I just saw this morning that Microsoft have announced the Surface Pro 3… I must admit it looks quite nice. I have always thought of the Surface as more of a MacBook Air competitor than an iPad competitor, so it is interesting to see the comparisons drawn on the Microsoft website.
If you are going more after the laptop market, why not have a slightly larger screen? That makes sense to me. I’m pleased to see they reckon they have sorted the ‘typing on the lap’ issue that was really challenging with the original surface. However cool the keyboard attachments were, typing on your knees always felt like you were dicing with gadget death…
I haven’t had a go with one yet but hopefully I will get the chance in the near future…
Archive for the ‘Desktops’ Category
Surface Pro 3 – 12 inches of shiny…
May 21, 2014VDI – the final furlong
January 28, 2014It’s a running joke in our industry that every year since 2006 has been the year of the virtual desktop. In reality, it’s been a mixed bag over the years, and has been sold as a panacea when in fact it has been very use-case dependent.
I’m firmly of the opinion that we are gently moving towards a ‘workspace’ metaphor rather than a ‘desktop’ one – where a device-independent portal connects users to the applications, files, data etc that they need to do their job. With the acquisition of Mobile Device and Application Management vendors recently by both Citrix and VMware, it certainly seems to be moving in that direction.
In the meantime, however, pretty much everyone still has need of a good old Windows desktop in some way, shape or form for existing applications – which brings us back to VDI. What’s interesting is that over the last few months, the technology stack supporting VDI has matured to the point where I reckon we can deliver pretty much any desktop or use case using that technology. There are two important parts at play here:
Firstly, the maturation of flash storage technology. Whether an all-flash array, in-server flash, or hybrid, there are now options available, at a reasonable price, to help to drive the performance your users really need.
Secondly, graphics card technology. NVidia are doing some great stuff here in enabling us to dedicate graphics capability to desktop virtual machines – in conjunction with some clever software stuff from the VDI players.
Between these two advancements, we’re able to do some pretty awesome stuff. Admittedly our EUC team seems to spend most of their time showing off that they are able to play Call of Modern Warfare or some such rubbish from a field in the middle of nowhere, but we are finding some real use cases in architects and other heavy CAD users. We’ve been able to take a chunk of cost out of their bill for workstations – and give them an element of flexibility and IP protection that didn’t exist before.
So VDI might not be the ultimate answer – but until you can access CAD from the cloud, we can help!
Predictions for 2013…
January 7, 2013I normally post stuff here to make sure I like it before cross-posting on the Softcat website. This one made it onto the main site before I got round to sticking it on here, but for completeness’ sake here are my predictions for 2013 – interested in your views so please feel free to comment!
Clouds moving faster
It looks like ‘cloud’ is finally past the ‘trough of disillusionment’. We saw a surge of interest particularly in the second half of 2012 and we expect that to continue and even accelerate this year. IT departments are starting to realise that they need to spend more time working with the business on the applications they need to do their jobs – and less time worrying about the flashing lights in the data centre. Cloud doesn’t necessarily mean you have to throw out all your servers and storage and let your data out into the big wide world – your strategy might equally be to invest in the latest generation of pre-validated infrastructure stacks, complete with management layer, to take a lot of the pain away from worrying about hardware, firmware compatibility, multi-vendor support issues etc. The main thing is there are options…
What to do?
Evaluate your options, when the time is right – with the help of someone who can advise on a range of different approaches. On/off premise and indeed hybrid are all options. When acquiring new software, look at SaaS options alongside on premise deployments. Don’t forget connectivity – quite often overlooked when considering cloud approaches.
A big year for Microsoft
It’s going to be a huge year for Microsoft, with new releases of Windows, Office, Exchange and SharePoint either out or shipping this year. The desktop is the obvious place to start – with the impending end of support for Windows XP (April 2014) it doesn’t take a genius to suggest that we’ll see an acceleration of Windows 7/8 migrations. It will be really interesting to see the split between Windows 7 and Windows 8. My gut feel is that Windows 7 will be the default choice but the UI in Windows 8 as well as the wide selection of form factors (pick one to suit your working style!) will drive adoption for more mobile workers.
Outside of Windows, there’s a lot of interest in LYNC – and with the increase in collaboration features as well as a much more social approach SharePoint 2013 could be a hit!
What to do?
Familiarise yourself with the roadmap and work out where the technology matches the needs of your organisation over the coming year or so. It’s also worth taking stock of your licensing situation to make sure you’re in a position to take advantage of the new releases if appropriate. If you have Software Assurance in place, make sure you are taking advantage of some of the extra benefits – in particular Deployment Planning Services and Training Vouchers to help you get set for the roll-out.
Mobility
No surprises here but the pressure on IT to allow user-owned devices to connect will get even stronger. You can try and offset this with an appropriate form factor of Windows 8 tablet, but in reality your users will want to work on whatever device they choose/chose! Fortunately this year will see a range of technologies to help you secure these devices and deliver services to them. Our security team are talking about ‘The Return of the NAC’ – using network security to identify users and devices and route them securely to appropriate resources. This sort of ‘contextual analysis’ will also hopefully enable us to detect threats and infections earlier and respond appropriately. Now that this new mobile world means that we cannot rely upon perimeter-based security, maybe now we will start to see a ‘secure by design’ approach rather than making use of point products to plug gaps.
We’ll also see offerings, from Citrix and VMware among others, that will provide a ‘gateway application’ delivering access to a range of internal resources, SaaS services and native apps.
I’m going to go out on a limb here having spent the last year researching options – but maybe this year we will get clear and concise guidance from HMRC on tax treatment for individuals buying devices for work use, and for organisations providing a contribution towards such devices…. Fingers crossed, anyway!
What to do?
Now more than ever it is imperative to have a clearly defined mobile strategy. Email is the starting point – but it is definitely worth looking at how access to applications on the go can speed up the flow of your business.
Buzzwords of the year
No doubt we will hear (as we have every year since 2006!) that 2013 will be the year of the virtual desktop… Other than that, hopefully we will see a decline in the tendency of vendors to ‘cloud-wash’ their software. Now that the whole IT world knows what cloud is, that ceases to have much value. No doubt the ‘Big Data’ bandwagon will continue to trundle on this year. I rather think the value is in the analytics rather than the size of the data! The big one for 2013 will of course be ‘Software Defined’ – the concept that functionality previously in hardware can be managed from a software layer in an abstracted manner. This has been applied so far to networking, storage and indeed the whole data centre – expect to be flooded with ‘software defined’ products by the end of the year!
Maybe VDI could be the answer to BYOD, after all?
July 18, 2012I had an interesting thought regarding the use of VDI (hosted virtual desktops) as a way to enable a ‘Bring Your Own Device’ policy. Centrally hosted desktops, whether true VDI or session-based, can be a part of a mobile/ remote working strategy and can be a relatively easy way of getting existing Windows applications onto tablets without having to re-architect the application completely for native or HTML-5 mobile access. However, current Windows and applications are not really touch friendly, and the endless panning and scrolling etc required to use Windows 7 on an iPad or equivalent means that it is not really a viable solution for full-time working. I have long thought that VDI is perhaps a stepping stone (probably a ten-year stepping stone!) to having device-independent applications accessible from whatever device you choose.
What interested me though was the announcement of the next generation of Office – coupled with the imminent release of Windows 8. Both look to have the Metro interface (which I really rather like) and to be touch-enabled. The intention, obviously, from a Microsoft point of view is for all of this to work perfectly on a native-Windows 8 device, whether tablet, slate, traditional laptop or some entirely new form factor of which we can only dream.
However, if Windows and Office in the short term and most Windows 8 apps in the medium term are Metro – and touch – enabled, that just might change the game. If a centrally hosted desktop can present the touch interface, and this can be remoted to any device running an appropriate receiver or client, any touch device should be comfortably able to present and deliver a Metro/ touch experience. Therefore VDI becomes a far more usable proposition for delivering Windows apps to devices.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that if it works (time to get testing in the Softcat labs) this could drive significant uptake of VDI technology. All we need to fix now is the licensing. Oh, and if someone can magic up pervasive connectivity throughout the world that might help too…
Citrix acquiring ShareFile
October 13, 2011On my way down to London this morning and I saw that CRN appear to have broken the news of Citrix’s acquisition of ShareFile. The theory here is that using the ShareFile technology, your files will be able to follow you on to any device you use in the same way that your applications do via Citrix Receiver. Two points, really, from me:
Firstly – this approach makes a lot of sense and doing it right will help us accelerate towards device-independent, and therefore installed-OS-independent computing. I’m convinced that’s the direction in which we are eventually heading.
Secondly – this is going to be an interesting market segment, as competition hots up. The big players today are really DropBox (the darling of the technical community) and Box.net (who, rumours have it, were Citrix’s original acquisition target before ShareFile). It sounds like VMware are working on their approach here, with their announcement of Project Octopus. These two giants of virtualisation and end-user computing are again on a collision course. Interesting times!
Transformer Man…
August 18, 2011I got to take a look at one of our tech team’s new toy, yesterday – an ASUS Transformer tablet. Those of you who have read my brain-dumpings before will know how much of a fan of the tablet genre I am, and how much I love my iPad. I use a fair bit of Apple stuff, but I am absolutely not against all other vendors; however I hadn’t yet seen a tablet that I thought was the equal of or better than the iPad.
However, I was impressed with this one. It was fast, slick, seemed to work well. There was no discernible lag to the interface, which seems to be the case with many tablets. The keyboard/dock/extra battery worked very well, with hotkeys for certain functions and a really useable track pad. I was even able to play Fruit Ninja (badly, but that’s down to me not the device) using the track pad. And I gather the dock adds an extra 8 hours of battery, which is pretty awesome – somewhere close to 18 hours all in, apparently.
Downsides? Well, I’m not convinced the elongated (widescreen) form factor is for me – it wants to be in portrait whereas I tend towards landscape with tablets. It’s blooming heavy with the keyboard dock – unscientific measurement (holding apples in one hand, android in the other) suggests that the weight is roughly the same as my iPad and 11″ MacBook Air. I didn’t like the ouside coating, a plasticcy, sort-of carbon fibre effect. Although as Phill pointed out, it’s probably scratch resistant and does form a protective shell for the device when the keyboard dock is closed.
With access to a virtual desktop delivered by Citrix, VMware View or similar, this could be all the device you need…
I don’t think I will be replacing my iPad right now, but it’s good to see there’s some good competition at last!
Login issues with Mac OS X Lion
August 16, 2011As a geek, I had to do it. I know you are supposed to wait for the first service pack, or at least until they iron out the bugs. So as soon as it was available, I installed OS X Lion. Pretty good overall to be honest. I’m not sure I have worked all the new tips and tricks into my workflow yet, but overall I like it.
Recently, though, I have developed an issue whereby I am unable to log in to applications – in particular the official Twitter app (probably a productivity advantage!) and Citrix (definitely not a productivity advantage!). I tried all sorts, including deleting the apps and reinstalling (nice and easy from the app store of course!).
I must admit I was getting a bit frustrated. However, tonight I decided to fiddle with network locations – not something I was actively using, to be honest. I deleted the network locations I had, and added a new one – hey presto, I can log in again.
Don’t ask me why it works (hey, if you know why, please tell me in the comments!), but it did. So you know what to try if you have the same problem!
Total Value of Ownership and ‘Martini Computing’
June 30, 2011After the event with HP’s CTO I hosted, I was fortunate to be invited to an event in London with the President and CEO of Citrix, Mark Templeton. I was quite impressed with the guy, if I am honest – a really down to earth chap, which you don’t expect at the higher echelons of a large organisation. After the main event, which was a presentation and a Q and A, he was more than happy to have a chat over a cup of coffee, which was enlightening.
Some of the stuff he talked about resonated with me, as it was similar to the way we try to shape our own business. He was saying that while they are a public company and have a duty to their shareholders, they are more interested in building something interesting and powerful, which will deliver benefits to their customers – whilst having fun – than focusing short term on the needs of those shareholders. We try to do the same – focus on employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction, in our belief that the former drives the latter. If we treat our customers right, the rest will follow – I’m sure that’s an appropriate standpoint. We’re privately owned, but I’m sure Mark’s attitude will deliver for his shareholders in the long term.
Anyway, back to business… Mark was talking about the way in which IT calculate the return of spending money – or how business calculates the return of spending money on IT. This is generally based on TCO – total cost of ownership – and whether having a lower TCO will generate a return for the investment over a given time period.
The suggestion was that in this day and age, we should be looking at Total Value of Ownership – TVO – instead. This means concentrating more on the benefits an IT solution will deliver to the business rather than the pure costs.
I guess this is particularly appropriate in the virtual desktop space where Citrix play – it’s difficult to justify a VDI project on capital grounds over the cost of replacing PCs, but the benefits come in terms of, yes, lowered operational expenditure but also in flexibility of workspace, device independent computing (letting users choose their access device), home working, employee experience… We’re likely to role out VDI for our own users, and can see such benefits, as an employer which likes to be nice to its staff, as really important. I look forward to the day when all users can access IT systems securely using the device of their choice, wherever and whenever they want. Maybe we should call it Martini computing….