Wanova releases Mirage 3.0

Wanova's CMO and VP of Sales, Barry Phillips, spoke with me about his company's release of Mirage 3.0. The target this time was highlighting that server-based virtual desktop architectures might not be the most efficient or the most useful for organizations.

Barry made some very good points about why organizations should consider Wanova's Mirage during the discussion. Here's a summary of what he had to say:

• Server processing, memory and storage is often more costly than that found in client configurations. While it might make sense to move certain desktop workloads back into the data center, this approach might be much more costly than keeping them on the staff member's own desktop or laptop system.
• What organizations are really seeking when they consider a VDI implementation is a well-managed, secure, highly reliable desktop environment, not an experiment in computer science.
• By capturing and encapsulating the operating system, applications, user data and user personalization, it is possible to provide a well-managed, secure, highly reliable client environment without also being forced to rely on "virtual desktops" that reside inside of virtual machines back in the data center.
  • Capturing and encapsulating the operating system, applications, user data and user personalization also offers the benefit of making it possible update a single component without forcing massive amounts of work on already overburdened IT staff.
  • This approach also makes it easily possible for all of this software to be deployed on new systems either to complete a hardware refresh cycle or to deal with a hardware failure.

• Will organizations really get the performance and reliability they require by upending their desktop computing strategy or will there be performance problems? Barry suggests that local processing would be a better choice for most workloads.

I asked why organizations should choose Wanova over competitors such as Citrix, MokaFive, Virtual Computer and aa few others? Barry suggested that Wanova's approach was far more efficient and cost-effective. He started presenting one case studay after another to make his point.

I believe that Wanova's key issue is that there are many competing approaches to offering virtual desktops, each based on a different technological base. All of the competitors are saying the same things even though what they really are doing is quite different. Wanova has to find a way to cut through all of the noise and get IT decision makers to try out Mirage. Then they'll be able to determine if this product will make their life easier.