Desktop Virtualization Savings: It's in the Approach

One of the things we keep hearing from prospects about desktop virtualization is cost. In fact, in a meeting with our CIO Council this spring, the CIO of a major Wall Street bank said this firm’s investments in a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution had so ballooned out of proportion and the experience had been so painful that it’s left permanent bad taste in everyone’s mouth. There’s no way, he contends, that he could ever sell “desktop virtualization” to his firm again – management and end users alike.

That point really inspired us to work on a TCO model – so companies know what the costs entail before they commit to a desktop management path. Fundamentally, desktop virtualization is about easier desktop management and cost savings the icing on the cake.

In our TCO calculations, we show how MokaFive can dramatically cut desktop TCO by at least 45% by delivering savings in three areas:

1. Operational costs;
2. Helpdesk costs; and
3. Capital costs.

Operational Savings. MokaFive’s management model -- central management and distributed execution – is unique in the market, and critical to lowering overall TCO. The IT administrator creates one golden image, called the LivePC, which is sent down to thousands of users. To patch or update OS or applications, IT updates the single golden image in a central location, and automatically the changes are distributed to users’ machines. Contrast that to traditional software distribution, which requires every endpoint to be individually patched which can result in errors, complications and costs. (It’s no wonder companies are dreading the Windows 7 migration – and I am not at all surprised by the costs.)

Helpdesk Savings. MokaFive also delivers savings in helpdesk costs. Typically the most expensive calls occur when a user corrupts their machine with a virus. With MokaFive’s rejuvenate capability, a corrupted desktop can be “rejuvenated” back to its pristine state with all personal data intact – all with just a click of a button. The user doesn’t have to even make a helpdesk call or be online. The CIO of one of our earliest customers – a major law firm in Silicon Valley – recently raved to me about the unexpected savings in their helpdesk costs. They hadn’t even calculated it into their models (nor we, for that matter), but we now expect them to have paid for their initial investment in the next year.

If not for MokaFive, this customer’s helpdesk would be fielding level two and level three calls when a user corrupts their machine with a virus. This specific case calls for a desktop re-image, which can be a very cumbersome process taking hours, if not days to complete. When you re-image the machine, IT needs to supply a new OS, restore all the applications, and then re-apply all the user data.

We estimate steady state this is going to be true whether it’s a VDI instance or with software distribution because even in a VDI scenario the user has to make a helpdesk call and the administrator has engage and to revoke the VM and put the data back on.

Capital Savings. With MokaFive, enterprises have the option to implement BYOC (bring your own computer) programs for employees and contractors. Cisco and Dell made headlines last year when they initiated BYOC programs giving their employees a stipend to purchase their own computer. Both used virtualization to deliver company approved applications, but their approaches had significant limitations. In Dell's case, the only real choices was, well, Dell machines. Cisco at least allowed more latitude, so employees could purchase Macs, but "they are pretty much on their own for tech support." With these traditional desktop management models, and even with VDI, BYOC hits a snag due to online-offline access issues.

With MokaFive, IT deploys and manages the virtualized corporate environment on employee-chosen machines (Mac or a PC, online or offline) using MokaFive and benefit from the central management and distributed model I discussed above.

Going Green. There is one final area of savings I'd like to highlight -- though it may not necessarily be considered by CIOs when making a decision on desktop virtualization: the environmental impact. With MokaFive's approach, companies can use existing equipment; existing personal devices and existing corporate devices. In the case of contractors, companies are no longer buying assets, nor are they provisioning servers to the datacenter. All these add up to a reduction in new power-hungry equipment. MokaFive’s approach give you almost status-quo type of energy in the case of most work from home and contractor scenarios – and is even more effective than what we have today. I go into a lot more detail on this in an earlier post.

For our customers, the savings in all these areas have been very real. But the fact remains that desktop virtualization has over-promised and under-delivered for many years -- to the detriment of all of us. Just because two (with a third making very fast progress) very large vendors dominate virtualization, it doesn't mean innovation has ceased. It's still happening, and MokaFive is proof of it, 20+ patents and still coming.

We've really put a lot of thought into all the costs associated with managing desktops. Our customers have weighed in and helped us create a TCO model that factors in these four areas. We invite you to sign up for a personalized TCO for your environment.

Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products and Marketing

Windows 7 Migration Just Got Easier with MokaFive Suite 3.0

Today, MokaFive hit a significant milestone: the release of MokaFive Suite 3.0.

We began pilots over two years ago with some early adopter customers. Since then, these customers have gone into production – in some cases even increasing the size of their deployment – and now they’re beginning to see real, tangible business benefits from a centrally managed, distributed execution approach to desktop virtualization:

• A Silicon Valley-based international law firm saw its employee satisfaction ratings skyrocket
• A Global investment banking and securities firm whose traveling executives can carry one laptop (either a  Mac or PC) for both work and personal use

I point to these customers because their feedback has been absolutely critical for what we are delivering in version 3.0. This is the next-generation evolution of our product. We have made it Windows 7 ready, truly integrated into the enterprise with more policy controls and security features, and we hope to get more leverage from a market perspective with a multi-tenant managed services model.

Full Windows 7 support.

In my recent blog about the costs of Windows 7 migrations, I argued that this massive IT disruption could be a golden opportunity to future-proof the management architecture. And with 3.0, we’ve given IT leaders just that.

Rather than having to go from one desktop to the next and one office to the next over a 12 to 30 month period to manual upgrade machines, enterprises can implement MokaFive Suite to create a full Windows 7 VM that runs on existing hardware – and still access legacy applications – without waiting for the hardware refresh cycle. This means no additional capital costs to migrate to Windows 7, and companies can refresh hardware on their own timeline.

MokaFive’s Windows 7 support is not just a container. We now have full layering support on Windows 7 both in terms of AD domain join layering, OS layering, user-installed apps, data and settings.  We have changed the architecture of the layering so that it leverages some of the inherent features of Windows 7 much better.

Data center to endpoint security.

In the past, we’ve often talked about our seven layers of security, but for MokaFive Suite 3.0, we upped the ante with security at the device level.

With server hosted desktop virtualization solutions, you can secure the data in the data center, but how do you ensure that the browser accessing the VM is not being screen-scraped at the endpoint? Back in August, we announced a partnership with AVG to solve exactly this security gap; MokaFive Suite 3.0 now takes advantage of this full integration. The solution includes a secure virtual encrypted desktop container that can be deployed to the endpoint and further be secured from key-logging and screen-scraping attacks from the host machine by the AVG security scanning capability. Now virtual desktops can be a secure container that can be accessed by many devices, both corporate and personal.

Desktop management as-a-service.

We’ve been talking to some managed service providers that wanted to be able to leverage MokaFive Suite to deliver desktop management services to multiple organizations and their end-users. It seemed like a great idea, so we created a multi-tenant infrastructure as well as new reporting tools and the ability to delegate management to any tenant.

We see 3.0 valuable to three types of providers:

• Outsourced services firms currently using “brute force” to manage desktops for their clients. Now, with a single platform, they can increase the operational efficiency of their delivery model.
• Service providers and carriers that want to expand their footprint with a client or to add a new revenue stream.
• Hosting companies that have no specific desktop management expertise but want to add more services and move beyond providing just rack space.

These are the three big-ticket items in version 3.0, but we have many, many more features. Check out Brian Madden's latest blog post for more info and video interview.

Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products and Marketing



Get ready. Start. Migrate.

We’ve entered the final quarter of 2010, the time when Gartner anticipates most Windows 7 migrations will start in earnest. They’ve done extensive number crunching on the costs of Windows 7 migrations, and many other analysts have further reviewed these findings and prescribed their remedy to ease the pains, if not the costs entirely.

Windows 7 migration is expensive.

No matter how one dresses it up, there’s no hiding the plain truth: IT organizations are being asked to budget an extra 20% to 60% to their costs over the next two years. In addition to the well known costs such as new hardware and Windows 7 licensing, there are many hidden costs with Windows 7 migration.

First, there is the cost of identifying which applications to migrate and when? This is a hard, time-consuming task. Even though Windows 7 is supposed to be backwards compatible, the reality is that many applications still do not work flawlessly.

Second, there is the cost of maintaining both Windows XP and Windows 7 environments for a protracted period, which can be up to two or three years for some organizations based on their migration schedule.
Lastly, there is the cost of migrating personal data. In many work environments, there has been a blurring of the personal and the corporate. Windows 7 migration brings this issue to the forefront, since IT has to decide what and what not to migrate.

There is a silver lining. Windows 7 migration also provides the best opportunity to clean up.

While the list of problems with Windows 7 migration seems endless, a migration project provides IT with the opportunity to upgrade its management architecture, enforce better data usage guidelines, and offer greater user flexibility.

The question becomes, which solution can really solve the problem? Virtualizing the desktop can significantly speed up image deployment. Gartner suggests going with a hosted virtual desktop (HVD or server hosted virtual desktop), but at the same time argues that it is expensive, and what you are saving in migration costs you are adding in capital costs.

The alternative approach (MokaFive’s approach) is to virtualize the desktop, but instead of putting it on a server, you send it back down to the endpoint for local execution, thereby eliminating the datacenter requirement. With this approach, you have no additional capital costs. You simply take your existing machines and deploy a Windows 7 virtual machine environment to them. Your users now have Windows 7 environment without having to wait for your hardware refresh cycle. The best part is that the users can still use the Windows XP on their host machine to access legacy applications.

Refresh hardware on your own timeline: Traditionally, with Windows 7, customers are left with the hard choice of either forklift-upgrading their machines or refreshing their hardware. Instead of trying to speed up the refresh, you can use MokaFive to deploy a Windows 7 LivePC on top of your existing machines until they need a hardware refresh. Even if your refresh cycle extends beyond 2014, you will be fine, since your users can be provisioned with a Windows 7 environment on their existing Windows XP machines. Then when the refresh happens on a true Windows 7 base platform, the Windows 7 LivePC can be moved in minutes.

Provide users with platform choice: With virtual desktops, you can now implement programs such as BYOC or offer employees the choice to bring in the much-desired Mac. You can leverage the migration project to get out of the device management business. Let users bring a device, and you manage the secure corporate virtual image on top of the device. Best part, unlike HVD, users are free to work online or offline.
Separate work and personal: Windows 7 migration gives the ideal opportunity to start enforcing best practices around user data. With a virtual desktop approach, users can move their personal data to the host machine, allowing you to lock down the virtual desktop.

Future-proof yourself: In IT, change often means cost and pain. But a hugely disruptive change like Windows 7 is also a golden opportunity to implement a 'future-proof' management architecture. Even if you muscle through a Windows 7 migration by 2014, what happens with the next big upgrade? By upgrading your management infrastructure to a client based virtual desktop solution, you can not only ease the next upgrade cycle but also get huge TCO benefits while at the same providing more choice to your users.

Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products & Marketing

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

Going Green with Virtual Desktops

Everyone is talking about Green IT these days, and virtualization is a popular way to save money and reduce your environmental impact at the same time. Many companies have already discovered the benefits of virtualizing their servers, so the natural progression is to begin looking at virtualizing their desktops, as well.

There are several environmental benefits to using virtual desktops, but it all depends on the type of approach—whether you’re using server-based (VDI) or client-based virtual desktops. In the past, we have blogged about the shortcomings of VDI, such as cost and lack of offline support. From a Green angle, the problem with VDI is the huge datacenter infrastructure it requires, and more servers mean more space, increased power consumption, and increased cooling costs. The additional servers required by VDI more than offset any green savings you might see, and as a result, VDI is actually less Earth-friendly than traditional desktops. In contrast, a client-based solution (like MokaFive) requires no additional datacenter infrastructure.

Let’s compare the green impact of MokaFive vs. VDI. Gartner predicts that 49 million endpoints will be virtualized by 2013. Let's assume 30% will be laptops and remaining will be desktops. Based on those assumptions if all of those desktops were virtualized using MokaFive (instead of VDI), we would prevent 7.8 million metric tons of CO2 emissions each year—that’s the equivalent of taking 1.4 million cars off the road per year!

Another environmental benefit of client-based virtual desktops is the need for fewer machines. Virtualization allows you to use existing machines for multiple purposes: for example, an employee can use the same laptop for home and work. As a result, you can avoid the carbon footprint of an additional machine, including the energy and cooling it requires.

In addition, telecommuting is growing in popularity, and virtual desktops are helping to drive that trend. With centralized management, IT can easily support remote workers’ desktops, and employees have the flexibility of accessing their corporate desktop anytime, from any machine. Remote workers are environmentally friendly, too: they take cars off the road, and they save on office emissions (consider the space, energy, and cooling that each cubicle requires).

Desktop virtualization is a great way to reduce your IT costs and help save the environment at the same time. Just keep in mind that the type of virtualization approach makes a big difference, and client-based virtual desktops are by far the greenest option.

Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products & Marketing

VDI Project? One question to make sure you ask.

We recently hosted a CIO summit that was attended by several CIOs, representing some of the largest organizations in the US. The topic was desktop virtualization, and we had a terrific discussion about ongoing initiatives at each company.

One CIO cited a statistic that was so surprising, shocking really, it really stuck out in our minds. At their organization—one of the premier universities in the world--they’d recently evaluated the use of VDI for university employees. In their analysis, they found the all-in cost of VDI to be nearly $12K per user per year! (sound of jaws hitting floor) When contemplating the necessary server, storage and network improvements, the costs were so prohibitive they dismissed VDI as being completely impractical.

His argument was so sincere and thoughtful that other attendees were heard making mental notes to ask their staffs for a business case on their VDI projects.

If you’re considering, planning, or even deploying VDI, one piece of advice: make sure you ask this question too. If you don’t have a staff, then ask yourself. Or ask your boss. Just don’t let the question go unasked and risk a rude $12K surprise.

Overheard, five years from now: "Tell me again, why did we spend so much on VDI?"

As the story goes, during the 1960s space race, NASA was faced with a major problem. The astronauts needed a pen that could write in the gravity-free environment of space. After a $1.5 million effort, they developed the Astronaut Pen which could write in a vacuum, write with no gravity, and write in extreme temperatures. It was brilliant!

The Russians, faced with the same problem, had a simpler approach: they used a pencil.

This apocryphal tale contains a valid lesson: sometimes we spend a great deal of time, effort and money to create a “high-tech” solution, when a perfectly elegant and low cost solution is right before our eyes. (Of course, one clear alternative to VDI springs to our minds. J)

Question: how many abandoned VDI projects are littering the streets?

The CIO’s comments resonated with many of us, as we’ve heard, particularly recently, of many organizations that have investigated, piloted and ultimately abandoned VDI because the costs were so prohibitive, and because better suited alternatives do exist.

So we ask the question to all of you: how many of you have gone through this experience and ultimately decided to go with status quo or an altogether different approach?

Burt Toma, Director of Products

VDI post on Madden: good observations, different conclusions

Last month, I predicted that VDI will be just a niche play as the cloud matures. Yesterday Brian Madden posted a dramatically different perspective about the extent to which VDI will penetrate computing.

This perspective was not his own, but he thought it interesting enough to write about it. The problem though is that although the observations are reasonable, the conclusions are awful.

Let's look at specific examples.

First, the post notes that computing is changing rapidly, and of course I agree. More apps are moving toward the cloud for simplicity and portability reasons. The apps that will be left behind are rich applications that require local execution. The problem with VDI in this scenario is that you get the worst of both worlds: you get neither the simplicity of the cloud app, nor the functionality of a local app. It just doesn’t make sense to take your fat desktop and stick it into the cloud (except in niche scenarios), since VDI will only become more cumbersome as the cloud matures.

A second observation in the post invokes Moore’s law, saying that as servers become better and cheaper, the cost of VDI will drop. This might be true if users continue to use the same applications, but that’s not how computing works. Applications will continue to expand and consume the additional server bandwidth, negating any savings from Moore’s law.

Thirdly, the post goes on to describe deployment models. The primary pain point that desktop virtualization solves is desktop deployment and centralized management. With a client-based solution, IT can provision an additional VM simply by publishing an html link and sending an email. It’s cheaper, faster, and more resilient than provisioning additional boxes in the datacenter, as you do with VDI.

The post also completely ignores some fundamental issues with VDI. For example, a defining characteristic of VDI is the pooling of resources in the datacenter, but the downside to pooling is that you are magnifying the risks and complexity of desktops—the classic “eggs in one basket” problem. With VDI, you are taking inherently resilient, distributed desktops and turning them into a highly concentrated system that is vulnerable to malfunction. With VDI, if the system goes down, all your desktops go down. A related problem is that IT has to over-provision in order to prepare for peak capacity (e.g., 9:00am on Monday morning). But it’s difficult to predict group behavior, and your “over-provisioning” may prove inadequate, anyway.

Finally, the post fails to address Madden’s own Offline Paradox. Offline capability is at the core of VDI’s shortcomings. There are many times when a user finds himself without an Internet connection, such as on a plane or when the connection goes down for whatever reason. With VDI, users without a connection are unable to access their virtual desktops. This is a key area where a client-based approach excels.

What do you think the future holds? Will virtual desktops live in the datacenter or on the host machine?

Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products and Marketing

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

Cloud and the Evolution of Client Computing

The headline of Mark Bowker’s article in Network World recently caught my attention: “Will Cloud Lead to the Failure of VDI?”

No equivocations on my part; the answer is a resounding yes. Today, there are multiple deployment models, but fast forward to three to five years from now, when cloud computing becomes much more mature, and we will see only two models survive. And neither will be VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure).

But let’s back up and look at what we have today.

First, there are thick client applications, such as Microsoft Office – rich applications locally executed on a desktop OS to give users a fast, seamless experience. This type of application is not going anywhere and will be around for a long time because it offers a high level of dynamic activity that cannot be rendered for a Web-only interface.

Over the last few years, a new class of applications has emerged that run in the cloud – for example Google apps or Salesforce.com. These apps are fundamentally built for the cloud and built to run on browsers from any computer or mobile device. These aren’t applications built to run locally which are just thrown into the cloud. Google is leading the charge here, with Google Chrome increasingly becoming an operating system itself. IN the near future, these apps will co-exist with thick client apps and end-users will require environments that support both models.

Somewhere in between is the third model today: VDI.

Though its proponents may say otherwise, VDI is not a true cloud-based solution. The apps were not built to run on the Web; they require rich local execution. What VDI does, in the simplest sense, is allow IT managers to put a rich local execution environment on a server and deploy it as a “cloud app,” albeit a crippled one at that. It offers none of the performance and offline use you get with a rich app nor the simplicity of a Web app. At best, VDI is a stopgap solution; it exists because most enterprise apps were not built for the Web.

In five years’ time when apps that need to run in the cloud are in fact purpose-built for the cloud, you can bet that VDI will become obsolete. In the end, we will have only two main types of applications: Rich, locally run applications for end use points and a rich set of applications built for cloud computing. Rich local execution apps will persist because computing will not be 100 percent online (yet) due to connectivity and performance. Some apps, such as PowerPoint (however much you love it or hate it), requires rich interaction, and therefore is best fit as a local, OS-based desktop application.

Interestingly, the motivation for VDI was always about central control. If VDI, as a management layer, is out of the picture, then how do you ‘control’ and centrally manage these two types of apps? We believe for rich endpoints client-side virtualization is the way to go – allowing central management of the desktop while enabling rich interactions and offline use. For the apps in the cloud – existing datacenter management tools solve the problem.

What do you think? What will a mature cloud computing environment mean for VDI?

Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products and Marketing

To centralize, or not to centralize

You wouldn't do this with eggs. Why would you do it with your company's desktops?

Desktop virtualization holds great promise to dramatically reduce IT support costs, while allowing end users unprecedented access and flexibility. There are now dozens of offerings to choose from. But beware – your approach matters. A lot.

Picture the last time your PC crashed. Now imagine it happening to everyone in your company. All at the same time.

It makes complete sense to centralize certain aspects of desktop management. Access and policy control, reporting and image updating, definitely. And certain compute-intensive applications. But it makes little sense to centralize execution.

Desktop execution should (almost) always be decentralized.

A decentralized system is inherently more resilient than a centralized one. No single incident can bring down the productivity of the whole. This has been a truism in computer science, and it’s proven itself in many other systems, not least of which is the Internet itself. On the Internet, no single router or gateway failure can bring down the connectivity of all the endpoints. Instead, in the case of a failure, packets are rerouted around the downed node and transmissions successfully proceed.

Similarly in a decentralized desktop environment, a single PC failure, or even the failure of the management server itself, does not stop the productivity of the whole. Sure, a single user may be inconvenienced (and we all know that certain users are more important than others :) ), but there is no chance that the entire system can come down. When we say “no chance," we don’t actually mean “low probability,” or “five 9s,” etc. With decentralization, there is *no* chance of systemic failure. Nada.

Moreover, a decentralized desktop system is usually lower cost because consumer CPU and storage is much cheaper in aggregate than the equivalent resources in the datacenter. And decentralized execution provides the best user experience, since the user can be online or offline, does not have to worry about bandwidth, and local CPU provides better performance than a centralized remote one.

Now, certain narrow use cases do warrant centralization. But the vast majority of desktops should remain decentralized.

Something to chew on

Even with 14 years of experience and a bazillion dollars, Google’s search services went down last May. What’s the likelihood that your VDI will fare better?





Caveat VDI

Your existing physical desktop environment is already an inherently resilient system. Your company (and your career) can easily survive the occasional user hard drive crash or network issue. But now you’re thinking about scrapping that beautiful architecture, and replacing it at enormous upfront and ongoing costs with an inherently more fragile and risky one. There may be a legitimate cost-risk-benefit reason for you to do this – just be sure you’ve done the analysis.

A better way

Distributed Virtual Desktops (DVDs), a term coined by IDC, represent the low cost, highly flexible world of the New Desktop (capitalization intended). In this model, like your physical desktop solution, DVDs are controlled centrally, so access control, policies, reporting and image management happen efficiently by a single team. But desktops are virtualized so the same golden image can run on any platform, and any hardware configuration. This makes it better than your current physical desktop solution.

And, in stark contrast to VDI, DVDs execute in a decentralized fashion. This means that issues (and we all know issues can happen) are isolated to a single user. As with VDI, there are multiple offerings in the DVD space—MokaFive is one. At MokaFive, the tenet of decentralized execution has been imbued from the very beginning and throughout every aspect of our product design. We believe it’s the only way to go.

Burt Toma, Director of Products

Learnings from our CIO Summit

Last month, we hosted our first quarterly CIO summit session that was attended by several CIOs representing some of the largest organizations in the US. The goal of this session was to investigate the priorities and the associated drivers for end-user computing within these large organizations. Over the course of a terrific power packed discussion, several themes emerged - one of which struck us as very distinctive.

We were expecting the usual themes around cost and control to emerge when, right at the beginning, one of the CIOs of a leading services firm said, “Look, it is not about control. IT doesn’t want to control; we just want to deliver enterprise value at the lowest possible cost, ensuring that every user is productive.” Quite a profound statement. Which brings us to the question, “Why are IT conversations always peppered with the word control?”

Upon further discussion, the answer became clear. The CIOs want to enable user productivity at the lowest cost and risk to the business. In the past, the only way to achieve a reliable, secure desktop was through lockdown and control. But over the years in many organizations, “control” has become the primary objective which, in turn, has lead to myopic decision making.

A number of influences seem to be changing this trend. One reason is that IT is required to support new business initiatives, which cannot be supported using traditional models. As the CIO for a large healthcare firm put it, “I have to enable new work models including teleworking and outsourcing. We hire talent where we get it and do not worry whether it is in the corporate location or not. These users need a secure, reliable working environment at their home, on the go, right at their fingertips at all times.” Second, there are finally a number of solutions now that can enable an IT organization to provide user flexibility without additional cost or risk penalty, so you don’t need to control and lockdown the user. In fact, client- based virtual desktop management solutions like MokaFive can significantly drive the cost and the risks down by enabling single image management across corporate and employee owned assets. (More elaboration in subsequent blog posts).

Another alternative that is commonly considered is VDI. Almost all the CIOs had investigated or were investigating VDI. But they found VDI to be too expensive, too complex, and most importantly, too restrictive for their users. This seems to be a growing sentiment and is reflected well in this article by Randy Eckel . We will explore more of the CIO comments and feedback in upcoming blogs.

Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products and Marketing

MokaFive, a green technology?

Yesterday we announced our new round of funding lead by NGEN Partners with contributions from existing investors Khosla Ventures and Highland Capital Partners, MokaFive Raises $21 Million in Venture Capital Funding. Over the past year, we have built a great enterprise-class product that is now deployed within large F1000 companies. With our product now proven in production, this funding allows us to rapidly scale our business and deploy new customers.

Why did a clean technology VC firm like NGEN Partners invest?

Like all successful venture capital firms, first and foremost they seek to invest in companies with a sound business model and huge market potential. Secondly, they look for opportunities to advance the mission and benefits of clean and green environments. You may ask yourself: how is a desktop management (virtualization) company like MokaFive “green”?

It’s very simple. Compared to VDI, or server-based computing, MokaFive's distributed virtual desktop solution offers a 90% reduction in number of servers needed –that is 90% less power, less space, less cooling and less bandwidth. In addition, the model provides *all* the benefits that accrue from a centralized management model. Also, the MokaFive model is a perfect solution to enable green initiatives, such as work from home. You can now simply provide employees with a secure, encapsulated virtual image that can run either on their machine at home or at work (bye-bye to worries about VPN on unknown, unsecured machines, access to terminals over low bandwidth, etc.). Telecommuting avoids not only the fuel used by commuters, but also the overhead energy costs needed to maintain a workplace.

Now, let’s talk about the market potential. End-user computing is being transformed by a huge variety of new devices and increasing numbers of mobile users. This change has marched right into the enterprises. As a result, managing computers with the necessary security and flexibility has become enormously expensive. MokaFive’s revolutionary approach allows you to cut traditional desktop management costs by as much as 50%. Our management solution enables you to maintain a single virtual image across any device and any user (e.g., employee, contractor, or teleworker). The virtual image is deployed to the endpoint so it eliminates the huge outlay in servers that VDI requires. The market potential to deliver a new, more effective model to update and maintain secure corporate environments across disparate, dispersed device and user types.

We are very excited to have NGEN on board, and we look forward to accelerating our business this year.

Purnima Padmanahban, VP of Products

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

User Personalization: The New Frontier in Desktop Virtualization

When companies give laptops to their employees, they set various access policies. Some companies let their employees do what they want on these laptops, like install software, while other companies lock down their laptops so employees can only do work related items. I know people who have to carry two laptops, one corporate and one personal, while they travel so they can do personal things on the road.

When companies set these policies, they are forced to make a trade off between employee productivity and flexibility with data security and manageability. The more flexible IT is towards the user, the harder it is to manage the laptops. How much time does IT really want to spend on re-imaging laptops because users frequently mess them up? At the same time, users are working longer hours from remote locations, so IT needs to make sure the users are happy and productive. And if something goes wrong, users do not want to have to wait days before they can try out software that might help their work.

Now companies are planning to implement desktop virtualization, especially VDI, to reduce their cost in supporting laptops and desktops. However, they have not realized that they are just avoiding one problem by introducing another. Instead of managing physical machines, they will be managing a lot more virtual machine images.

When the MokaFive founding team was at Stanford looking at desktop virtualization trends, we realized that we needed to make sure the solution satisfied both the needs of the IT department as well as the needs of the end users. If the solution only makes one side happy, it will never be successful.

This is why we introduced a product called User Personalization in our new version 2.0. A new policy is added which allows IT to control whether an end user can or cannot personalize or customize the virtual machine image. If IT allows the user to change various Windows settings, install applications etc., on the image, IT controls the image - IT can update it, add new applications, etc. The changes in the base image and the customization done by the user are merged when the user boots up the image. If the user messes up, he just needs to revert all of his changes and go back to the base image. IT does not need to be involved at all.

By combining the User Personalization feature with the Targeting feature, we are providing a very powerful image management solution for desktop virtualization deployment. With v2.0, you can have one single Windows XP image targeted to different groups with different policies. And you can give a group more flexibility and another less. You can work on the next image release while everyone stays productive. When the release is ready, a few clicks in the management console and you get everyone updated.