On living and working with cloud computing, desktop virtualization and green IT

As we become more mobile the need to access files remotely increases too.  This can be either to view the file on a mobile device or, as is often the case, to respond to a request from a colleague or customer.

This leads to the concept of a ‘personal cloud’ – your own collection of locations where your business or personal files are stored.  In this video shot at Mobile World Congress Barcelona, Daniel Barreto, General Manager of Wyse Technology’s Mobile Cloud Business Unit gives a demo of PocketCloud Explore – the app from Wyse that lets to find and access your ‘stuff’ when you are on the move.

Watch for the really cool tech preview towards the end: you have your mobile, your colleague has theirs, but the file is on your PC/Mac/virtualdesktop somewhere else. You use the Beam near-field communications feature in Android 4 (ice-cream sandwich) to share a link to the file by touching your phone to theirs!

Video courtesy of Laptop Magazine

The Kindle Fire looks set to shake up the tablet world. With its focus on delivering content from Amazon, it is a very different device to the iPad, but aggressive pricing and strong Amazon promotion are likely to make it a big success.

Why is this relevant to business IT? Small size, light weight and long battery life make tablets ideal devices for staying up to date when travelling. How many of your IT users carry PC laptops just to access email, web content and read PDFs on the move? If they are happy to buy their own tablet for books, movies and Internet content; why not let them access their work environment from this same device? You may find they don’t want the PC laptop anymore – and that’s one less for you to manage!

For tablet users the combination of a local apps and Wyse PocketCloud for secure access to corporate data and applications is a winner!

BYOC (bring your own computer) sometimes called BYOD (bring your own device) has been a regular topic that often runs in parallel to desktop virtualisation.  The idea that IT can delegate device supply to the user is very appealing.  The device could be an iPad, a laptop – I see an increasing number of Macbook Airs in business now that I’m pretty sure are not corporate supplied devices – or a home computer.

I’m doing it too – writing this piece on my home Mac connected to my cloud-based corporate desktop.  The Macs 24” monitor and fast performance makes it a great ‘thin client’.

But BOYC is not without its challenges.  Chris Wolf from Gartner has just written on what happened when a Windows update broke the VMware View client immediately disabling BOYC users from connecting to their corporate desktops and how IT needs to be ready to react to this.

Like many aspects of desktop virtualisation, BOYC needs to be viewed as an available choice,that may or may not work in a particular company or environment.  A good example where it doesn’t make sense is Hilton Hotels Work@Home programme.  They have created virtual call centres manned by people working from home.  It has given them great business flexibility, avoided a lot of capital costs, and tapped into a new demographic for call centre workers that includes older workers and parents at home who provide a really motivated workforce.

But this same workforce wouldn’t be a good target for BYOC.  They can deliver great customer service, but probably cannot easily manage technical issues on their home PC.  And if they can’t connect to the Hilton cloud datacentre, they cannot work.  Hilton’s solution is to provide them with Windows-based thin clients that are locked down and centrally managed to ensure they work first time every time.

BYOC can be a good complement to cloud-based IT environments, but potential cost savings need to be balanced against reliable IT delivery.

You can see more about Hilton Work@Home in this video.

Last week’s BETT education trade show in London provided a good barometer for virtualisation technologies in UK schools and colleges.  It reinforced the views I have consistently seen from teacher’s and ICT technicians on PCs in the classroom.  Teachers just want ICT to work, and work first time.  In a 40 minute lesson there is no time to resolve rogue PCs.

But why are PCs more of a problem in schools?  The demands of the applications are certainly part of the challenge. By the time you get to university the application set is pretty close to that needed in business, but in schools, applications become more challenging the younger the student is.  Old applications written before the concept of PC virtualisation, and sometimes even before Windows are still used alongside the very latest multimedia applications.  A suitably powerful PC provides the flexibility to run everything, but PCs struggle with doing both flexible and reliable.  Lock it down for reliability and you lose the flexibility, and vice versa.

The classroom environment is also getting more attention now.  Few schools want the neatly arranged rows of computers you can see here.  Whole class teaching is limited, with much more emphasis on groups, and the need to set each group a different task.  With some students using computers and others not, taking the class to a dedicated ICT suite doesn’t really work. ICT has to be integrated into the classroom without taking over the room.

Heat and noise matter too.  An efficient PC, powerful enough for classroom applications is probably using a minimum of 40-50 watts and generating virtually the same in heat – which is equivalent to the heat from a small child.  And older, more typical classroom PCs are using 80-100 watts which is equivalent to a teenager or adult.  So a classroom with 20 computers has a minimum of 41 ‘people’ in the room (don’t forget the teacher).  Students and teachers also need to talk over the noise from fans and disks.  So the classroom ends up hot and noisy – not exactly ideal for a learning environment.

This picture (left) shows a typical, current thin client installation.  Small, silent, thin devices with no moving parts enable computers to be placed around the walls leaving the central desks free for non-computer work, or additional laptop thin clients.

However, recent developments in desktop virtualisation haven’t made it any easier for school staff with ICT responsibilities to understand the alternatives to the PC.

There are a minimum of 5 different technology approaches that can be used; so where do you start?  My presentations at BETT were addressing exactly this question.   You can see my presentation here, and my next post will drill into the different approaches in more detail.

My iPad day in London worked fine. The only danger was there was more interest in the iPad than my presentation, but its becoming acknowledged that users will want to bring this kind of device into the work environment. A King Canute-style approach to try and turn back the tide isn’t going to work, so the interest was genuinely related to how Wyse PocketCloud could help in their environments.

Having used all the devices in the title to access my virtual desktop I now understand where the trade-off is:

With a laptop form factor, mobile thin client I can work at full speed.

The iPad has a similar size screen but a soft keypad and no mouse. I can still do everything, just not at the same speed. The Wyse touch pointer (right) certainly works. Outlook 2010 has a really detailed user interface, especially if you are using personal folders, and I was able to accurately manage my email over a 3G connection on the iPad.

With an Apple or Android smartphone, the smaller screen means a lot more scrolling, pinching and zooming but it is fully functional. As part of the preparations for VMworld Europe, I had to review a Powerpoint slide deck over the phone with a colleague while sitting in Edinburgh airport. Using PocketCloud on the 5 inch Dell Streak I could navigate the presentation perfectly well, and even make and save changes as I went along.