Back from BriForum 2010

Just got back from BriForum 2010, it was a great show as usual. This was the largest BriForum yet - both the attendee count and the exhibitor count were higher than ever. We had a table this year and got a lot of traffic. It was nice because most attendees were pretty knowledgeable about desktop virtualization and understood the benefits of client-side execution with central management, so we didn't need a lot of explaining for people to "get" the MokaFive solution. People loved our BareMetal demonstration and the fact you could manage both the BYOPC/work-from-home machines as well as BareMetal from the same management interface.

But without a doubt the best part of BriForum are the quality speakers and technical sessions. BriForum has a core of truly great presenters and speakers who talk technical and avoid FUD and marketing spin. People like Shawn Bass, Ruben Spruijt, Jeroen van de Kamp, Claudio Rodrigues, Steve Greenberg, Ron Oglesby, Tim Mangan, and Rick Dehlinger, just to name a few. And of course the man himself, Brian Madden. The presentations are great with a lot of technical meat behind them and mostly avoid the high-level fluffy marketing speak that you get at most other conferences. They are 75 minutes so you can actually get into some depth. The great presenters are what make BriForum a great event and I'm proud to have had the opportunity to present at the last two BriForums. The organizers also do a good job of treating the presenters well so I'm sure the trend will continue.

This year I did two sessions - one on BYOPC and another on Disk Workloads for Desktop VMs. The BYOPC one was in the first slot of the conference (8:45am!) and was completely full. There was a good mix of people, some of whom had deployed BYOPC, others who were interested in deploying it, and we had a good conversation. The key points were that BYOPC can reduce support costs and lead to happier users (if you do it right), and this change is happening whether you like it or not. Brian in his keynote had a great quote: "If you say there is no way you will allow it (BYOPC) in your organization, pretty soon you won't have to, because your employees will leave and go somewhere else." The other great quote I heard is: "If BYOPC is a competitive advantage today, it will be a requirement tomorrow."

The second one on Disk Workloads was much more technical. I did a deep dive into how I/O in a VM works and what a Desktop workload looks like. The desktop VM workload is quite different than server VM workloads - a typical server VM does 90% reads vs 10% writes, but a desktop is more like 60%/40% or even 50%/50%. Not only that, but the desktop VM workload is very latency-sensitive, and if you have any long latency writes, your user experience will suffer greatly. The load from a single desktop VM can peak at up to 8000 IOPS during certain operations. At the end of the session I did a demo that pitted a VM served from my Blackberry (15MB/sec read, 7MB/sec write, 10-30 IOPS) using MokaFive's optimized virtual disk format versus a normal VMDK on a much faster USB drive. The optimized one booted quickly and was very responsive, whereas the straight VMDK was sluggish, stuttering and unusable. It just goes to show that slow IO performance can make the user experience unbearable, and optimizations can make a big difference.

It was great to meet up again with the BriForum crowd and I'm looking forward to participating again next year!

John Whaley, CTO & Founder

Going to BriForum 2010?

This year’s BriForum conference is coming up June 15 – 17 in Chicago, and we’ll be there with some exciting announcements and demos (hint: some new, really cool things straight from our lab).

Make sure you catch John Whaley, our CTO, who will present two sessions:

• “BYOPC: IT Panacea or Management Nightmare”(8:45 am on Tuesday, June 15). John will cover some of the pros, cons, and lessons learned from actual and attempted BYOPC deployments.

• “Understanding and Optimizing Disk Access Patterns for Desktop VM Workloads”(2:30 pm on Wednesday, June 16). This highly technical session will dive deep into what typical desktop VM disk access workloads look like and how to measure IO performance in a way that mirrors the users' perception.

Also, swing by our booth (#300) to see our demo. I’m really looking forward to meeting you all face-to-face. If you’d like to set up a meeting in advance, please contact Lynsey Rose at lrose@mokafive.com.

Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products and Marketing

Prediction Piece 2010: BYOPC for Today’s Workforce is a Reality

Is the only driver behind BYOPC attracting and retaining Gen-Y'ers?

Sure, the freshly minted college graduates who are entering your organization today were born in 1988. All they know is instant gratification of having information at their fingertips. As our CTO, John Whaley mentioned in a reply to Andi Mann's article, Is BYOPC Really Key to Attracting Millennials?, "a company that adopts a BYOPC program is more likely to attract millennials just by the fact they consider adopting such a program," not necessarily because it's just a perk to lure them in. Giving them the ability to bring in their hardware of choice, aka Mac, makes you look like the trend-setting, understanding employer (and then you put them to work, of course).

But is this attempt purely altruistic? We think there other drivers worth considering – namely, cost. There are deep cost advantages – some underneath the surface and worth the time to consider. By requiring employees to bring their own hardware, you get out of the hardware support business. Or if you're less inclined to give them complete choice, you have the option of corporate issued choice – you retain your volume discounts and offer a catalog of choices. Think about the flex initiatives that are growing in popularity, where companies are aiming to lower overhead by keeping workers in the office for fewer hours during the week, or fewer days. Now think of BYOPC as synonymous with use of home computers – which is more "use your own" rather than "bring your own." Here, real estate costs can be eliminated, which can represent a large percentage of the operating budget.

A client based managed VM can not only address the above scenarios in a very cost effective way, it can also eliminate the security risk associated with allowing corporate access from unmanaged, unknown endpoints. Cost effective – because it 1) Negates the need to deploy vast amounts of server infrastructure that server hosted virtual desktop solutions require; 2) Allows your users to leverage the distributed assets on hand such as personal PCs 3) Enables you to support new green initiatives such "work from home" and productivity initiative such as "Platform Choice". Secure – because it 1) Eliminates the worry of VPN clients tunneling into the perfect lockdown corporate world from dirty machines since the VPN session can now be established only from within the secure lockdown VM; 2) Removes the need to subject a user to time consuming extensive host AV scanning/could quarantining process.

If BYOPC has not looked that promising before – then it is time to look at it again. This time not just for Gen Y’ers but also for the cost saving that it can deliver to you.

MokaFive solves these exact problems while realizing the cost benefits of eliminating hardware costs, real estate costs, backend infrastructure costs, and excessive overhead. MokaFive's virtual desktop is an isolated virtual machine that sits on the endpoint – yet is fully managed, tied to a server behind the enterprise firewall that filters down policies and settings for the virtual desktop to completely lock it down and ensure safe access to the network. Whether corporate-issued choice (Mac or PC), true BYOPC or work-from-home, the cost savings are clear.

Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products and Marketing

MokaFiveTV is Live

Curious to know more about desktop virtualization? The concept of managing virtual desktops with layers? Want to learn the backstory on how MokaFive came to be?

To satisfy your curiousity and learn about innovations in desktop computing, we invite you to check out the MokaFiveTV channel on YouTube. Our co-founder and CTO John Whaley, along with co-founder and current Stanford CS professor Monica Lam as well as other experts from the team will give you an inside look at what it's all about.

For starters, you'll find the following video episodes:
MokaFive: A brief background
Virtual Layers - Inside View
At the Whiteboard - Layering
Virtual Layers - Application Management

For an even more intimate view, follow "Joe Whaley" and MokaFive on Twitter.