No Cloud Over VDI!

Unsurprisingly, whatever the IT genre and whatever the weather, cloud is always on the horizon right now.

One of several top meetings I had last week within IP Expo’s confines was with Morteza Esteki of Liquidware (glamorously assisted by Jane Rimmer of Hiviz Marketing of course, from an original idea by Declan “when’s my next guitar lesson?” Waters of Water Comms). One issue that many IT departments are finding themselves in right now, is in feeling they are potentially trapped within a world of VMware, Citrix, Google, Amazon, Azure… you get the picture.

For the VDI crowd who chose the thin client route many moons ago, the potential migration to the cloud/DaaS world (one mainframe substitute to another?) can, I guess, be a little scary – two IT worlds that make lots of sense, meshing logically but… What Liquidware offers is a platform-agnostic helping hand. For example, its Stratusphere UX product, sits atop and provides that all important end-to-end visibility of the combo of physical, virtual and cloud-based workspaces – as a single entity. Think migration, performance assessment and optimisation, as well as problem solving and – ideally – avoiding those problems in the first case. Endpoint client support is also open – Windows, Mac and Linux are all supported (not sure about Oric Atmos and ZX Spectrum though…).

As an example of real-world use of this tech, legal expenses insurance company DAS, in the UK, has recently taken on Stratusphere UX and is looking to put it to use it in areas such as:

⦁ The on-boarding of VDI from home.
⦁ Windows 10 testing and on-boarding.
⦁ Scaling the environment.
⦁ To provide a real time dashboard for BAU (business as usual) incidents and alerts so they are ahead of the game should an issue arise – fix it before it’s a problem!
⦁ Troubleshooting for users who have reported issues from a previous date, pulling historical info that will prove useful when working on longer standing issues.
⦁ Measuring Network and SAN performance during an issue (let’s not forget good old SANs – they won’t be disappearing anywhere quickly!).

Timing isn’t always my strong point, but there’s a definite alliance of technology here, given that I’m involved in very complimentary product projects with the likes of Fedr8 and Rimo3 in the UK and Canada-based Densify, not to mention some top secret due diligence on tech breakthroughs that impact on all of these areas by a mad professor from West Virginia (oops, too late).

Maybe I’m unintentionally assembling the next IT dream team?