Building the Personal Cloud

Step back to Citrix CEO Mark Templeton’s keynote at Citrix Synergy in San Francisco and you would have heard him talk of “The Three Cs – the Public Cloud, Private Cloud, and Personal Cloud.” Hang on a moment, “Personal Cloud” what’s that? For years Citrix used to talk about “any any any” and it did a pretty good job of delivering it provided any was restricted to meaning any Windows app. Now though, Citrix is wanting us to believe that it has moved past any app and extending that to anything digital.

News: Virsto introduces new virtual storage options for VMware and Hyper-V

The virtual storage market is hotting up with Virsto Stoftware’s announcement of two new products for release Tuesday, January 17th. Following on from its June 2011 acquisition of EvoStor and building on its existing Virsto for VDI platform, Silicon Valley-based Virsto Software has made good on its investment by announcing the release of Virsto for vSphere.

Will Client Hypervisors Drive the Next Generation Desktop?

Whatever your enterprise desktop issue – VDI is often hailed as the answer. But a remote desktop is not always available anytime, anyplace, anywhere. More importantly, a VDI infrastructure is complex and expensive to deliver. Virtualisation will certainly play a major part in the next generation desktop: but does that next generation desktop have to be hosted and run in a datacentre? A client hypervisor can solve the issues that are inherent for many applications and use cases when you take the compute power away from the end-device and try and put it back in the data centre?

2011 Year in Review: Presentation Virtualization

It has been a while since we last updated our Presentation Virtualization Solutions whitepaper. Has nothing happened in the market in 2011? On the contrary, there was a good deal going on for Presentation Virtualization in a year that saw a new benchmark setting XenApp release from Citrix, Apple remove terminal services functionality, RES Software launch their reverse seamless technology and Ericom their HTML5 client.

Xen port to ARM puts pressure on VMware

Stefano Stabellini, a senior software engineer at Citrix Systems, has announced a proof of concept port of the open source Xen Hypervisor for the ARM Cortex A15 processor. The project was started in early November and has already developed to the point where it is capable of booting a Linux 3.0 based virtual machine up to a shell prompt. The Xen port has progressed so rapidly due to a decision to take advantage of the virtualization features that were introduced with the ARMv7 architecture making it small and comparatively easy to develop. However, because of this it won’t be able to run on anything older than a Cortex-A15 processor.