IBM Joins Crowded Market With Virtual Desktop Platform

IBM has ensured it found the right in-house technologies and outside partners for its newly launched virtual desktop package.

Big Blue collected all the required ingredients and simmered them with quality assurance testing and best practices for nearly two years. Finally, the Virtual Desktop for Smart Business launched 24 January.

The new, web-based and channel-enabled IBM enterprise desktop package provides anytime/anywhere secure access to personal desktops on any device – PC or Mac, Windows or Linux (SUSE, Ubuntu or Red Hat). It is designed primarily to run on IBM System x mainframes but works equally well on x86 servers, IBM Solution Strategist Antony Satyadas told eWEEK.

Intense Competition

No matter that dozens of other companies are already far ahead of IBM in this sector, including such longtime competitors as Hewlett-Packard, VMware, Wyse, Oracle, and Cisco Systems. Oh, and don’t forget all those brazen newcomers that include Kaviza, nComputing, Wanova, eG Innovations and others.

In the above list, you’ll not see Citrix, one of the world’s largest suppliers of virtual desktop systems. That is because Citrix is one of IBM’s partners on the new product. Nor did we cite Virtual Bridges, which is supplying the management interface. Microsoft is providing the Windows interconnect.

“Yes, we’re always pretty deliberate with the partners we choose when we do any kind of solution,” Satyadas told eWEEK during a demo of the virtual desktop at Big Blue’s Market Street offices. “But that’s why IBM is IBM.”

The IBM Virtual Desktop enables Windows or Linux desktops to be hosted and managed centrally and will work with a range of devices, including tablets, netbooks, laptops, thin clients and servers.  Because this, like most virtual desktops, comprises a separate window on a desktop that can accommodate several windows, it’s not optimal for small smartphone screens.

This Virtual Desktop includes Virtual Bridges’ easy-to-read-and-understand Verde management software console, which can be deployed on a customer’s own data centre or through a channel-created private cloud environment. Citrix provides the secret sauce for the terminal services and legacy application virtualisation.

Latency Improvement

Controls for the virtual desktop are largely pre-configured, although there’s plenty of room for customisation. The VDI [virtual desktop infrastructure] system also features continuous backup and recovery, Satyadas said.

Depending upon pre-configured policies, users of the system can exchange documents back and forth between the business desktop and the local desktop with ease. Latency in the VDI has been improved, Satyadas said, so as barely to be noticeable – especially when performing routine activities, such as checking email, surfing the web, or viewing documents or photos. Heavier workloads still can cause some minor latency issues.

The benefits of a virtual desktop system have long been apparent: faster deployment and undeployment of employee desktops, lower licensing costs, less complexity, automatic software updates and security patches, easier and more efficient policy enforcement, and so on.

IBM’s version is no different from the others in these regards. The two main differentiators, Satyadas said, are the fact that this system can work with Macs, Windows or Linux, and that this is IBM – not a lesser-known entity – that’s backing everything up.

Virtual Desktop for Smart Business, which includes the Verde software from Virtual Bridges, can be deployed on a customer’s own infrastructure or through a business partner private cloud hosted environment.

Another interesting aspect of this is the pricing, which works out to $150 (£95) per seat/per year, per one-year contract. It is designed with the midmarket and SMB customer (500 seats or fewer) in mind, although larger enterprises certainly might become interested.

IBM Virtual Desktop for Smart Business is available now in North America, the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg and Poland, IBM said. The company plans to make the offering available in China, India, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand by March 2011.