The good news is that we had power outlets, so our laptops were not limited to the “five hours” (read: one hour and forty two minutes) of battery time on flights that were otherwise much longer. Barry and I plugged in, powered up and got working.

Throughout the flight, we worked on the presentations, documents, and spreadsheets that we would need for our meetings, and also replied to any mail that had come in before we left. There was no WiFi on these flights, so our Outlook “outbox” queue grew click by click.

We hadn’t thought much of this in-flight experience since it is just standard operating procedure for us at Wanova. Open up laptop, perform work normally, close laptop, take a nap, then rinse and repeat. That’s the standard 14-hour flight procedure, right?

Apparently not! Barry and I were talking to a friend a few weeks after our return and we mentioned that we had just come back from abroad. We were musing about how the gentleman next to Barry kept bumping his arm, snoring, dropping his blanket, and more, while Barry was trying to work on his PowerPoint presentation. Our friend turned to us, chuckled, and said “you guys work on airplanes?”

We inquired a bit more about what he meant, and he explained that his organization had gone “network-centric” a few years back and moved everything (yes, EVERYTHING!) to the data center. His apps, data, and desktop image were all in the data center. He smiled and said, “When I’m on an airplane my laptop is an offline entertainment center, not a work station. I couldn’t work if I wanted to, which is fine by me.”

Barry and I were somewhat astonished that an organization would deploy something that is actually work-inhibiting depending on where you are- but our friend seemed to love it. Personally, I’d rather have the freedom to choose between ‘work or play’ while I’m 30,000 feet in the air. Why wouldn’t businesses afford their employees the same experience?

During the first week of January, I was getting material prepared for our sales kickoff meeting.  I updated five presentations and created two new ones (ironically, one of those presentations was on image repair).

The next morning I had a call with a partner at 6 AM so I was working from home.  After the call concluded I was trying to find some Clip Art to really bring home a point in one of my presentations.  Yes, I know that getting Clip Art from the web can be a little dicey, but I have Kaspersky anti-virus running on my PC, so I’m totally covered, right?

Wrong!  Suddenly, one of those fake Windows Security Center messages popped up and I immediately knew what was happening! Kaspersky sat idly by while the virus inundated my laptop with pop-up messages all over my screen telling me to purchase software to solve the problem that it had created!  I immediately closed all of my open browsers and shut down my PC hoping that the damage had not yet been done. It was too late. I tried booting into safe mode but the virus was alive and well. I tried cleaning it with Kaspersky, but the software would examine a few files and then report all was well. The virus had won this round.

Unfortunately this was not the first go around with this particular virus.  About a year ago, I tried helping a neighbor remove the same virus from his machine and tried four different antivirus programs. None of the four worked, and in the end we had to re-image the entire PC.  I was getting rather nervous that the 10 hours of work that I spent creating and updating my seven glorious presentations the day before would all be in vain.  The thought of having to redo the animations in PowerPoint alone was dreadful enough to make me thirst for a stiff drink.

The virus was still winning, so I called up Ady, who was also at home and told him what happened.  Ady pulled up the Mirage management console, right-clicked on my image, and did a snapshot restore on to my PC from a day prior.  It took about five minutes to determine the differences between the files on the two images (primary one in data center and my local copy).  Downloading the apps and files I needed to get going, followed by a quick reboot only took about 10 minutes. In all, I was up and running in a measly 18 minutes!

Round two goes to Wanova! The virus was gone.  My presentations were all intact — animations and all.  My PC was at home with me.  Ady was at home using the management console.  Mirage took my Windows/core application layer back a day while leaving my user file and user application layers intact. All of this happened without anyone troubleshooting or even looking at my PC.

As we all know, antivirus programs will never catch all viruses — even older viruses that should be in the virus definition file.  For everyone that has ever tried to recover a system from a virus, you know the indescribable relief that I felt at that moment when the system rebooted with no virus and my precious files intact.  Everyone who has experienced this understands how game changing it is to have a tool like Wanova’s Mirage that enables IT to recover a virus-ridden system in minutes without jeopardizing user files!  For everyone who hasn’t yet experienced something like this, that day will unfortunately come, and when it does, we’ll be happy to speak to you!

After being a somewhat reluctant dog food eater for many years, I want to tell you how I now enjoy my dog food.

As I wrote a whitepaper inside a blog on my last post, I figured I would make amends by breaking up this “enjoying your dog food” blog into two different posts… although I cannot guarantee that they will be shorter!

One of the products I had at Citrix was Citrix Receiver. The Windows version would install all the Citrix clients (we called them plug-ins) that a user would need and provide one user experience across all clients. Many of us would blow away a PC once a week and start from scratch so that we could make sure that we were providing the best experience possible across all Citrix plug-ins. Of course, we still had to install our own applications, load our files, and re-personalize that machine every week. We even talked about creating a Citrix plug-in that would do all of this for you.

Let’s fast forward to my first week here at Wanova. My Dell laptop was late in arriving, so IT provided me with a HP loaner to serve in its place. It was one of those laptops where the palm of your hand hit the touch pad whenever you typed, which made me type all over the place. As I was used to personalizing PCs frequently, I soon had that HP loaner with the frustrating touch pad completely tricked out even down to the drivers for my Microsoft HD webcam.

My Dell laptop arrived exactly one week later. I flashed back to my Receiver days and prepared to re-load all of my applications, drivers, and files as well as re-personalize the PC. Pleasantly surprised would be a complete understatement of how I felt when I logged in to my new Dell and found it to be a complete clone of the image on my HP loaner, down to the last document that I created. While this is an example of what would happen in a PC refresh cycle, I also knew this would be the same experience if my Dell laptop was ever damaged. The best part of this experience was not worrying about interacting with the Wanova client on my HP loaner, as it was running in the background making it feel like I was working with a regular laptop.

Even though I knew our product could do this in theory, it was a complete eye-opening experience seeing it happen in person. All at once, our dog food became really tasty. And if you tune in next week you can see how the dog food went from being really tasty to downright gourmet!

For anyone uninitiated to the joys of high tech marketing, a paying customer who is willing to talk to the media is more valuable than, well, just about anything else.

Anyway, all employees at Mellanox have laptops, and many are distributed around the world in various offices, creating an ongoing management challenge for IT. What they liked about Mirage was its ability to work optimally in their distributed environment, giving them centralized image management, and full desktop backup and restore - even across a WAN. Their helpdesk can now address end user problems far more quickly, allowing Mellanox to support their rapidly growing employee base without adding more IT staff. And end users are happier and more productive.

Happy customer. Happy me. Happy Friday!

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!

So I picked up one of the freeware tools and ran it on my work laptop (yes, sleep deprivation probably had something to do with the questionable logic of this decision). I ran the tool to create the most damage possible — letting it delete over 600 different registry keys ranging from file type associations to ActiveX and COM classes it deemed unusable. The system was still up after that, but many applications had serious issues: some crashed, some gave errors, and some simply wouldn’t launch at all. Internet Explorer had problems opening pages, and Flash froze often.

If I had to call a helpdesk to try to fix these problems, it could take hours or days to troubleshoot the issues. However, all our systems are Wanova Mirage-managed, so I put on my ‘Admin’ hat. With a few mouse clicks on the Mirage Management Console, I initiated an ‘Enforce Base Image’ command. A few minutes later, I was able to reboot my PC back to its fully functional state, without losing any of my data or user installed applications. And all this was accomplished via a Mirage server that was thousands of miles away from my crippled laptop.

Mirage’s image management, combined with its unique desktop streaming capabilities over the WAN, solved hundreds of issues in minutes.  I didn’t have to touch anything on the laptop and didn’t spend any time troubleshooting. Think about the number of hours helpdesk employees spend trying (often unsuccessfully) to troubleshoot PC problems. How much could your organization stand to benefit by reducing helpdesk costs, improving support SLAs, and keeping end users productive?

Quick tutorial for those of you not familiar with Mirage: Mirage centralizes the complete contents of your desktop into the data center (including data, files, personalization settings, and any applications you’ve installed.) This is combined with an IT-managed Base Image, which includes the Windows OS and core applications like MS Office. We call this combination of ‘layers’ a Centralized Virtual Desktop, or CVD.

The CVD is a fully-bootable image and is hardware agnostic. To give me remote access, our admin simply provisioned a virtual machine in the data center, and assigned my CVD to it.

So, while I was sitting on the lanai, sipping a Mai Tai, I was able to securely access my full desktop through our VPN from my Mac using Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection. When I returned to the office, my desktop was moved back onto my laptop hardware — complete with all the changes I made while working remotely. Further, I now had an updated corporate image, yet all of my apps (like Photoshop and Illustrator) and personalization were still there. I was back to normal, with only a slight sunburn to show for my travels. All hail the flex desktop!

Whether the acquisition is small or record-setting, the task of assimilating the PCs of the new employees to meet the acquiring company’s standards is critical. The faster this happens, the faster people become productive.

What if there was a way to centrally and easily install an IT-approved OS version and applications on the PCs of the company being acquired, including for remote and mobile employees, without causing them to lose their other applications, data and personalization?

Here’s the scenario:

Company A acquires company B. Company B has thousands of laptops with various versions of Windows XP, plus the usual glut of office apps , user-installed apps and data.   The desktop managers at Company A sigh, and wonder how many weekends they will spend bringing all those devices into compliance with their corporate standards. Then, they consider using Wanova.

With Wanova Mirage, the desktop managers can quickly and efficiently transfer the user data, applications and personalization over the WAN to the data center, where IT can augment the transferred data with a Base Image (BI), comprised of the approved OS and corporate applications. When the BI is combined with the endpoint data, we call this a Centralized Virtual Desktop (CVD). A CVD is maintained for each user, but the BI may be the same across many users. This allows IT to patch or update a single BI, and automatically propagate changes to an entire set of CVDs.

IT can now begin ongoing synchronization, where the BI data is moved to the endpoint, (without removing user personalization) and any changes the user makes are efficiently and optimally transferred back to the datacenter.

Centralized management, single image updates that retain personalization, full data protection, fast troubleshooting and restores — optimized for remote and mobile users. That’s what we do at Wanova.

A different customer loaded a remote user’s CVD from a laptop to a Virtual Machine (VM) running in the data center in order to troubleshoot a problem locally. Within two hours, the customer was able to fix the user’s issue and re-assign the corrected CVD to the end user’s laptop. After resolving the issue, the customer commented, “This process usually requires that we send someone onsite, and it can take days to resolve a problem like this for a remote user. Mirage is going to save us a ton of time and money by centralizing many of our support processes.”

Another customer (yep – we have a lot of beta sites) had a desktop corrupted beyond repair; the system was non-responsive, and Office applications were not functioning. Normally, the only (very painful!) way to recover from such state would have been to re-image the desktop with a clean corporate image, then have the user re-install all of her user-installed applications, re-configure her settings, and backup and restore all of her files before and after the re-imaging, respectively. Moreover, for remote users the shipping of the new image over the WAN is a big challenge in its own right, and often requires an image-server infrastructure from which the desktop can PXE-boot.

Using Wanova, the IT administrator simply invoked a “Reinforce Base Image” operation, which applied a clean base image on the endpoint that corrected the system and all corporate applications, while preserving her personalized applications and user-data. The user’s system was up and running with a clean OS and a fully operational Office suite within an hour. Our customer’s initial reaction was “Wow.” Then, after a (we think, stunned and amazed) pause, he said, “It usually takes a week for a user to get back to a full working environment – my users hate this. And the best thing, I can apply this same magic both to my local and remote employees. This is awesome!”

Finally, another customer had a dead laptop. Rather than sending the laptop back and having the user down for several days, IT simply migrated the user’s CVD to a new laptop (different hardware, incidentally) using the correct base image for the new hardware. Further, all user data, personalization and locally installed applications were also installed. Because Wanova first downloads the minimal working set, the user was up and running again in 20 minutes. Any missing data was streamed in the background. After seeing this process, the customer said, “This is a game-changer. We just took a process that is extremely painful and time-consuming – both for us and and for the end-user — and completed it in minutes!”

So a valid question to ask is — What is the applicability of Wanova in the enterprise ?

The following 4 points answer this question by summarizing the breadth and depth of our coverage in the enterprise and demonstrating its wide applicability.

1. Wanova optimizes the user experience for mobile (laptop) and remote employees. In 2010, laptop users will outgrow fixed desktop users in the enterprise. As we all know, most laptop users, when given the freedom of mobility, will end up working from multiple locations, including office, home, and their favorite Starbucks, as well as offline. So supporting “offline and remote users” really covers the majority of enterprise users today!

2. Wanova supports both fixed endpoints and VMs. Nothing in the Wanova architecture limits its use to laptops. In fact, one of the main advantages of Wanova is that it provides a uniform solution that covers fixed, mobile, virtual, and physical endpoints. Some customers have even asked us about supporting their servers. While this is currently not the focus of our development, our architecture does not limit this use case.

3. In addition to broad user coverage, Wanova provides depth of capabilities that further expand its applicability in the enterprise. Specifically, in addition to efficient single image management, Wanova’s protection capabilities allow centralized backup and fast restore, eliminating the need for client backups and ensuring remote/mobile employees are up and running in minutes on a new hardware. Wanova also provides support capabilities, such as centralized troubleshooting and fast re-imaging, allowing support engineers to quickly address user problems.

4. Finally, Wanova is complementary and synergistic with traditional server-hosted solutions. Specifically, the Wanova Centralized Virtual Desktop (CVD) can be re-assigned, within minutes, to execute on a VM in the data-center, and then accessed by a thin client protocol. This gives users the flexibility to determine dynamically whether they want to run their CVD on the endpoint cache, or on a central VM. For example, if a user loses her laptop, she can reassign her personal CVD onto a VM in the data center and access it remotely using a thin client protocol until a new hardware is provided to her. She can then reassign the same CVD to the new hardware, while all the updates she has made during this period will be automatically synchronized to the new hardware within minutes.

For more details on the “how” see our product section in http://wanova.com/pages/wanova-products.html