dan McCall : http://www.linkedin.com/in/danmccall
(16) VC Management | Dan McCall | President & CEO of Virtual Computer Inc. : http://www.virtualcomputer.com/About/dan-mccall
(17) VC Management | Linkedin Profile | Alex Vasilevsky : http://www.linkedin.com/in/alexvasilevsky
(18) VC Origins | Virtual Iron : http://www.oracle.com/virtualiron/index.html
(19) VC Management | Alex Vasilevsky | CTO of Virtual Computer Inc. : http://www.virtualcomputer.com/About/alex-vasilevsky
(20) VC Management | Linkedin Profile | Peter Marconi : http://www.linkedin.com/in/petermarconi
(21) VC Management | Peter Marconi | Global VP of Engineering : http://www.virtualcomputer.com/About/peter-marconi
(22) VC Management | Sanrijn Stead | Global VP of Sales : http://www.virtualcomputer.com/About/sandrijn-stead
(23) Personality Type | Sandrijn Stead | Field Marshall : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fieldmarshal_(role_variant)
(24) Animal Charity | Stead Animal Rescue Trust : (website being designed) http://www.ssar.co.uk/
(25) Animal Charity | Himalaya Rescue Dog Squad Nepal : http://www.hrdsnrescue.org.np/
http://www.virtual-desktop-review.com/V ... eview.html
by Guise, Idoia and Henry
Company Introduction
We liked this company the second we met them because Virtual Computer are not like other tech companies with normal people working in them and also because they have an aura of 'special' wrapped around them which is driven by the sustained applause they are currently getting from the desktop virtualization technical community.
If we had to pick a word to describe what the people at Virtual Computer feel about their technology it would be pride.
In fact Virtual Computer was presented with the Pricewaterhouse Coopers Award in the Cloud Computing category of the 6th Annual MITX Technology Awards and were the darlings of vmworld 2009, their virtual desktop technology NxTop a finalist for the Best in the Desktop Virtualization category. They didn't actually win, which we thought was criminal and we should know, we are proper desktop people as opposed to those who know about virtual servers and therefore think they automatically understand the virtual desktop.
Virtual Computer were the first company in the world to release a very 'niche' and relatively unknown kind of desktop virtualization technology which can simply be called a 'client-side' virtual desktop or if you want to be really specific, a type-1 bare-metal client-side hypervisor (1) capable of running multiple virtual desktops side by side on the same machine. We will explain this concept a little later, we just wanted to illustrate that what Virtual Computer was doing is very special and very revolutionary.
Well it WAS revolutionary at the time, since then Virtual Computers technology has since become mainstream, used in countless global desktop deployments and has been adopted as the future by VMware (2), Citrix (3) and everybody else.
Remember that Virtual Computer have been around since late 2007 (4) and also that the desktop virtualization space had not been around for much longer at this point if you could in fact call it a 'space'. Back in the bad old days of 2008 when our space had just been born and nobody quite knew what a virtual desktop was, Virtual Computer were there talking lots of sense about virtual desktops and putting their money into a revolutionary kind of virtual desktop and then proceeded to make magic happen with their technology. Damn right they are proud of themselves, we feel proud just to be allowed to review their desktops.
To give you some kind of idea of how important this technology is, when Virtual Computer invented the NxTop Virtual Desktop (5), based on the open source server virtualization software Xen (6), every other major tech player in the space followed suit but STILL nobody has managed to get a working product out of the door yet other than Virtual Computer. In fact Virtual Computer are so far ahead of their competitors, its looking to us like they are going to seize an awfully large portion of the enterprise desktop market from right under their very noses.
What is interesting is how everybody responded to NXtop being released for the first time. Citrix clearly noticed and they immediately invested in Virtual Computer (7) and then hired the Chairman of Xen.org, Mr Ian Pratt (8) to head up their Citrix XenClient project code named 'Project Independence'(9). VMware didn't really have much of a clue what was going on with desktops back then but started bleating about their revolutionary client-side virtual desktop technology almost immediately and began looking for people to buy who could achieve their ambition. There was also a diligent and very hard-working bunch of Israeli gentleman called Neocleus (10) who were not saying anything at the time and working hard to get their version of this technology released and to market.
This is an important virtual desktop technology. In fact we will go further and say that Virtual Computer's NxTop us likely to change the face of the corporate desktop globally in 2010 and beyond. Our review team was fortunate enough to get unprecedented first-hand access to the next-generation release of NXtop Virtual Desktop technology before almost anyone else outside of the development team and we were blow away by what we saw.
Virtual Computer are so far ahead of their time that they STILL do not have a serious competitor in sight, VMware is still three quarters away from releasing anything remotely worth testing in the real world and Citrix are having kittens about their own version of what we think is an original concept, invented by Virtual Computer. We have said it before and we will say it again because too many people talk about fairytales in our space enough as it is.
In this world, the real world in which we live, there is only ONE company with a client-side virtual desktop technology worth a salt and that's Virtual Computer. There is only ONE company that has released multiple alpha generation releases of this kind of technology and deployed it in the real world, in live production environments and that's Virtual Computer. There is only one company with this technology that can count Fortune 500 companies in its engagements and client list and that is Virtual Computer. There is only one company with this kind of technology that has tens and tens of thousands of real-world virtual desktop deployments under its belt and again, that's Virtual Computer.
We keep having to tell Citrix and VMware people the same thing, its becoming annoying now but we will say it again. If your tech is not out of beta, if its not got real-world desktops deployed in production environments in any serious way, if its not got technical engineers accredited on the platform globally and is supported by a highly motivated and elite team of virtual desktop people who are technically accredited and supported by a global network of offices then ITS A FAIRYTALE. We would like to remind our readers not to buy into the huge amount of hype that the virtual desktop space seems to automatically generate for some strange reason and base their desktop infrastructure decisions on fact rather than fiction.
Virtual Computer is a highly specialized kind of virtual desktop company with multi-national enterprise clients globally, technology partnerships (11) with Dell (12) and Lenovo (13) to ship machines with their virtual desktop technology pre-loaded, on demand for their channel partners and serious financing in place from two major Venture Capital firms (14). Even Citrix themselves have invested hard cash into this company which is kind of weird when you think about it. We are positive Ian Pratt tries not to think about this, or at least not in his public presentations about XenClient anyway.
So now we have firmly established that we are not talking about a fairytale virtual desktop technology or company and that we are in fact talking about a serious contender for the title of "Best Virtual Desktop Technology" and perhaps even "Best Desktop Infrastructure" of 2009/2010, perhaps everybody can now stop believing the hype and begin to understand that the future is already here and is deploying virtual desktops amongst us in the form of NxTop`s 2.x release and in offices near you in large quantities.
Virtual Computer is headed up by a serious management team. Their CEO and President Dan Mc Call (15) was the recipient of the prestigious Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year award (16) and we often see him talking about technology and virtual desktops in Business Week, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and USA Today.
Their CTO is a gentleman called Alex Vasilevsky (17) who appears to me some kind of high-technology grand-wizard with a reputation for inventing "world-first" products and co-founding and acting as the CTO of Virtual Iron (18) where he basically invented the technology behind their revolutionary server virtualization platform. He has also accumulated an insane amount of prestigious awards for his technologies and is the primary inventor or lots of global patents (19). He is the one ring that rules them on the technical front over at Virtual Computer.
Peter Marconi (20) their Global VP of Engineering of has two decades of experience in the technology space with an impressive array of companies which he either co-founded or led and we really cannot list all of Peter's (21) and the rest of the management teams wide-ranging achievements in this review because it would become ridiculously long and we would leave ourselves open to the charge that we found this management team very sexy indeed.
We are huge fans of the people we became familiar with throughout the course of our review process over at Virtual Computer, especially their VP of Global Sales, Mr Sandrijn Stead (22) who is probably almost single-handedly responsible for driving Virtual Computers technologies into the real-world desktop environments of large-scale enterprise deployments globally.
Sandrijn Stead has a reputation of being a master-strategist and just to be sure of this, we actually made him sit through a personality test which correctly identified his personality trait as "Field-Marshall" (23).
Bill Gates was a Field-Marshall too, as was Napoleon Bonaparte, Margaret Thatcher and Hilary Clinton (24) which is a little worrying when you think about it. Don't mess with Desktop Field-Marshall Stead, his personality type is rare.
More than anything we like Sandrijn Stead because he likes dogs and we have dogs in our office when we write our reviews and why wouldn't we ? In our minds any man who loves dogs is a good man. Sandrijn Stead founded the Stead Animal Rescue Trust (24), is friends with the Himalaya Rescue Dog Squad Nepal team (25) and is definitely what you would call a doggy person. We would know because we are proper doggy people too.
In case you happen to be reading this review and wondering why we have digressed into dogs, get used to it this is how we roll, we also play video games on our virtual desktops a lot too, sometimes with our dogs. We like dogs and we like to promote doggy people.
God help your company if we happen to review you and you have cats in your office, we cannot guarantee that we would be impartial and independent although in principal we have nothing against cats or their owners. Its a tribal thing and we are all smiling as one of us writes this, there are three people collaborating on this review in real-time.
We go on and on about how good Virtual Computer are, but you have to appreciate that we were given unprecedented, never-before access to their company, their technologies and their thinking. Throughout the course of our review process, we spent time with their global sales teams discussing huge desktop pilots they are engaged in. We spoke to Eric Shoemaker the Director of USA Sales , Colin Lim the Director of Sales Asia pacific, Stuart Quinsey the Director of Sales EMEA and of course Field-Marshall Stead.
That's an awful lot of salesmen when you think about it but what we found really refreshing is that they are actually selling something that they are proud of and intimate with. Our only criticism of Virtual Computers global sales teams is there do not seem to be any Females in the upper-levels of sales management which we did not like, especially considering that some of the finest salespeople in the world are females and also that Field-Marshall Stead shares the same personality-type as Margaret Thatcher and Hilary Clinton.
Anything the sales guys told us was tempered by solid technical desktop superheroes starting with Richard Cassidy who we liked a lot. We spent a lot more time with Virtual Computer's global engineering team which is solid like a rock in desktop people terms. They have a dream team of global virtual desktop superhero engineers starting with Tom Reed in the USA , Martin Kyprianides in EMEA and Andrew Bycroft in ASIA (again, where are the girls?).
We do not pull punches in our reviews and the issue had to be raised. In short our message is that you and everyone else in the space give more females access to the upper-reaches of our space over the long term. Don't think about it, just do it and they will not let you down. That's a desktop superhero promise.
We would be doing Virtual Computers team a grave injustice if we did not mention the countless technical and sales support team members scattered around the four corners of the earth who dealt with the 15 odd other people who took part in this review scattered around the world and who called Virtual Computers local telephone number asking for support at funny hours because they were being stupid.
We got unprecedented access on a global-scale and a complete snapshot of their entire client engagements, that's how confident these guys are in their virtual desktop technology and proud they are of their Fortune 500 type clients. They were excited as hell to let us into their company to review their technologies which is exactly what you would expect from a world-class global technology provider with a serious amount of clients.
Together these guys represent one of the finest, most talented, well financed and most powerful teams we have come across yet in the virtual desktop space and we are seriously impressed with Virtual Computer's NxTop virtual desktop and desktop infrastructure technology.
We know a world beating technology when we see one and we would know, we are real virtual desktop people talking to some of the biggest companies and players in our space about exactly this kind of thing.
That's probably the best company introduction you are ever likely to see on this review site for a long, long time unless we come across some kind of über-advanced virtual desktop technology from the future that takes Virtual Computers title as Virtual Desktop Review's "Best Virtual Desktop Technology of 2009-2010".
They don't get to have that title because they paid us for it, they don't get it because they were really nice to us, they don't get it because we think we know about virtual desktops here at Virtual Desktop Review.
Virtual Computer get the title because 'WE', the many desktop people who write this review are serious virtual desktop people who know about virtual desktop tech and deployments in the real world and also because Virtual Computer is a company that is genuinely changing the global landscape of the corporate, enterprise and SME market in a big way. Virtual Computer are serious desktop super heroes seeking to redress the 'balance of the force' in the virtual desktop space and we applaud their efforts.
In fact we celebrate their efforts and cheer them on as they as a team march forward with pride into the destiny they created for themselves out of nothing but their thinking, the sexiest management team on earth, Sandrijn Stead's Field-Marshalling, solid desktop Jedi techies and a multi-lingual and very global team of very special desktop people, all trained and accredited on the NxTop virtual desktop infrastructure. Awesome.
If Virtual Computer were a girl called Genevieve or a boy called Moses, some members of our review team would marry Virtual Computer without hesitation or stopping to ask what their mother thinks. VC are that sexy.
What is a client-side virtual desktop ?
But why are they so sexy ? That will be because of their wonderful virtual desktops and their magical desktop infrastructure.
NxTop, is magic.
Remember that to the untrained mind, any significantly advanced high-technology appears to work by magic.
Before we go on to explain exactly what NxTop is, its best to provide a little background on the technology and this is where it can get confusing so bear with us. The virtual desktop technologies in our space can be very roughly and with strong resistence from their owners, be thrown into two categories from the end user perspective.
Client-Side Virtual Desktops and Server-Side Virtual Desktops. Simple.
Simply put, if your virtual desktop is delivered/streamed/presented to you from a remote server over the internet it is a 'server-side' virtual desktop.
A good example of a server-side virtual desktop would be ThinkGrid's hosted virtual desktop offering. You rent the very latest virtual desktop from Thinkgrid and they pre-install it with the applications you need and push it down to you wherever you are. Your desktop in this instance 'lives' on the central server. You can trust ThinkGrid to monitor, back-up, manage and store that desktop on their central server infrastructure, which is perfect for a lot of desktop users who are constantly connected to the internet.
But what if you are not connected to the internet a lot of the time ? Forget 3G the service is too patchy. Forget wi-fi it is not yet everywhere as the more mobile amongst us already know. A server-side virtual desktop is not resident on your local machine.
What if you need constant and critical access to your desktop regardless of the network conditions ? You need a Client-Side Virtual Desktop and this is where NxTop comes in.
Technically speaking NxTop is a type-1, bare-metal client-side hypervisor and the first one of its kind in production with real desktop users working on it. You do not really need to understand what a hypervisor is unless you have a deep interest in a vibrant community of desktop and server professionals who constantly argue amongst themselves and the patience to make sense of what they are saying.
If you want to learn a little more about hypervisors and the different types without feeling like you are losing your mind, please visit our parent website, which is a community-driven project and the virtual desktop sectors first client-facing source of information on our technologies aimed at newcomers to our space. The Virtual Desktop Forum.
If you are spanish, we also maintain the Spanish speaking worlds only source of information, news and explanations of these technologies in native Spanish. El Foro de Escritorios Virtuales just in case you were wondering what virtual desktop was in Spanish.
You don't really need to know about hypervisors because its incredibly boring and who cares as long as they work ? But in case you do insist, In the case of a client-side virtual desktop, the hypervisor is a piece of software that allows you to run multiple virtual desktops on the same machine, side-by-side. This means you can have multiple but completely separate virtual desktops on the same laptop or PC and you can hotkey between them using them at the same time.
When we talk about client-side virtual desktops the best way to describe this technology is to describe a use case.
Company | The largest national provider of Financial Services in a major Western Country.
This company had a huge problem. They have 250+ guys running around with powerful laptops containing highly sensitive information and a further 1500 people working on high-end desktop PC's in offices scattered around the world. If you are in charge of the management, security and administration of those desktops, this basically means that no matter how well you do your job, at some point you are going to get into big trouble.
If a sophisticated team of intelligent criminal hackers decide they want the data on those desktops then they are looking at an organization with multiple vulnerabilities in that each and every one of those 'traditional' desktops is not virtual, is anchored to the underlying hardware and worse, represents one weak link for potential attackers to attack which then gives them access to the rest of the desktop network. If hackers don't get your desktops, script kiddies running botnets and pushing out trojans in email or through compromised websites would. Those desktops are ultimately highly vulnerable because the users consider the desktops to be their own thing and quite rightly too.
Desktop users are the people who have to go to work every day and actually use the desktops, actually run applications on the the desktops in a million different ways. They want to install their own programs, communicate with their friends by email and surf the net when they aren't working. If you stop desktop users from being able to do this they revolt, but if on the other hand you weaken IT central's grip on the desktops then you have problems.
How do we deal with this issue ? The answer is a No-Compromise Solution. The desktop user does not have to compromise, they can treat the machine as if it were their own and IT central do not have to compromise because they have all of their desktop users on highly locked down corporate desktops. In case you wondering, we know that last statement doesn't make much sense unless we put it into context.
A no-compromise solution would be to run TWO completely separate virtual desktops, side-by-side on the same laptop. One desktop running Windows XP Professional 64bit and the second running Windows 7 with all of the bells and whistles. The XP desktop is the 'corporate' virtual desktop, its a locked down, no admin access, no user rights, restricted web-browsing and e-communication and HORRIBLE to use for anything other than work in short bursts.
Then you have the Windows 7 Home Premium virtual desktop running right alongside the XP desktop which can be reached by using a 'hot key' so you can flip between the two virtual desktops in an instant and use them as if they were both running natively on your machine. The Windows 7 desktop is the 'personal' desktop where the user can do whatever they like on it.
This is a no-compromise solution, everybody in the equation gets what they want and even better, it doesn't matter if the user breaks their personal desktop because of viruses, trojans, botnets or hackers because their second 'corporate' virtual desktop always loads, always works and will never be affected by whatever goes down on the 'personal' Windows 7 desktop. Magic.
When we say no-compromise we meant perfect. Multiple instances of completely separate virtual desktops running 'native' and side by side on the same machine. Magic.
So in pilot at the company, 50 mobile desktop users were pulled out of circulation and given new laptops running client-side virtual desktops together side-by-side on the same machine. Instantly all of the users were happy because they had been using horrible locked down corporate desktops that they could not do anything personal on at all. All of a sudden they are given a new machine on which they can play to their hearts content. Magic.
And off they skipped like happy children with new toys, the happiest corporate desktop users that you ever saw in your life. As they left the building a line of IT central support desk staff and management waved a hearty goodbye to the desktop users with real emotion because the chances that they would ever have to see those desktop users again had just shrunk to practically zero. Magic.
Now at this company if one of their people out in the field has problems, IT central can just pull the virtual desktop out of the machine, fix it and push it back down the pipe out of the cloud and onto the laptop fully-repaired. Even better IT central have taken responsibility for the constant back-up of the 'corporate' virtual desktops completely out of the hands of the desktop user which is wonderful really because even technical professionals forget to back up their efforts a lot of the time. Whenever the desktop user is connected to the desktop, NxTop drip feeds a steady stream of back-ups to the cloud server consuming very little bandwidth and processing power in doing so. Magic.
Say for example that IT central decide that they need to update/patch or install new applications on every single one of those machines, they do not have to call the laptops or the users back into base, they just push the updates/patches and installs down onto the desktops automatically and all at the same time. If a desktop is acting strangely, it can be sucked back up into the cloud, fixed and then pushed back down to the desktop user out of the cloud all fresh and ready to go. Magic.
All of this makes life for IT central very easy indeed, I mean can you imagine going back to the old days when you had to run around offices with installation CD's and floppy disks ? It sounds like one of the levels in Dante's inferno.
You know effectively have complete control over your mobile desktop workforce, dramatically increased their productivity, tightened up your corporate desktop acreage and given the users exactly what they wanted in doing so and I think we can now begin to understand the power of client-side virtual desktops. Client-Side Virtual desktops are desktops that 'live' on your local PC or laptop and are resident to that machine. You don't need a decent internet connection to use client-side virtual desktops.
But what about data security ?
The short answer is that your business data has never been safer. There are levels of security inherent and operating at the lowest levels of the machine. We talked earlier on about hypervisors, NxTop is a hypervisor that lets you mount multiple virtual desktops, side by side and on the same machine. Think of the hypervisor as "the operating system" because in a way it actually is the operating system in that it is the lowest level piece of software operating on the machine.
NxTop secures your data with varying levels of security. The hypervisor works in tandem with the Intel's Trusted Execution Technology which simply provides hardware-based mechanisms that help protect against software-based attacks and protects the confidentiality and integrity of data stored on the machines virtual desktops. NxTop will not even run, let alone 'mount' your virtual desktops if it doesn't get the right fingerprint swipe or RFID chip in close proximity to the physical machine. That's ignoring the fact that most people with the confines of the technology world (a huge umbrella) do not even know what a hypervisor is let alone hot to attack one.
Corporate bad ass next-generation security tech. Nice, we want it.
So whoever steals the laptop or desktop machine can not only get NxTop working, they will also not be able to pull your highly encrypted virtual desktops out of the machine. We were going to say Magic again, but it gets better by venturing into the realms of James Bond type tech in that you can set it up so that the desktops self-destruct at a certain time of the day unless they 'report' back to Q in the underground NOC
Alternatively, Q can quite simply send a kill-pill down to a machine anytime he likes which initiates a self-destruct sequence, which first digitally shreds your encrypted virtual desktops and then proceeds to destroy itself. Kill-Pill Magic.
NOW. Virtual Computer vigorously denied what we are about to say. This is not an authorized part of the review and we have not laid eyes on anything like we are about to describe in any way shape or form. At no point did any member of Virtual Computers team suggest to us that what we are about to describe exists, ever has existed or is ever likely to exist. We haven't heard any rumors either to this effect, in fact it would be safe to say what we are telling you is a fairytale which is fine in the right context.
We have strong reasons, based on nothing but pure speculation, to believe that Virtual Computer are working with the intelligence agencies (probably the CIA and MI5) to release a James Bond version of their virtual desktop magic which actually detonates a small concealed ribbon of C4 plastic explosive upon receipt of a kill-pill and really does self-destruct the actual machine completely. How cool would that be ?
They MUST be working on James Bond versions of NxTop in some underground and highly-secure NOC detonating high-explosives contained within laptops and PC's in controlled environments for R&D purposes, they MUST be.
We here at Virtual Desktop Review urge Virtual Computer to immediately licence a sweet high-end gamers laptop with the James Bond people to make it an official James Bond virtual desktop machine, embed it with C4 for real kill-pill action and send us five of the machines over so that we can test them and review the kill-pill effect in HD video for our website visitors.
If the laptop is lost and/or self destructs, remember that there is an exact 'snapshot' back-up of the 'lost' virtual desktop back at IT central. Tell them your machine blew up and have them slap your previous virtual desktop image back onto a shiny new laptop and Fed-ex you the machine containing the exact same virtual desktops as the old one. Or walk into a store, buy a laptop of your choice, download and install NxTop and then phone home to have them push your virtual desktop back-ups to you out of the cloud. No data lost, everybody happy. Magic.
That in a nutshell is what client-side virtual desktops are about. Simply put the NxTop client-side virtual desktop solution allows you to manage an extremely large amount of desktops centrally in a highly-effective way, whilst at the same time completely securing your data in every conceivable manner, in order to mitigate against the problems that can occur when you have large quantities of desktops 'out in the wild'.
There is a huge added bonus in that you don't have to upset any of your desktop users either, you give them everything that they want and put the 'personal' back into computing. If you do that for 10,000 desktops spread across a global organizations desktop acreage, if you successfully steered that project through from the initial assessment to actual deployment across all 10,000 desktops then you would be crowned king by the users of your organization and your colleagues would begin call you a desktop superhero. Magic.
Virtual Computer and their partners Dell and Lenovo are wrapped up in some very large-scale deployments indeed, this is not a technology just for mobile workers. Think 40,000 desktop global deployments and you will begin to glimpse the power of NxTop and its potential. Magic.
Desktop users rejoice ! Virtual Computer are giving you exactly what you want ! One desktop for banking, paypal, important stuff and another for everything else which you can blow up to your hearts content and then rewind back to the last point it was working on demand. Did we say this was magic ?
Virtual Computer have showed the world how to realize the dream of client-side virtual desktop computing and Dell and Lenovo support them in their project. You wouldn't want any other partners really, these guys are beginning to dominate the global client-side virtual desktop market before their competitors even got out of bed. Microsoft may have just decided that they want to get in on the virtual desktop market, but the big boys over at Virtual Computer are already in the space before anybody and they brought Dell and Lenovo to the party too.
Virtual Computer are already beavering away making their second gen version better and they have more than a years head-start on their competition, have already released their alpha 2.x version, and have the finest client-side talent in the world on their team.
Virtual Computer are not about fairy-tales in any way, shape or form. They do not run around the world hyping up the cloud and shouting about desktop virtualization, virtual desktops, VDI, DVI, their competitors or their clients, instead they work with the quiet, proud, dignity of people with a definite purpose and who are realizing their potential. Field-Marshall Stead keeps his troops focused.
Their people just work diligently through the night all round the planet, on five different continents, chasing the sun and delivering some of the largest desktop deployments we have ever seen in the virtual desktop world in the offices of some of the biggest businesses in their respective countries. Fact, not magic.
Whilst we are on the subject of serious client-side virtual desktop technology, we think its about time we began our review.
Virtual Desktop Review
WE HAVE A GREAT VIDEO OF US TESTING HIGH-END HD VIDEO AND HD COMPUTER GAMES ON NXTOP DESKTOPS THAT WE CAN USE AND WE HAVE LOTS OF IDEAS GLEANED FROM OUR TECHNICAL TRAINING ABOUT THE ACTUAL TECH REVIEW. WE ARE TRYING TO WORK OUT THE BEST WAY TO DESCRIBE TECH TO NEWCOMERS TO OUR SPACE IN A WAY THEY WILL UNDERSTAND AND RELATE TO.
Virtual Desktop Management Suite Review
WE HAVE A GREAT VIDEO OF US MANAGING LOTS OF DIFFERENT VIRTUAL DESKTOPS THAT WE CAN USE AND WE HAVE LOTS OF IDEAS GLEANED FROM OUR TECHNICAL TRAINING ABOUT THE ACTUAL TECH REVIEW. WE ARE TRYING TO WORK OUT THE BEST WAY TO DESCRIBE TECH TO NEWCOMERS TO OUR SPACE IN A WAY THEY WILL UNDERSTAND AND RELATE TO.
References
Herein Virtual Computer Inc. will be referred to as 'VC'.
(1) Virtual Desktop Forum | The type-1 client-side bare-metal hypervisor explained
(2) VC Competitors | VMware : http://www.vmware.com/
(3) VC Competitors | Citrix : http://www.citrix.com/lang/English/home.asp
(4) VC Origins | Virtual Computer Inc. : http://www.virtualcomputer.com/About+us
(5) VC Technology | NxTop : http://www.virtualcomputer.com/Products+page
(6) Open-Sorce Virtualization | Xen.org : http://www.xen.org/
(7) VC Origins | VC Investors : http://www.virtualcomputer.com/About/investors
(8) Linkedin Profile | Ian Pratt | Chairman of Xen.org : http://uk.linkedin.com/in/ianpratt
(9) VC Competitor | Citrix | Project Independence : http://community.citrix.com/pages/viewp ... d=63177816
(10) VC Competitor | Neocleus : http://www.neocleus.com/
(11) VC Partners | http://www.virtualcomputer.com/Partners
(12) VC Partners | Dell : http://www.dell.com/
(13) VC Partners | Lenovo : http://www.lenovo.com/
(14) VC Investors | Citrix, Flybridge, Highland : http://www.virtualcomputer.com/About/investors
(15) VC Management | Linkedin Profile | Dan McCall : http://www.linkedin.com/in/danmccall
(16) VC Management | Dan McCall | President & CEO of Virtual Computer Inc. : http://www.virtualcomputer.com/About/dan-mccall
(17) VC Management | Linkedin Profile | Alex Vasilevsky : http://www.linkedin.com/in/alexvasilevsky
(18) VC Origins | Virtual Iron : http://www.oracle.com/virtualiron/index.html
(19) VC Management | Alex Vasilevsky | CTO of Virtual Computer Inc. : http://www.virtualcomputer.com/About/alex-vasilevsky
(20) VC Management | Linkedin Profile | Peter Marconi : http://www.linkedin.com/in/petermarconi
(21) VC Management | Peter Marconi | Global VP of Engineering : http://www.virtualcomputer.com/About/peter-marconi
(22) VC Management | Sanrijn Stead | Global VP of Sales : http://www.virtualcomputer.com/About/sandrijn-stead
(23) Personality Type | Sandrijn Stead | Field Marshall : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fieldmarshal_(role_variant)
(24) Animal Charity | Stead Animal Rescue Trust : (website being designed) http://www.ssar.co.uk/
(25) Animal Charity | Himalaya Rescue Dog Squad Nepal : http://www.hrdsnrescue.org.np/
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