At different times of the year, IT management, vendors, and others get together at the Donald E. Stevens Convention Center in Chicago, IL to share strategies, experience, and real-world information pertinent to the diverse set of technologies which are top of mind for all of us. You can visit their link here: http://www.campconferences.com/
I have spoken at several Camp IT events, one as recently as April 28th, 2011 on a variety of Cloud topics. Interestingly enough, in March I was talking about Cloud Security and warning the 200+ CIO’s and IT management in the room that not all Cloud providers are created equal. Cloud’s do go down, and urged them to start asking the hard questions before choosing a Cloud Provider to host a part or perhaps all of their business. A month later of course, Amazon had gone down for 4 days and the room was abuzz with questions around the efficacy of Cloud, particularly around technologies that everyone assumed were solid (the hosting of virtual servers & cloud storage!). Now we know that not only was there an outage but Amazon announced they had in some instances, completely lost customer data. See our take on this debacle here: http://www.dincloud.com/blog/Dont-Blame-Amazon-Ask-How-You-Can-Protect-Yourself
The April 28th event was no less amusing, now that it was focusing on the next frontier: desktop virtualization. A diverse set of speakers tackled the topic 1 hour at a time as the day went on. I was last, in the 3pm slot just before a panel discussion was conducted. It’s always fascinating being the guy in the crowd for a bit. Various speakers got up there with a wide range of pitches. Some seemed downright negative about desktop virtualization — no doubt reflecting the frustrating and failure the crowd had already experienced across numerous products numerous times in the do-it-yourself model which I’ve now dubbed the do-yourself-in model. Complaints ranged from “it’s not mature yet”, to “you can’t save money but who cares, others made me wince, laugh, and occassionally a wild errant idea would invade my dulled senses resulting in an inexplicable urge to boo and throw fruit (fortunately through supreme discipline, I suppressed such behaviors). This was shared by other spectators who would randomly nudge me and say something like “do you believe this guy?!”. Altogether, love it, hate it, or dazed/confused by it, the diversity of opinion and presentation is what makes Camp IT great. It’s definitely not a scripted, mind police approved, politically correct, booth babe, xylophone clanging event which is so common in our industry today.
So when it became my turn to speak, I figured hey, enough talk about Hosted Virtual Desktops (“HVD”). I’d heard enough yak blah yak myself all day so it was time for action. I pulled up http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest and validated what everyone with a physical laptop in the room already knew: the convention center Internet wireless was less than stellar at 300k down and 200k up. Next, I duly informed the crowd I’d be logging into my dinCloud Hosted Virtual Desktop 2,000 miles away in our LAXdc and then surfing some youtube.com videos. At this point, I clearly had everyone’s attention. Most leaned back in their chair and got this smirk like they had just won front row tickets to witness a car wreck. After a whole day of hearing excuses, could it be? The fabled winged horse would fly at last?
And it flew! I toured the crowd of 200 not through a demo, but my very own Hosted Virtual Desktop. The desktop I use every single day to get my job done. From home with 2 monitors, at work with 2 monitors, via Android tablet, IPAD 1 & 2, Macbook laptop, and more. What better “demo” is there than the guy who is using the product! Office 2010, email, other apps, some virtualized, some I loaded myself (user installed), ability to spin up Win7 desktops atop VMware infrastructure (without View!), or Hyper-V or Parallels, and do it with Microsoft Terminal Servers (RDS) and to all of these platforms utilizing native Microsoft protocols like RDP and/or RemoteFX while optimizing them by 62% to deliver 1080p full screen videos flawlessly even at distances of 2,000 miles on bandwidth that left much to be desired? Priceless!!
If you haven’t demo’d dinCloud? You haven’t lived. And with $0 CAPEX and average 23-55% OPEX savings where we build it for you onsite (Private Cloud) or offsite (Public Cloud)? It’s the biggest no brainer in virtualization today. So why wait? Talk to us TODAY!
PS: I wrote this blog on my virtual desktop. Call us today can be viewing it on your own HVD, soon!
– Dr. Cloud
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