So, I boot up my computer yesterday evening at home. Everything is working fine. Half an hour later, I come back, and realize my 9 month old son (the one with an uncanny ability to find keyboard shortcuts I never knew existed) has been banging away on the keyboard. There are dozens of windows open, and there is clearly something wrong with my video driver. I’m not sure what, exactly, he did, but my computer was almost unusable.

Wanova Mirage to the rescue! I called our IT guy, and – instead of spending a hour trying to remotely troubleshoot my machine – he executed an ‘Enforce Base Image’ from the Mirage console. In a few minutes, my Mirage client notified me that an update was in process. I had dinner, and was then notified to reboot my computer. When my system came up – everything was fixed.

So – what was happening in the background? Mirage centralizes the full contents of my desktop in our data center, synchronizing regularly to ensure my full system is backed up. Further, Mirage separates my desktop into virtual layers, so that IT is able to manage a Base Image (my OS and applications that IT manages for everyone, like Microsoft Office) separately from my user-installed applications and data. Consequently, when I was experiencing a problem that was likely somewhere in the Base Image, our administrator could just ‘Enforce’ the Base Image from the data center. Mirage’s network optimization also came into play during this re-alignment. Instead of having to package and send an entire copy of the OS and applications to my PC, Mirage simply scanned my PC to find the differences between my BI and the one in the data center, compressed those few files, and sent them to my machine. When I rebooted, all the missing or corrupted files had been replaced in my local copy of my desktop.

It’s cool when the technology you market actually works!