In the nicely written article, “’Zero clients’ promise to replace fat clients but have downsides,” Bridget Botelho points out that while Zero clients promise to improve the manageability and reduce cost for IT, they also have some significant disadvantages. Most notably, she refers to user-experience demands that are in direct conflict with this approach. Tim Garland, CIO and director of management information services at the Mississippi State Department of Health is quoted, further highlighting this inherent conflict: “Users want all the bells and whistles of the PCs they are used to, but we don’t want them storing a lot of stuff on hardware drives and turning their thin clients into PCs,” Ragland said during a recent interview. “The whole point of a thin client is to have them store on the server, where we can manage everything.”

This quote exemplifies the dilemma of IT – how to bridge the gap between user experience and cost-effective endpoint management. Furthermore, the challenge of supporting adequate user-experience is far greater when the managed endpoints are mobile laptops, especially those used by knowledge workers or power users. These users are accustomed to rich user-interfaces. They need to execute their advanced applications quickly, and must be able to work offline. Further, they do not want to depend on network latency for every keyboard stroke or mouse click they make.

What if there was a solution that could, as Ragland says, “store [the desktops] on the server, where we can manage everything,” but do this without degrading the user-experience? This is the objective that we challenged ourselves to address when we founded Wanova. Now — 2 years later – this vision is fully realized with the Mirage product.  The key idea is to centralize the desktop contents in their entirety in the data center for total manageability, protection, and support, but turn the endpoints into caching devices that execute the workloads locally. This way, IT has all desktops in the data center, while users get the rich experience they want. What’s more, IT does not need to forklift upgrade their data center infrastructure to centrally host and power these thousands of desktops. With Wanova’s distributed design, only a small fraction of server and storage resources is required. We leverage extensive deduplication to reduce storage requirements, and because the applications execute on the endpoints, the server is used primarily for management. In fact, the same server that could host maybe a few dozen thin clients can support a thousand Wanova-managed endpoints.

So – IT enjoys all the benefits of centralized desktops – central management, backup, continuity, migration, provisioning and support — while end users stay fully productive. Sound too good to be true? Why don’t you try it out for yourself ?