Wyse Does Streaming?

Yes, Wyse has an alternative to standard terminal services and virtual desktop solutions. It is the most feature rich streaming product available on the market, Wyse WSM. The problem is that the Wyse Sales force has difficulty promoting this product because of the relationships with Citrix, VMWare and even to an extent Microsoft.
Today, the Thin Computing market is dominated by the server providers from Microsoft, Citrix and VMWare with a smattering of other offerings such as Parallels. These solutions are the most optimal solutions on the market for enterprise sized customers. However, they require some scale in order to meet the lofty expectations of 25-50% operating expense reductions in a timeframe which would allow an IT executive to keep his job. The other assumptions that these solutions make is that the infrastructure is in place in the data center and the network to be able to handle the transition from a physical environment to a virtual environment. This may change as public clouds become more developed, but it is not the case today for many companies. Additionally, companies must assess the impact if there is a catastrophic network outage or data center failure.
This is where streaming comes into play. Streaming is really an old concept called network booting, but taken to a new level. What occurs is that a small boot disk is booted on a client which has ample RAM, but no local storage. The boot disk can either reside on a USB stick, a small local flash or on a network boot platform which pushes the disk to the client on network boot. The boot disk registers the client with a local server (should be either in the LAN or very close to the LAN) and the server begins to stream across a company specific image of the operating system of choice (in the case of WSM, this is a form of Windows [NT, XP, Vista or 7]). Enough of the operating system is sent across so that the Gina can run and the user logs into the system. It is the user's profile which determines what comes next. The applications to which the user has access are placed into two categories: subscribed and unsubscribed. Applications marked as subscribed are placed on the desktop, in the start menu and/or in the quick launcher. These applications are now available to be streamed when needed. Applications which are marked as unsubscribed are placed in a menu to which the user has access for subscription.
While all of this sounds extremely difficult, it is actually not. To obtain an operating system which can be streamed to clients, the administrator need only suck that OS off of an existing client using a simple tool from Wyse. To create applications to be streamed, the administrator need only use a snapshot tool from Wyse to look at the difference in a system before an application was installed and after it was installed and instantiated. These components are stored one time for all users. In fact, Wyse has developed a tool which will allow a single operating system image to be used for different types of computing hardware. This means that one OS image can serve the entire company.
But the beauty of the product does not lie in its simplicity. Instead, it lies with a couple of major features. The first feature is how changes to the OS are handled. As each of you know, every time you run an application or attach to the web, your operating system files are changed, even if ever so slightly. Malicious items (and some COTS software) intentionally make changes to the OS in order to allow them to do their job. WSM allows the administrator to determine exactly what will happen to those changes. WSM stores a cache file on the local server which is providing for the individual client. This cache file contains the modifications to the base OS image that the user has made. The administrator can choose to wipe out all changes to the OS every time the system is booted (this is called Shared mode). Thus, the cache file is only there temporarily and can be reset by just re-booting the box. The administrator may choose to allow the user to maintain changes that they make to the system (the assumption here is that the system is not shared between multiple users). This Persistent mode allows changes which are not being stored in directory services to continue to persist on this machine, but not between machines. The adminstrator also has a mode in which changes can be made to the operating system and then stored back to the golden image. The administrator mode modifies the image directly and then makes it available to be pushed out to all users either as a patch or a completely new image on the next reboot of the physical end devices.
For those technical people among you, Wyse has also thought about fault tolerance. The clients can be configured with primary and secondary servers (which of course have to store the cache files on some sort of network or RAID shared storage in order to handle all the clients). The network streaming servers can be tiered in order to reduce the WAN traffic. The users can be configured in Active Directory or in LDAP. The applications can be configured to be automatically distributed for all users or all users in a particular group (that means that the application will be mandatory for the user so that they may not unsubscribe from it). Applications can be associated with a domain group to determine which users have access to it. Each application can be configured with an associated license key. The administrator can determine what to do when the license is invalidated (i.e. the 6th user when the license only allows 5 users). The event can be ignored, just logged or the user can be prevented from subscribing to the application until the license has been updated.
The end result of all of these features is a company full of devices which have no local storage, but have a completely secure PC environment without the headaches of managing the PC environment. Support cases are at worst a reboot of the device which results in bringing the user back to a known state.Application development is much easier because only one environment need be tested and the environment can be easily reproduced when issues with an application arise. Deployment is as simple as creating the application (or application update) on the central server and having that server perform a distribution to all network servers. License monitoring and conformity can be ensured by the administrator using WSM. The overall cost per user can be drastrically reduced, especially if the end clients are replaced by thin clients.