[THIN] Re: Pano VDI Solution
- From: "Rick Mack" <ulrich.mack@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 8 Jun 2008 07:25:01 -0400
Hi Steve,
The Net2Display standard is real and is set to be ratified later this year.
Considering IBM's contribution to Net2Display I don't think I'd lose any
money on a bet that they'll be one of the first implementers, but initially
for blade PCs only. On the thin client front, Devon IT might very well be
first out of the blocks and considering the relations between VMware and
Microsoft, it wouldn't be all that surprising to see Net2Display support in
VDM3.
I guess I've got to qualify my comments with regards to Net2Display and
RDP/ICA because life is never totally simple.
If we think about what Panologic and Teradic are doing at the moment then
it's likely that we will have no operating system as such on the
Net2Display thin client devices, at least for LAN-connected devices (see
comments about WAN below). That's pretty profound and will mean that we will
finally have thin client devices are much less expensive than a PC with no
compromises in the area of graphics, USB support and multimedia. Imagine
what that will do for thin client-based technologies in education.
I think that Net2Display will be the killer protocol for LAN conencted thin
clients and will very likely displace RDP and ICA. But multimedia support
and WAN connectivity unfortunately raises some special challenges that will
redefine Net2Display capabilities.
If we have a look at ICA as an example, you have separate audio and video
channels and run them at different priorities. Throw in different
compression technologies for audio and video as well then synchronisation
of audio and video becomes hit or miss, mostly the latter.
The only way to handle multimedia redirection effectively is by
redirecting the multimedia content to the appropriate player on a thin
client device with enough buffereing to deal with bandwidth variability.
That unfortunately results in increasing the complexity of the operating
system at the client end with a multitude of codecs, players and IE
plugins. If you've got embedded XP or XP/Vista running on all your thin
client machines just to support multimedia, at least some of the promised
TCO savings compared to managing traditional fat clients get swallowed up
managing the thin client device operating systems.
The challenge for the Net2Display protocol is that playing multimedia
content on the thin client device is still the most efficient way to do it
in terms of bandwidth utilization even with stuff like lossy compression.
That doesn't matter on a LAN or where you've got lots of bandwidth, but it
does matter on a high-latency and slow or variable bandwidth WAN
connections.
We also haven't addressed latency effects that need stuff like a local text
echo, local cursor, additional TCP/IP optimization and so on to make an
acceptable user experience. That's going to require somewhat more
intelligence at the thin client end and means that at the least we will need
a minimal latency-aware operating system that supports multimedia players.
So for WAN connected thin clients, Net2Display probably isn't going
to provide the functionality needed unless it's a piece of client software
running on an operating system that supports multimedia redirection and all
the other latency reduction stuff. That sounds a lot like what we've got
already with ICA and RDP.
I'd better finish rambling now with a bit of a summary.
Net2Display has a very good chance of dominating the LAN-connected thin
client market. While I'm not discounting the effects of the Callista
technology on RDP, Microsoft is going to have to do something really
interesting on the thin client o.s. licensing side to make RDP competitive
in that area.
The outcome in the WAN connectivity area is still wide open. Provision
Network's enhanced RDP is catching up with ICA and unless Citrix do
something really smart like WANScaler based ICA bitmap caching to give ICA a
profound advantage, the ICA/RDP comparison is becoming irrelevant. Combine
Net2Display with latency reduction and multimedia redirection and you've got
a LAN and WAN solution that actually has a good chance to replace RDP and
ICA.
regards,
Rick
--
Ulrich Mack
Quest Software
Provision Networks Division
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