Hi all,

Intel has been working with various companies on implementing the concept of Dynamic Virtual Clients. As innovators among Harvard University’s IT community, the School of Engineering and Applies Sciences (SEAS) is an ideal environment for implementation of Application Streaming technology. Within SEAS, the office of Computing and Information Technology’s (CIT) CyberInfrastructure Labs (CI Labs) supports faculty, researchers, students, and staff by deploying and maintaining up-to-date, effective computing technologies.

With application streaming, applications are streamed on demand from the data center to the client, where they are executed locally. The goal of the scientific application streaming project, as outlined in the attached white paper, is to simplify the deployment of large, complex engineering and scientific applications to a highly diverse user population of around 1,000 students and faculty.

Initial results show install times decreasing from hours to minutes, as well as fewer problems caused by human error during complex installation and licensing procedures. As innovators among Harvard’s IT community, the CI Labs anticipates wider implementation of application streaming, both within its user base and across Harvard.

Check out the details in the attached case study.

The Duchess of Windsor once famously quipped, “You can never be too rich or too thin.” If she was a modern day IT director, however, she might be lamenting that neither is satisfactory. End-users want their PCs rich, powerful and mobile, and most IT managers would like to give them what they want. However, given budget constraints, nightmares of lost laptops brimming with customer records and the job of keeping applications uniform across an entire fleet of PCs, many IT managers might, albeit with regret, conclude, “Make mine thin, manageable and secure.” To many IT professionals, this may seem the best answer: equip as many end-users as possible with thin clients, and store the images and data on a central server where they can be maintained and guarded. As we know, that works fine in some instances, but today’s end-users are too mobile, too performance oriented and too stubborn to part with their high-powered, go-anywhere-anytime PCs. My Aunt Ruth, a duchess to me, used to tell me, “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.” As Intel’s PR guy for business PCs, that’s what I’ve also been learning from Mike Ferron-Jones about client computing. Mike heads up Intel’s research into a number of different models for client computing or what he calls “dynamic virtual clients.” The idea is to give IT managers what they want – the efficiency and security of managing client applications, data and even OSs on a server, but without a large datacenter buildout – while at the same time offering in-kind benefits to end-users – the performance and mobility they’re accustomed to. Simply put, the best of rich and thin. Mike accomplishes this with various combinations of virtualization, streaming and storage, all with a financial objective commensurate with IT’s dwindling budgets. If you’re interested in learning more, Mike has been asked to talk about “Dynamic Virtual Clients – How To Be Rich and Thin” at BrightTALK’s Virtualization Webcast, which airs here at 3:45 p.m. PST, Tue. Nov. 4.

If you can’t make that, there’s plenty to be learned on the Intel Emerging Compute Model Forum. Check them both out. As Mike likes to say (yeah, there’s one more) about dynamic virtual clients, “You can have your cake and eat it too.”

After much talking with end users and industry thought leaders, a group of us developed this utility the help people decide which compute model is best for a specific user segment. There are many items to consider when trying determining which compute model is best for your users. I believe this utility does a decent job at calling out the most common questions that help to determine the ones that would be well suited and lists the ones that may not be appropriate.

In this application, you walk through a compute model decision by answering a series of questions for a specific user segment (the user segment you enter is a free form text field and does not change the output). You are presented with a summary screen that will give you recommendations and concern areas based on your inputs. When you mouse over the compute model name, reasons why that model is or is not recommended are in the notes section.

I welcome any feedback.

-Jason A. Davidson

p.s. For compute model reference, please refer to this document: http://communities.intel.com/servlet/JiveServlet/previewBody/1518-102-1-1802/Public%20compute%20model%20discussion%20deck%204-17-08.pdf

PodTech recently conducted a video interview about the Emerging Compute Model Forum with Chuck Brown, Jason Davidson, and Mike Ferron-Jones from Intel. Here is the video, please give us any feedback you may have.

PodTech wrote:

There are now possibilities in enterprise computing that have the potential to solve mainstream problems and become widely adopted. These "Emerging Compute Models" are creating a lot of buzz, but also a lot of confusion in the IT community. That's why this video podcast focuses on Intel's Emerging Compute Model Forum. Jason Davidson, technical evangelist for the forum, says IT shops are experimenting with new ways to deliver applications and operating systems, but there's no consensus on the best model, or models, to use.

In this podcast, Davidson and his colleagues Mike Ferron-Jones, marketing manager for Intel's Emerging Compute Models program, and Chuck Brown, who directs the program, lay out the basic questions IT managers need to ask before choosing new compute models, discuss some of the pros and cons of different models, and preview some Intel and industry developments in the ECM space.