Ah, the challenges of marketing in tech.

Anyway, Brian asked a lot of great questions and provided some good insights as Ady gave him a great deep dive into Wanova Mirage distributed desktop virtualization software. Highlights include a tour of the management interface, and a full restore of a complete desktop to new (and different) laptop hardware, complete with all user-installed apps and data. Oh, and did I mention the Mirage server is located in Israel?

Enjoy! http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/videos/archive/2010/06/07/video-demo-of-wanova-s-offline-laptop-disk-management-thing-it-s-really-cool.aspx

Wanova Mirage leverages a global single instance store across all users of the system. Consequently, Mirage can deduplicate both user data and user-installed applications, as well as the OS and applications included in the Base Image.

Let’s consider a fairly conservative example: An organization has 1000 engineering end users. The Base Image for their systems is about 12 GB in size, and includes Microsoft Windows XP, Office, Outlook, Norton Antivirus, corporate agents and IT utilities. 500 of the engineers use the company’s software catalogue and install Visual Studio (2 GB). 100 users also install Visio (1.5 GB), and 50 users install Microsoft Project 2010 (2 GB). Using Mirage, the data comprised in the Base Image can be reduced from 11.7 terabytes to 12 gigabytes. Further, Mirage’s deduplication of the user- installed applications will reduce the storage requirement for this data from 1.2 terabytes to 5.5 gigabytes. Mirage will also deduplicate user files, which on average have about 30% redundancy, depending on the organization.

This indexing scheme results in a massive reduction in the amount of data that must be stored. The deduplication happens automatically — Mirage doesn’t require an administrator to do anything special in order to realize the savings. And what’s interesting is that the larger your deployment, the more efficient it gets.

In looking at the TCO of any desktop virtualization solution for a distributed organization, it’s important to consider how the system addresses all aspects of the infrastructure: endpoints, the WAN, LAN, servers, storage network, and of course, back end storage. At Wanova, we have invested — and will continue to invest –  in all of these areas to create a solution that is optimized for the way global enterprises need to work.

In fact, the challenge is so daunting for some that they have thrown up their hands and postponed their migration plans until a clearer solution emerges.

This week, we’re opening our beta program for Wanova Mirage 1.5, which adds support for Windows 7 endpoints. In addition, we are thrilled to provide a sneak preview into some technology from Wanova that will significantly ease the XP -> Win7 migration.

So that we’re all on the same page, the basic premise of Wanova Mirage is that it separates the PC into layers: an IT-managed Base Image (OS and core apps), a layer for user-installed applications and machine data, and a layer for user data and settings. These three layers (we call this a Centralized Virtual Desktop, or CVD) are stored in the data center, though we maintain a copy in a cache on the endpoint for local access and execution.

Now, CVDs are hardware agnostic, so one can imagine the following scenario:

An end user (let’s call him Spud), has a laptop running Windows XP. He’s an engineer, and he’s got years of his work stored on his PC: pictures of his kids, a hundred bookmarks in Firefox, Microsoft Project, Skype, and gigabytes of files. Furthermore, Spud is remote from headquarters and from IT, and has no access to nearby corporate images. His IT admin is trying to figure out how to get him (and thousands of his peers spread across the world), upgraded to Windows 7.

Fortunately, the company recently acquired Wanova Mirage. Spud’s CVD – and those of his colleagues – are already stored in the data center with a Base Image for their XP machines. With the click of a mouse, the Administrator introduces a new Base Image, which includes Windows 7 and IT-managed applications like Office, into each CVD. When Spud connects to the data center, the new CVD begins synchronizing with his PC. Because this transfer happens in the background, Spud can keep working, hopping on and off the network until the new Base Image is resident in his laptop cache.

Then, Spud is directed to reboot. Mirage instantly takes a snapshot of his XP desktop in the data center, storing the complete, bootable instance as a backup to make sure the current state is fully recoverable. Then, Mirage does its magic, transparently switching the operating systems. When Spud’s PC comes up, he will now be running Windows 7, with complete access to all his files, preferences, and machine state, so he can quickly reconnect to the domain without further configuration.

While Mirage will automatically provision applications contained in the Base Image, user-installed applications will need to be reloaded. Note: this is only true for XP -> Win 7 migration. In all other cases, such as moving a user from an old PC to a new one, or updating an OS service pack, Mirage will automatically preserve user-installed applications, as well as personalization.

So — all these benefits can be realized with a solution that doesn’t require a forklift infrastructure upgrade, or a complicated image distribution network, and it works well for WAN-connected users who are remote and mobile. Customers are telling us this capability will be tremendously useful. What do you think?

Storage Performance Requirements with VDI
There are some slick demos out there these days that demonstrate how much better user experience can be for rich media applications over VDI. But what you don’t see is the price tag associated with the storage and server infrastructure required to support this kind of performance. Here are some things to consider:

• As Ruben points out, because VDI requires a synchronous connection with storage, the quality of the storage network is going to have a direct impact on the quality of the user experience. High capacity, high performance drives = big $$$.
• A good storage network isn’t enough. With VDI, user data is stored separately than the base operating system and applications, so you’ll need some beefy servers to prevent lags there.
• The actual storage network can become the bottleneck in larger deployments, so you should make sure the SAN and Fibre Channel infrastructure can handle the traffic. For a 1000-user deployment, you’re going to need 20-40 Gbit of network connectivity to storage, with multiplexing and other costly features.

Yikes. No wonder the storage companies are excited about VDI.

Storage Performance Requirements with Wanova
With Wanova, you can get the same centralized management and data protection, but at a dramatically lower cost. Each endpoint runs a cache of the centralized desktop, leveraging local (and cheap) compute power and storage. Consequently, we don’t need an expensive server farm to handle execution. Plus, you get great side benefits,  such as the ability to work offline. Since our architecture is distributed and asynchronous, we don’t need Tier 1 storage — you can use Tier 2 or Nearline storage that is 1/5 the cost.

To summarize just some of the methods Wanova uses to ease storage requirements:

• Wanova leverages the cheap endpoint disk for executing the Windows and application workloads locally. Storage cost for workload execution on the client is $0.2/GB vs. $5/GB on the server side in VDI. And that’s excluding server side networking, NAS/SAN equipment, etc.
• With Wanova, the endpoint acts as a ‘shock-absorber’ to dampen any IO bursts and load during execution, for example, filtering page file access, temporary file access, log and repeated file read/writes, etc. This reduces the load on the Wanova Mirage server to handling only persistent changes on the desktops. So, with Wanova, the server and storage subsystem must only be sufficient to handle the averaged and deduped volume of changes.  It is interesting to see Daniel Feller’s comment to Ruben’s article, highlighting the issues with sizing a VDI deployment using average IOPS. These issues do not exist with Wanova.
• Another interesting fact raised in Ruben’s article is that with VDI, the typical IO workload is write heavy, with ratios mentioned in the order of 80:20 writes to reads. Write throughput is much more expensive than reads in RAID configurations, as Ruben explains. With Wanova, not only is less IO required at the server side, but the write:read ratio is actually reversed, allowing cheaper Nearline storage to be used with fewer, larger capacity disks — further enhancing the cost efficiency of the solution.

We recognize that there are applications where VDI makes great sense. However, for organizations that want to centralize control over their roaming force of laptop users (while still keeping them happy with good performance, personalization, and offline use), Wanova offers a far more cost-effective solution.