MokaFive at VMworld

This year’s VMworld conference is fast approaching, and we are beginning to feel the excitement as we prepare to participate after a two-year hiatus. Over the past couple of years, we’ve been focused on three key areas: refining our product, gaining customer wins, and raising awareness of MokaFive.

First, on the product front: I am proud to say that over the last two years, the team here has built an enterprise-class product with all the capabilities, scale, security and robustness to manage enterprise endpoints.

Second, a good product translates to customer wins, and we have started to see a big ramp up in production deployments. We've spent the last two years working very closely with our customers to solve the complexities of managing desktops and enabling choice computing for end users. We’re now seeing customers who initially bought into the concept of server-based desktop virtualization saying the model is too complex and not cost effective. MokaFive’s approach of centralizing the management of virtual desktops and having them execute locally at the endpoint - irrespective of the type of endpoint - is actually gaining a lot of traction and truly validating the strategy we’ve established.

Lastly, we recently raised a round of funding this past April to add to our successes. We are now in a place where we can focus on raising awareness of the product and of MokaFive as a company. With a robust strong product and a great, referenceable customer base, I feel we can put our foot forward strongly and confidently.

As we look ahead to VMworld in less than two weeks, we’re excited about the quality of conversations we expect to have with CIOs, IT managers, sys-admins and end users about desktop virtualization.

If you are planning to attend VMworld, come by MokaFive’s booth (#1736) to see a live demo of MokaFive Suite, learn more about MokaFive’s BareMetal Player, and enter to win an iPad. You can also follow our our Twitter stream for updates before and during the show.

We look forward to participating in VMworld 2010! Stay tuned for our next VMworld blog post where I will predict the emerging themes and trends that will be discussed at the VMworld show.

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