Intel, Citrix Team on Virtualization Page 2

The Desktop as a Service

Users will be able to access their corporate desktop from whichever device they find convenient, Dhingra said. “The desktop will be a service, it will no longer be a device,” he explained.

Intel’s vPro technology, now in its third generation, has advanced remote management features that let administrators log onto the computer and do maintenance even if it has been turned off.

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“We’ll give the IT manager the large-scale management and control they want of the image and policies, and, because we’re executing the image locally on the client device, you won’t have performance degradation,” Gregory Bryant, vice president of Intel’s business client group, said during a conference call.

This new technology will provide a comprehensive flexible environment from the data center to the end user device, Juan Vega, senior product marketing strategist at Dell’s Flex Computing group, told InternetNews.com. “With this approach, end users can use whatever devices appropriate for their work or lifestyle without putting the burden on IT in terms of management, security, access control and so on, that comes up when there’s the need for distributed management of data.”

It is that very concern of the added burden of management that has led many IT departments to oppose the introduction of iPhones into the enterprise.

Dell is providing engineering talent and physical machines to Project Umbrella, Vega said. “It takes everything from the BIOS (basic input output system) we’re developing to the CPUs from Intel to the software Citrix is developing to pull this together.”

VDIs from VMware and other vendors make it easier to manage the virtual desktop end to end, but they rely on the device being always connected to the network. The new technology being developed under Project Umbrella will not require that always-on connection.

“You’ll be able to take the virtual image on your laptop when you travel, then synchronize it later with the corporate model when you’re back on the network,” Ian Pratt, vice president of advanced products at Citrix’s virtualization and management division and founder of the open source Xen Project, said in a conference call.

This article was originally published on InternetNews.com.