Friday, January 27, 2012
Why do Virtual Desktop Integration Deployments Fail?
Today virtualization is a hot topic for IT. Servers have already been very successfully virtualized and now IT pros are moving on to virtualizing desktops. In fact, a recent IDC study showed that 45 percent of CIOs polled indicated that virtualization of the desktop is their number one concern and interest in 2012.
Yet, despite the interest and many attempts at deployment, many VDI rollouts fail due to performance and user experience issues. Why? As organizations move from VDI test and pilot stages to production, they are realizing that the “traditional” approach of treating performance as an afterthought, and addressing it in a reactive fashion, does not scale. Too often, VDI project owners are surprised by performance issues during and after rollout when everything worked just fine during the (often over-provisioned and less complex) pilot.
When VDI performance issues show up, how do you solve them without just throwing more hardware at the problem, killing budgets as well as return on investment (ROI)? When a user calls IT about slow applications, how do you pinpoint the true service performance bottleneck: Is it the network? Profile server? Web? Desktop Virtualization platform? Storage?
Some of these issues can be addressed if we look at the lessons learned from server virtualization. Below are some best practices, insight and predictions for VDI deployment success:
- Systematic VDI Performance Assurance. Rather than relying on slow, manual, ad-hoc remediation of performance problems, systematic performance assurance processes need to be built early into the VDI infrastructure in order to avoid costly issues and re-mediation downstream, and to mitigate the risk of VDI failure during deployment. This is key to getting faster VDI deployment on a larger scale, with great ROI.
- Pre-emptive VDI Performance Management. Silo monitoring tools fail to provide rapid insight into causes of VDI service issues. Companies require 360-degree VDI service visibility with virtualization-aware performance correlation across every layer and every tier ‒ from desktops to applications and from network to storage. They require deep, actionable insights into the true causes of VDI service performance issues to enable administrators to preemptively detect diagnose and fix root-cause issues ‒ even before end users notice.
- Right-Sizing of VDI Resources. Throwing hardware at VDI performance problems only kills budgets and ROI. What’s required are solutions that automatically pinpoint performance bottlenecks, identify excessive users, load intensive applications, and help VDI project owners to right-size the VDI environment and get more return out of VDI investments.
The key to a successful VDI deployment is the ability to automate monitoring and management of the entire VDI service across every tier of the infrastructure stack – from the underlying hardware, network and storage, to the virtualization platform and self service front-end applications. If that end-to-end automated approach is taken, user performance issues can be diagnosed and fixed more rapidly in with fewer resources – even proactively, before users notice.
Srinivas Ramanathan is CEO and founder of eG Innovations. Prior to eG Innovations, he was a senior research scientist at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California. Srinivas has extensive experience in Internet technologies, performance monitoring and management, and multimedia systems. He has co-authored more than forty technical papers and has been a co-inventor of 14 US patents. Srinivas has a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of California, San Diego and a Masters in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, India.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Cross-Platform, Cross-Browser Viewing of Any Document Format
In the second quarter of this year, Arizona-based Informative Graphics Corp. will be releasing its new Brava!® Enterprise HTML client (Brava HTML), which will provide browser-based viewing of virtually any document type. Because the viewer is HTML-based, it is truly zero-footprint, with no plug-ins to install and no other technology, like Flash or Java, required. This also allows all users to have the same experience whether they are on a PC or Mac, using Windows or Linux, or using Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox or Chrome. Since the traditional PC/Windows/Internet Explorer trio is no longer monopolizing the business world, universal support is essential for tools to be relevant and useful in today’s business environments.
The Brava viewer is already available with ActiveX, Java and Flash clients, but the HTML client will open Brava up to a broader audience by enabling increased platform support. The first release will support document viewing, thumbnail navigation and text search with term-hit highlighting, allowing users to find needed documents and data quickly and efficiently. Subsequent releases of Brava HTML will include greater functionality such as markup and collaboration tools and support for mobile, touch-screen devices like tablets. IGC has become well-known for its annotation and collaboration capability so the upcoming new features will be based on proven technology, delivered in a user-friendly interface.
The HTML client is included with Brava Enterprise, along with the ActiveX and Flash clients. Any combination of the clients can be used within an organization, providing the full-functionality available in the ActiveX client for those who need it, while also offering the simplicity and ease of the zero-client HTML for those who don’t.
Brava was designed to be easy on IT departments and offers highly scalable, secure viewing in a single, accurate viewer. Because it is a universal, multi-format viewer, it eliminates the need for multiple native applications to be installed on user workstations, providing visual access to document content while protecting the original document from unauthorized editing, saving or even printing. Brava is integrated to all major ECM systems and honors established user roles.
Check out a working example of the Brava HTML client at:
http://bravahtml.infograph.com/IGC/htmlviewer_7.1.0.1/brava.html?document0=http://html5demo/IGC/Samples/MortgageLoanApplication.pdf
About the Author
Gary Heath, CEO and Co-Founder of IGC, has more than 20 years of experience in developing enterprise applications. Incorporated in 1990, IGC is a leading developer of viewing, annotation, and redaction software. Since IGC’s inception, Gary’s leadership and innovation have been key drivers of the company’s growth. Through Gary's passion for innovation, IGC pioneered the concept of simple document security with its Visual Rights technology and introduced Redact-It, a software solution which removes privacy and sensitive content from documents. Email him at garyh@infograph.com.
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