Avant Secure PC Announces A Strategic Alliance with Jentu Technologies

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AVANT SECURE PC COMBINED WITH JENTU TECHNOLOGIES ARE WORKING TO PROVIDE A NEW WAY TO MANAGE DATA EFFICIENTLY AND ELIMINATE THE CYBERSECURITY RISKS OF MALWARE. AN INEXPENSIVE SOLUTION (TCO) COMPARED TO TODAY’S MULTI-MILLION-DOLLAR CYBER BREACH LOSSES WHILE INCREASING THE RETURN ON INVESTMENT (ROI) AND OFFERING COMPLETE CENTRALIZED MANAGEMENT OF ALL SERVERS AND ENDPOINTS.

HUNTSVILLE, AL – Friday, November 10, 2017 — AVANT Solutions Group, LLC. — Today AVANT secure PC and JENTU have announced an alliance aimed for immediate availability of AVANT’s secure NETWORK™ that is comprised of Jentu Technologies Diskless Computing Appliance and AVANT’s hardware-protected servers. AVANT’s secure NETWORK™ is ready for deployment in the most secure conditions including U.S. and Canadian Government Facilities, as a secure addition to VDI, standard desktop deployment, and centralized management.

AVANT secure PC provides system drive hardware-protected servers, desktops, and laptops. Once configured, the operating system boots in a locked state, where only the system owner can make changes to the system OS or Applications software and program configurations. AVANT’s secure NETWORK™ server requires a physical 2048-bit key to authorize the operating system or program changes. By performing a simple system reboot, secure NETWORK™ eliminates advanced persistent threats (APTs) that can compromise the security of an individual system or entire organization.

Key elements of secure NETWORK™ include:

SECURITY AND BUSINESS CONTINUITY

  • AVANT’s secure NETWORK™ servers have no hardware signatures or device drivers
  • No program or OS running on the host can detect, reconfigure, or disable secure NETWORK™ hardware security technology or write to the deployed workstations unless authorized
  • secure NETWORK™ allows for companies to use software after support ends (e.g. WinXP)
  • secure NETWORK™ does not require a database of known malware to operate
  • One secure read-only golden drive image per endpoint group
  • No persistent data storage at any point – data is stored and secured centrally
  • Reboot to restore any server or workstation to the golden image
  • No malware residue upon reboot to golden image
  • No loss of data upon endpoint theft
  • Risk free OS and application patches, updates and upgrades to all groups
  • Addresses 19 of 20 SANS Security Controls, and adds a 21st, Cyber breach mitigation
  • With AVANT’s secure NETWORK™, new compliance guidelines will need to be created
  • No provisioning to unauthorized ID
  • Simplified and effective network segregation, segmentation and disaggregated security
  • High availability, ALB, Round Robin and server replication available
  • Easily connects to all technologies and allows replication and deployment

OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCIES – LOWER TCO AND IMMEDIATE ROI

  • AVANT’s secure NETWORK™ acts as master image repository for OS and applications
  • Multi-location and multi-floor management with advanced web based management panel
  • Lowered TCO through simplified and streamlined configuration, delivery, maintenance and management of OS and applications
  • Desk-side support calls reduced by more than 70%
  • PC’s, servers and endpoints can be instantly reconfigured upon reboot
  • End user transparency – no workflow disruption when pushing out updates
  • Risk free software rollout – instant rollback to previous working image, no downtime in case of a bad patch or update
  • Deployments, upgrades, updates no longer require long planning/implementation cycle
  • Low cost hardware server requirements
  • Increase in PC lifespan – 200%-300%+ >10 years

PERFORMANCE

  • Non-virtualized desktops benefit from the full desktop processing power
  • Latency and lag free operations for all endpoints and servers
  • AVANT’s secure NETWORK™ has built in adaptive acceleration for 20X increased network performance

INDUSTRY COMMENTS ON JENTU PLATFORM

Brian Madden, Desktop Virtualization Expert and Blogger with TechTarget said the following:

“Jentu is disk block “streaming” where you take the hard drive out of a computer, do a PXE boot, and it connects to a central image which is run locally on the desktop. You get bare metal (i.e. no hypervisor) performance on your desktop, and with 100MB or 1GB networks and a bunch of drives and cache in your server, you can actually get better performance than a local disk.

The real advantage though is the central management, security, and the ease of reverting to a stable state (or swapping out an image) just by rebooting the desktop. (It’s like an instant version of Ghost, or a more secure version of Deep Freeze.)”

Grant Aitken, Former VP of Sales, Citrix for 10 year and VMWare for 10 years, “You succeeded where VDI Fails”

JENTU has developed a desktop management and delivery technology that inverts VDI , providing the best of centralized management desktop management, but leveraging the compute power of the existing PC that are already installed on 99% of all business desktops worldwide.

Unlike either Server-Based Computing (SBC) or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), the compute processes remain on the desktop, eliminating the issues of the server scale up, boot storm challenges, CPU app contention, I/O issues, and the many other associated problems of DC- based centralized compute models. (of either VDI or SBC)

Unlike a traditional distributed desktop environment, hard drives not required by networked PC’s, removing the single biggest point of failure and security risk in traditional PC computing.

Unlike SBC or VDI, which require a duplicate set of compute infrastructure (new high-powered servers) installed in the data center, Jentu leverages the existing compute power of existing PC’s allowing businesses to gain the advantages of VDI and SBC without significant extra costs and management.

Unlike SBC or VDI, since no significant backend infrastructure is required, the learning curve, training regimen, and management skills needed to deploy and run a JENTU environment are not significantly different than that currently possessed by most entry-level IT administrators.

However, like VDI or SBC, the desktop OS image management is central, reducing or eliminating the time consuming issues of distributed image/OS management, and dramatically improving data security.

INDUSTRY COMMENTS ON AVANT SECURE PC HARDWARE SECURITY

“Recently I wrote about “file-less malware” being the latest difficult attack to defend against. A daily reboot of this system would eliminate this threat.”
– Chandler Hall, Cybersecurity Evangelist, Sentar Inc.

“Never have we seen anything like this…The easy way to describe this one is Deep Freeze on steroids.”
– Dr. Peter Stephenson, Technology Editor, SC Magazine

“We put an AVANT secure PC system through a gauntlet of tests including installing Windows, configuring specific settings, all in Admin mode while using the authentication key that was inserted. After switching to User mode by removing the key, any and all changes quickly reverted to the last known Admin mode setting at reboot, just as advertised. These tests give us the utmost confidence that AVANT secure PC will hold off any unauthorized alternation attempts made to the system drive.“
– Warren Saio, Systems Engineer, Tutelar Group Inc.

“AVANT secure PC defied all expectations. Because no matter what was thrown at it, it couldn’t be stopped.”
– Charles Tendell, ABC and CNN’s cybersecurity contributor, The Charles Tendell Show “HACKED”

ABOUT AVANT SECURE PC

AVANT secure PC was established and officially launched in May 2016 from Huntsville, AL. AVANT was founded with the ambition of protecting and defense of critical infrastructure sectors, by adding a hardware layer of security to the ever-growing list of software solutions. By deploying computing systems with the AVANT hardware security technology, organizations can now effectively combat the growing threat of remote and insider cyber threats.

ABOUT JENTU TECHNOLOGIES

Jentu Technologies is a Toronto Canada based technology company that has developed a secure diskless streaming solution that eliminates the risks of malware in any operation and reduces operational costs of managing desktops by up to 90%.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, PRESS ONLY:

Email: [email protected]

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON AVANT’S SECURE NETWORK™:

Go to http://www.avantsecurepc.com/secure-network/

ADAM S. RAPER, VICE PRESIDENT/MARKETING

AVANT Solutions Group, LLC dba AVANT secure PC
Huntsville, AL
United States of America
Email: [email protected]

ABRAHAM S. MEGIDISH CEO/CTO

Jentu Technologies, Inc.
Toronto, Ontario, M3J 2M2
Canada

Tel: +1 (647) 891-7771
Email: [email protected]

AVANT-JENTU Press Release

Breaking out of the Alcatraz, and then breaking into Fort Knox right afterward

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Contestants at this year’s Pwn2Own hacking competition in Vancouver just pulled off an unusually impressive feat: they compromised Microsoft’s heavily fortified Edge browser in a way that escapes a VMware Workstation virtual machine it runs in. The hack fetched a prize of $105,000, the highest awarded so far over the past three days.

According to a Friday morning tweet from the contest’s organizers, members of Qihoo 360’s security team carried out the hack by exploiting a heap overflow bug in Edge, a type confusion flaw in the Windows kernel and an uninitialized buffer vulnerability in VMware, contest organizers reported Friday morning on Twitter. The result was a “complete virtual machine escape.”

“We used a JavaScript engine bug within Microsoft Edge to achieve the code execution inside the Edge sandbox, and we used a Windows 10 kernel bug to escape from it and fully compromise the guest machine,” Qihoo 360 Executive Director Zheng Zheng wrote in an e-mail. “Then we exploited a hardware simulation bug within VMware to escape from the guest operating system to the host one. All started from and only by a controlled a website.”

Virtual machines are vital to the security of individuals and large organizations everywhere. In server hosting environments, they’re used as a container that prevents one customer’s data and operating system from being accessed by other customers sharing the same physical server. Virtual machines such as the VMware Workstation hacked Friday are also used on desktop computers to isolate untrusted content. Should the guest operating system be compromised through a drive-by browsing exploit or similar attack, the hackers still don’t get access to data or operating system resources on the host machine.

Any hack that can break out of a widely used virtual machine is generally considered significant. The one described Friday is made all the more impressive because it works by exploiting Edge, which is regarded among security professionals as one of most challenging browsers to exploit. Typically, such remote-code exploits require two or more vulnerabilities to be exploited in unison. The requirement appears to be why the Qihoo team combined the heap overflow exploit with the Windows kernel hack. The description sets up a scenario in which malicious websites can not only compromise a visitor’s virtual machine, but also the much more valuable host machine the VM runs on. At last year’s Pwn2Own, contestants didn’t attempt to target VMWare, an indication reliable exploits were probably worth more than the $75,000 prize that was offered at the time.

Friday’s success underscores the central theme of Pwn2Own, that no operating system or application is immune to hacks that thoroughly compromise its security.

“A virtual machine hypervisor is just another software-based isolation layer that can have vulnerabilities in it that permit attacks to break through,” Dino Dai Zovi, who is co-founder and CTO of Capsule8, which provides real-time threat protection for modern infrastructure, told Ars. “Isolation layers such as sandboxes, virtualization, and containerization all add more work for an attacker, but none are perfect. Defenders should always assume that they can be broken through with enough work by an attacker.”

Dai Zovi was the winner of a $10,000 prize 10 years ago, the first year Pwn2Own was held. He won it for an exploit that fully commandeered a MacBook Pro.

The VM escape came on the third and final day of the 2017 Pwn2Own hacking competition in Vancouver, British Columbia. Pwn2Own is organized by Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative group. The contest attempts to crudely replicate the workings of a real-world zero-day market by paying cash prizes for hacks that completely hijack computers running fully patched versions of widely used operating systems and applications. This year’s contest paid $233,000 on day one and $340,000 on day two. More details about the exploits that fetched those awards are here and here. Contest organizers and participants typically keep exploit details confidential until after the underlying vulnerabilities have been patched.

This post was updated to add exploit details provided by Qihoo 360.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/03/hack-that-escapes-vm-by-exploiting-edge-browser-fetches-105000-at-pwn2own/

Five security trends to watch in virtualization in 2017

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Virtualization security is focusing on integration

Considering security solutions for VDI and virtualized servers,

I predict that enterprises will pay more attention to the smooth integration between various systems instead of the thorough examination of product features under a microscope. Security solutions that can be integrated into the virtualization infrastructure at a sufficient level to detect cyber-attacks in their early stages, as well as those that deliver malicious activity information to the components of the corporate environment to make quick decisions that isolate and analyze the threat, will be those that businesses opt for in 2017.

Through the integration between the infrastructure and security solution, enterprise-level customers are aiming to increase their reaction speed in response to security incidents, with the infrastructure and its automation platform executing management decisions and applying the changes. Enterprises will look for security solutions that can integrate with such infrastructure virtualization solutions (with automation inside) like VMware vSphere with NSX. Speaking of integration with VMware NSX, customers will prefer to keep using an agentless approach for server virtualization cases to preserve systems efficiency. Therefore, it is preferable for security solutions to integrate with VMware NSX in fully agentless mode. Moreover, since NSX has many integration capabilities, the ability to work via Security Tags and follow a Policy-based approach is a MUST HAVE for security solutions.

Last but not least, in constantly changing enterprise-level environments, there is always a risk of missing some virtual machines, especially offline ones, when executing an on-demand scan. Enterprises are looking at finding the easiest ways to make sure that powered off machines are not infected without powering them on.

Corporations to invest more in hybrid cloud protection

An emerging trend that will definitely gain more importance in the next five years is the transition from private to hybrid clouds. Corporate environments will be composed of private IT infrastructure and public cloud infrastructure. Both parts will be connected through protected communication channels – with the use of encryption among other tools – and managed from a unified console (or the control center). In 2017, corporations will have more systems that can and should be taken outside the corporate perimeter and placed closer to the customer. Public cloud environments make it easy to do this.

By 2020, the growth of public cloud infrastructure, and the resulting costs of the infrastructure and security solutions for it, are likely to increase by 2.5 to 3 times, compared to what the industry analysts demonstrated this year. Major cloud providers, such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google continue to lead, strengthening their positions and stretching out far ahead of competitors. They are doing this not only because of better reliability, availability or coverage area, but due to more sophisticated end-user experience and delivering a comprehensive set of automation and integration capabilities for workloads located in cloud.

Bringing a combination of on-premise and off-premise environments under a single architecture and unified management results in specific security requirements where traditional security solutions are a ‘no go’. This is because they do not provide a full set of security capabilities for elastic corporate hybrid clouds, nor can they immediately and effectively follow infrastructure changes and support business growth.

More attacks and more damage

The number of attacks on corporate players will continue to grow. It is not only that global companies use or do not use virtualization (at the moment more than 75% of businesses have been virtualized), but the question is whether they are able to watch all the processes occurring in the infrastructure with regard to the information security. Because of the complexity of large corporate infrastructures and complicated relationships among different systems within it, attack detection time will increase, along with the damage. This means that more and more systems will be in the high-risk zone in the next year.

In a large corporation everything is communicating with everything. It is like an organism – a very complex and sophisticated one. And, like an organism, if one of the interconnected systems is infected, then the infection is rapidly transported across the whole infrastructure. One can identify the symptoms and understand that something’s wrong, but to identify all the infected areas to find the source in order to eliminate it can be difficult. Especially if one does not get to monitor everything that is going on inside the systems. In such cases, an organization might not even know it is under attack for months or more. A breach can be damaging, but a breach that no one has noticed is much more dangerous.

Of course, it does not mean that solutions for virtualized environments alone can eliminate all the risks associated with the infrastructure’s complexity. Corporations need to implement complex security strategies beyond an outdated perimeter-based “Antivirus can protect me from everything” approach. There are tailored solutions and services available, such as penetration testing, APT reports, cybersecurity training for employees, and more. Kaspersky Lab offers these services in addition to its virtulization-native solution, Kaspersky Security for Virtuaization, designed specially to protect virtualized environment.

Ransomware continues impact on VDI

Speaking about the growing importance of particular threats, it is worth mentioning ransomware because Crypto-locker and Crypto-malware threats will become a headache for virtualized desktops.

Ransomware can hit a virtual desktop as well as a physical workstation, but when it comes to VDI, the risks are significantly higher. An infected virtual machine is linked to a data center, which means that localization and neutralization of the malware in virtual workspace might have an impact on all infrastructure and business processes. If malware makes its way to the golden image — a template used for creation of new virtual desktops — hundreds of the infected ones will be appearing every day.

Therefore, VDI protection task will go beyond the perimeter security to the level of each virtual machine where traditional endpoint protection solutions cannot help. Organizations will have to find efficient solutions, designed specifically for virtualized environments.

Mobility challenges call for unified security

The larger the enterprise, the more control it needs to achieve in order to make sure everything is safe and secure in how users interact with different business systems. Considering the fact that users are becoming more and more mobile and require seamless access to business services and applications from wherever they are, many corporations will find themselves implementing enterprise mobility management software (for example, VMware AirWatch and other solutions available in the mobility industry) for thousands of endpoints . This will require powerful yet resource-efficient security solutions to be tightly integrated with those enterprise mobility systems.

Problems with mobile devices fall into two major categories – data loss and possible hacks through a variety of malicious applications. While implementing VDI does reduce the risk of data loss and the prevention of unwanted intrusions, there are still challenges for unified security management to ensure the same high level of protection is available and efficient across various operating systems and devices for mobile productivity.

Article by

Vitaly Mzokov

stephendonaghy.com

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Source: stephendonaghy.com

NEWS: Absolute Data Destruction Inc AND Jentu Technologies Inc Announce - Spiceworks

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Source: NEWS: Absolute Data Destruction Inc AND Jentu Technologies Inc Announce – Spiceworks

Jentu Appliance Has Passed Security Audit for Use in U.S. Government Installations

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Today Axcess Canada Inc & Omni Systems, Inc. (OmniSystems) announced immediate availability of the
Jentu Technologies Secure Diskless Deployment Technology which is to be installed in U.S. Government
Facilities as a secure alternative to VMWare VDI.

This breakthrough technology provides a secure latency-free provisioning platform for desktops and server farms as well as mobile access. OmniSystems performed an architectural review and conducted internal scans of the Jentu Appliance along with vulnerability scans against the appliance using industry leading security and vulnerability scanning tools from vendors such as Tenable Network Security and HP.

Our team found no vulnerabilities with the product at the time of the scans. The Jentu Appliance provides a new way to manage data efficiently and eliminate the cybersecurity risks of Malware. Key elements of the product include:

SECURITY AND BUSINESS CONTINUITY

  • No persistent data storage at the desktop – data is stored and secured centrally
  • One secure read-only golden hard drive image per endpoint group
  • Reboot to restore to golden image to control virus and mitigate data breach impact
  • No malware residue upon reboot to golden image
  • No loss of data with endpoint theft
  • Risk free OS and application patches, updates and upgrades
  • Addresses 19 of 20 SANS Security Controls
  • No provisioning to unauthorized ID (Jentu can be set to silent, no OS provisioned unless in master table, additionally all end point computers can be bitlocked / encrypted)
  • Simplified and effective network segregation
  • High availability and server replication available

OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCIES – LOWER TCO

  • Jentu acts as master image repository for OS and applications
  • Multi location and multi floor management with web based management panel
  • Lowered TCO through simplified and streamlined configuration, delivery, maintenance and management of OS and applications
  • Desk-side support calls reduced by up to 90%
  • PC’s can be instantly reconfigured upon reboot
  • End user transparency – no workflow disruption when pushing out updates
  • Risk free software rollout – instant rollback to previous working image, no downtime in case of a bad patch or update
  • Deployments, upgrades, updates no longer require long planning/implementation cycle
  • Low cost hardware server requirements
  • Increase in PC lifespan up to 200%

PERFORMANCE

  • Non-virtualized desktops means full desktop processing power
  • Jentu adaptive acceleration for up to 20X increased network performance
  • Virtualization can be run on all end point computers or servers

INDUSTRY COMMENTS ON JENTU PLATFORM

Brian Madden, Desktop Virtualization Expert and Blogger with TechTarget said the following:

“Jentu is disk block “streaming” where you take the hard drive out of a computer, do a PXE boot, and it connects to a central image which is run locally on the desktop. You get bare metal (i.e. no hypervisor) performance on your desktop, and with 100MB or 1GB networks and a bunch of drives and cache in your server, you can actually get better performance than a local disk.

The real advantage though is the central management, security, and the ease of reverting back to a stable state (or swapping out an image) just by rebooting the desktop. (It’s like an instant version of Ghost, or a more secure version of Deep Freeze.)”

Michael Ball, CISSP, Guest Blogger ITWorldCanada stated the following:

“Remember that MAPS acronym from Citrix? Management, Access, Performance, and Security. Jentu is batting 4 for 4 on this. Management is still centralized. Access to images is local to the provisioning server. Performance is determined by the individual desktop hardware used, and the network connectivity provisioned. Security is ensured through encrypted iSCSI, as well as security and patch management of centralized images.

If you haven’t heard of Jentu, I suggest you go check them out now. You’ll definitely be hearing more of them in the future.”

ABOUT AXCESS CANADA

Axcess Canada was established and officially launched in September 2007 as a key distributor of a number of highly configurable technology platforms in the Loan Management, Enterprise Content Management and Network Management Space. This now includes licensing the Jentu Secure Diskless Deployment Technology. Since that launch Axcess have expanded to support clients in the UK, Europe and across North America. We provide complete software support for our global customers in many sectors including full business analytics to assist in product creation and/or optimization due to market or regulatory changes.

ABOUT OMNISYSTEMS

Established in 1993, Omni Systems, Inc. is a federal systems engineering, software development and consulting firm specializing in the development and integration of web-enabled systems. Omni Systems areas of expertise include cyber security, document and case management, full life- cycle software development and network infrastructure design and implementation.

ABOUT JENTU TECHNOLOGIES

Jentu Technologies is a Toronto Canada based technology company that was created after Abraham Megidish, who ran a Managed services company successfully for nearly 30 years, decided to release their software they developed to manage Desktop and Server infrastructure for their clients. Jentu has developed a Secure Diskless Deployment Technology that eliminates the risks of Malware in any operation and reduces operational costs of managing desktops by up as much as 96%. Jentu’s goal is to provide a low cost, very easy to use and operate, simple, robust tool that actually delivers on the promise of management, access and security, while at all times keeping the systems performing at their optimum.

 

My experience with Jentu – Robert MacCara

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With a large manufacturing plant (spread throughout Atlantic Canada with 5 locations) Jentu sounds like a good fit for us. We have Wyse thin clients in all the plants, as well as desktops for support staff and some of the manufacturing equipment. The idea that we did not need hard drives in any of the computers and that there would be next to no latency sounded like a pipe dream.

I spoke with Ben first asking about the opportunity to have Jentu present at our SpiceCorps. He quickly put me on to Abraham and one thing led to another, and next thing I’ve got a server setup for Jentu and a couple of client computers without hard drives operating as if they had local SSD drives!

There is nothing but professionalism and top notch support from Andrew and Abraham. They were available to me to help with my convoluted segregated network to keep the Jentu server from providing DHCP to the rest of the production network. A consumer Linksys router did the job to keep them separate.

Unfortunately our busy time of year has started (we make boxes – think lots of beer and veggies and seafood this time of year) and I just ran out of time proving the concept. I hope to pick it up in the fall when things slow down.

I was totally impressed with Jentu and the support I received. Depending on what you’ve already heard about Jentu, forget it all. You really have to see it to believe it. There’s an old saying that if it sounds to good to be true, it probably isn’t. Jentu is the exception!

If anyone wants more clarification, don’t hesitate to ask me.

Canada’s Most Awarded English School Implements Jentu and Reduces Desktop Support Calls by 90%
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Jentu’s diskless computing platform is implemented in early 2015 to manage the desktops at their Yonge St campus. Prior to implementing Jentu the IT department spent approximately 16 hours per month managing the desktops in 22 classrooms. Since the Jentu implementation the amount of time required to manage the same amount of desktops has dropped to 1 hour per month, a reduction in desktop support of 90%. ILAC’s IT team is now able to focus their efforts on more strategic IT initiatives, rather firefighting desktop issues on a daily basis.

Jentu has not only reduced ILAC’s desktop IT support but the end users have noticed an increase in performance as well. As Christopher Diesenger, IT Director at ILAC reports:

 

“After the installation we were extremely happy to find the promised speed has been delivered and Jentu works just like the concept did, any tasks on the computers are extremely fast, as many users have given our team feedback (feels like SSD speeds). The network/internet speed seems be unaffected with our current group of computers running Jentu on our network and we have had no problems since implementation. We are thankful for the results delivered by the Jentu team”.

About ILAC

ILAC is Canada’s most awarded English Language School, voted Canada’s #1 English Language School as well as one of Canada’s Best Managed Companies. With campuses in Toronto and Vancouver ILAC has over 18 years of experience providing high quality English language programs to students from over 70 countries.

About Jentu

Jentu Technologies Inc. is a Canadian based software company that has developed a unique diskless computing platform to cost effectively satisfy the need for speed and security for the estimated 400 million desktop PC’s being used in corporations and government on a daily basis. In centralizing both the software and system administration of the PC population, business using Jentu are able to dramatically reduce the risk exposure of the network environment, provide better safeguarding around data, and reduce overall IT operational and capital costs.

This Canadian company aims to turn virtual desktop infrastructure upside down

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First, some history. For the past decade and a half, Citrix and then VMWare have promised to deliver virtual desktop  seamlessly and efficiently to the corporate user. Maintenance and patching could be done on images on the server side, and when a user logged in, they would receive the updates. Beautiful!

Citrix first called it WinFrame, then Metaframe Presentation Server, then finally XenApp.

Anyways, it is server based computing, and they had the market share in virtual desktops and application streaming for the better part of the late 90s through mid 2000s. They used a proprietary protocol called ICA or Independent Computing Architecture to deliver applications or complete desktops to an end user.

This “thin computing“ as it was called could be delivered to a smart terminal or any of the existing desktop platforms of the time, whether it be Windows, MAC OSX, or UNIX/Linux.  It was going to greatly reduce the cost of the desktop through reductions in hardware requirements and maintenance.

VMware was working on a very robust server virtualization at the same time, and did not bring a desktop virtualization product to market until significantly later than Citrix. Their first product was called VMWare VDM (Virtual Desktop Manager).  This was later branded VMWare View, then recently VMWare Horizon View.

Years later, Microsoft also joined the game with Microsoft Virtualization Desktop Infrastructure.

Citrix positioned itself on a mantra it called MAPS: 
  • Management
  • Access
  • Performance
  • Security

Through centralizing the desktop images and applications, Management became infinitely easier. You didn’t have to install, patch, or maintain operating systems or applications on a myriad of desktops. You managed them locally on the server, and an end user would get the update when they logged back in.

Access meant that just about every desktop platform used at the time had the ability to render Citrix presentations. As long as they had adequate video capabilities, a keyboard, mouse, and network connectivity, it was likely that they could run Citrix ICA.

Performance was achieved for many applications that required constant backed or file share access. Two-tiered applications where the desktop application connected to a database or file share on the back end could be placed close to that back end and latency was practically removed.

Security was achieved through several artifacts of the technology. Firstly, your data never left the data centre. Merely a video representation of it in the form of an ICA session was made available to your monitor. Secondly patching was done on the image files on the server, and were inherently available the next time the user logged in.  Antivirus could be done from the backend, scanning all of the running guest images simultaneously. Updates would be immediate, and complete.

 So how come uptake is now less than stellar?

Today, there is little delta in cost between a smart terminal and a low end Intel/AMD based PC.  Without the cost incentive, adoption has slowed.

Network’s have become exponentially faster.  Today’s network environment has removed most of the latency issues chronically plaguing legacy applications.

Another entire tier of infrastructure is required to satisfy a typical VDI solution. High-end, multi-core server clusters with hundreds of gigabytes of memory are required to host these remote sessions.

Offline is not an option. In a typical VDI infrastructure, when your network saturates or becomes disconnected, your entire farm is unavailable. All workstations cease to work. And most importantly, today’s applications are media-rich.  High end graphics and audio processors are the norm on the average desktop purchased, but the server based computing model still fails to deliver on the performance requirements in this area.

So? What’s this upside down VDI thing you started with?

In 2006, Citrix acquired a company/technology called Ardence.  Ardence basically stood up generic workstation boot images and user profile drives, and provisioned them through PXE boot to your workstations. You got the benefits of secure patching and antivirus every time you booted, and if there were hiccups in the network, you were still operational. And the image ran locally on your desktop hardware.  No huge backend server infrastructure other than the provisioning box, and you could manage all the media performance locally!

Citrix has since rebranded this as Citrix Provisioning Services and focused it more on provision virtual images for its core line of business, the XenApp services as opposed to physical workstations.

Now, if you follow VDI or Citrix in general, the name Brian Madden is etched into your very optic nerves. He is the de facto guru of anything resembling virtualized desktop.

Read more: http://www.itworldcanada.com/blog/this-canadian-company-aims-to-turn-virtual-desktop-infrastructure-upside-down/99735#ixzz4HVidGM2z

or visit IT World Canada for more Canadian IT News

Source: This Canadian company aims to turn virtual desktop infrastructure upside down | IT World Canada Blog