Local CPU is becoming MORE important

I caught up this week with Intel's technology evangelist, Charlie Milo, at the Intel Developer Forum, for an update on some of Intel's exciting new technologies, including accelerated 3D graphics, 3D television sets, 3D photos and cameras. One of the items that was showcased at IDF was Internet Explorer 9, which was released by Microsoft in beta yesterday.

Inevitably in our conversation, we discussed the impact of having such a browser; that is, one that renders graphics beautifully on the endpoint, on desktop virtualization. Through that discussion, it became clear that this browser will use a lot more CPU cycles to deliver the high-definition graphics and 3D images that we, the consumers, want. The question then becomes, where do you want this processing power to be executed? On an expensive server sitting in a data center, or on the endpoint?

Rendering rich 3D graphics requires a lot of power and speed, and more importantly needs to be computed close to the user for a rich, interactive experience. The data crunching can happen on the server, but in terms of rendering the graphics, it has to happen on the endpoint.

To me, these rich interactive performance applications further validate the bet we have placed on the client side, where virtual desktops are executed on the distributed resource.

How do you think the coming new browsers will impact desktop virtualization?

  Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products & Marketing

VMworld 2010: Great Show

It’s officially over! For us, VMworld 2010 was an exciting ride.

Day one started with a bang when Network World named MokaFive BareMetal the Hottest Virtualization Product at VMworld. Even though our booth (#1736) was in the far corner of the show floor, we had a crush of traffic visit the booth to learn more about MokaFive. There was a lot of the excitement and buzz about MokaFive especially around our recent announcements on BareMetal player, our partnership with AVG and our MSP beta program. In addition to the high volume of booth traffic, we had a great set of conversations starting with The Register in the morning, Forbes in the afternoon, and a sprinkling of industry analysts throughout the day. Then there were meetings with prospects and partners that went into the wee hours of the morning. The great food and wine at Marlowe just made it even better.

The excitement continued into day two, three and four. The session on VDI TCO caught my attention. It was truly revealing and entertaining. The speaker said, “don’t bother trying to justify VDI on the basis of TCO, find alternative justifications like security etc.” Now that is what I call clean speaking. This just reinforces my conviction that the MokaFive datacenter-less (distributed) approach is the right way to go. Among other attractions, both Brian and Gabe from brianmadden.com stopped by the booth to discuss BareMetal , we had a surprise visit by our angel investor, Vinod Khosla, and Dale did a radio gig on Internet Evolution.

Net-net the predictions I made in the previous blog turned out to be nearly correct. The messaging was cloudy and VMWare killed CVP officially. But contrary to my prediction there weren't as many open source application companies. Well two out of three, ain't bad.

Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products & Marketing

It’s Official: MokaFive Goes BareMetal

Regular readers of this blog will recall that in June, we blogged about MokaFive BareMetal Player, which we were taking the wrappers off for industry insiders at BriForum. At VMworld we made our bare-metal preview official and demoed it to an appreciative audience. 

This comes, of course, at an interesting time. Just last month in its earnings call, , VMware killed its bare-metal hypervisor.  And just last week, Citrix decided to package its long-awaited XenClient bare-metal hypervisor with XenDesktop in an effort to get it to market faster.

With all the news, our bare metal solution was received as a welcome change.  The sentiment was echoed by Timothy Prickett Morgan of The Register in his eloquent (and irreverent) coverage of VMware, Citrix,  MokaFive and more.

We developed MokaFive BareMetal Player because our customers are asking for a solution that lets them forget about everything except the VM. They want to be able to run directly on the hardware and they want the same management they’re used to already with MokaFive Suite. And that’s exactly what we have with bare-metal: it provides a thin management layer that sits on the baremetal hardware, thus eliminating the cost  burden of managing additional OS’s and licenses.

Best of all, MokaFive BareMetal adheres to our commitment to deliver “choice computing.” In the bare-metal world, that means supporting a broad range of hardware—not half a handful of narrow configurations, and certainly not hardware deals cut in the backroom to lock customers in.

We believe our BareMetal will be a real game-changer in the desktop virtualization space. Like MokaFive Suite, BareMetal is designed to fit into existing infrastructure and to always be OS- and hardware-agnostic.

Take a look at this link of John Whaley’s video chat with Brian Madden at our VMworld booth. Generally, the response to BareMetal has been on par with Brian’s reaction – great! NetworkWorld even listed us as one of the hottest Vendors at VMworld.

 Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products & Marketing