Pano Logic: Another way to virtualize your desktops!

Ashlee covering the story:

"The network is the bus now," Pano Logic CEO Nick Gault told us, in a meeting at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park. "You can't tell if you're connected over PCI to something a few inches away or over the network to something miles away.

"Any software is a drag at this point. It's a management drag and a security drag."

Gault sounds like he's channeling mid-90s versions of Larry Ellison and Scott McNealy at the height of their thin client lust. In all fairness, though, Gault's enthusiasm for this PC-replacement technology is shared across the industry, despite the historic failings of thin client technology. The likes of Wyse, Citrix, ClearCube, IBM, HP, Sun Microsystems, and Teradici all claim that bandwidth improvements, the painful prospect of Vista upgrades and the costs and security headaches associated with managing desktops mean that thin clients and blade PCs make sense all over again.

Companies have already done the small, desktop device thing, and they've already worked on running multiple PC operating systems on a single physical server. Still, Pano Logic think it's up to something unique.

So I went up a took a look at the site:

Users rely on the same hardware they've always had-their existing display, keyboard, mouse, and USB devices-which are now attached via the Pano to a virtual PC running on the server inside the data center. This architecture makes better use of hardware, eliminates software from the client endpoint, and centralizes the management of desktops.

The Pano Management Server, which sits between the Pano and the virtualization server, enables administrators and IT staff to enforce security and access control, including use of the USB ports. IT can configure virtual machines for groups of users or individuals; roll out updates, upgrades, and patches seamlessly; and perform backups of all PCs on their own schedule.

OK lovely pics and so on, but we need to see the real beef. I want two kind of virtualized desktops:

Mid-Range: Lite and standard version, the ones of a solid diet. These are slim 'n trim solutions. work best for "normal" employees and home users.
HPC range: Xtreme versions, that satisfy the needs of a developer, designers etc.

Anyways, check out El Reg's coverage and "how-are-they-different".

They have also been covered by WSJ. Indeed it is time for citrix and other major vendors to sweat! Hope they won't get gobbled up by a major vendor like HP or Dell!