Wanova Launch a Turnkey Desktop Cloud Solution for MSPs and Cloud Providers
At the moment, whilst many managed service providers (MSPs) and cloud service providers want to enter the desktop management marketplace, doing so profitably is another matter entirely as management overheads and support seems too complicated and difficult to maintain. Well, that could be about to change with the launch of a new turnkey desktop cloud solution from Wanova that has been designed specifically for this area.
Recently Barry Phillips, Chief Marketing Officer at Wanova, described their new solution, known as Mirage, as an integrated platform capable of handling everything from image and patch management to complete data recovery for entire machines, to Windows 7 migration and hardware refreshes, to software and hardware asset reporting… quite a claim.
Phillips explained, “Mirage allows MSPs to have integrated break-fix in their product. They can do everything centrally instead of sending people to site. MSPs get the ability to centrally manage desktops, and users get the ability to use real PCs.”
Wanova have taken the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) concept of collating everything into the network operations centre for easier management, and applied it to desktop management. This approach provides three primary advances for MSPs and cloud service providers who want to expand into desktop management:
• It opens up new revenue streams by enabling new services to be managed from a single platform.
• It is a centrally cloud-managed solution, with layering, for desktop image management. Base images on a PC can be replaced, leaving the rest of the machine untouched, remote fixes are efficient: the image is rolled back to the last known snapshot and only the requirements for the repair are pushed off to the user.
• Mirage makes desktop management profitable for MSPs, quite an important aspect!
Wanova Mirage has the capability to centralise each desktop image in the data centre for management and protection purposes, allowing the execution of desktop images on the end points for a much better user experience and offline access, optimising the synchronisation between the end points and the data centre across a WAN. Its unique patented architecture is optimised for mobile laptop users, fully supports offline use and offers layered image management to maintain personalisation, all without the need or use of a hypervisor, allowing for:
• Multi-level network de-duplication.
• Branch reflector, significantly reducing bandwidth requirements and download times.
• Predictive desktop streaming over WAN.
• Storage optimisations.
• Client integration.
• Offline enabled.
• Image layering.
Deployment is simple, taking less than 5 minutes to integrate on any physical or virtual device that is Windows-compatible and all user files, settings and applications are preserved during installation. Once installed, Wanova Mirage clones the desktop image in the data centre, leveraging state-of-the-art network and storage optimisation techniques. A base image is created using a reference device, i.e. a virtual machine, which contains the OS, the system software and commonly-used, core applications. The solution also carries out:
• Single-image maintenance.
• Continuous synchronisation.
• Fast restore.
• Repair of a multifunctioning PC.
• Mass hardware refresh.
• Mass, in-place windows migration.
Developed to handle large scale deployments and supports clustering for both scalability and high availability, at the heart of the system is the Wanova Mirage server with the Mirage Client embedded inside the managed OS, which acts as a two-way cache. The Mirage Manager is the management console and the main interface for administering desktops, including monitoring, deployment/provisioning, restore and any on-going maintenance.
Written by: Allie Philpin