[THIN] Re: Pano VDI Solution

Hi Steve,

 

The Net2Display standard is real and is set to be ratified later this year. Considering IBM's contribution to Net2Display I don't think I'd lose any money on a bet that they'll be one of the first implementers, but initially for blade PCs only. On the thin client front, Devon IT might very well be first out of the blocks and considering the relations between VMware and Microsoft, it wouldn't be all that surprising to see Net2Display support in VDM3.

 

I guess I've got to qualify my comments with regards to Net2Display and RDP/ICA because life is never totally simple.

 

If we think about what Panologic and Teradic are doing at the moment then it's likely that we will have no operating system as such on the Net2Display thin client devices, at least for LAN-connected devices (see comments about WAN below). That's pretty profound and will mean that we will finally have thin client devices are much less expensive than a PC with no compromises in the area of graphics, USB support and multimedia. Imagine what that will do for thin client-based technologies in education.

 

I think that Net2Display will be the killer protocol for LAN conencted thin clients and will very likely displace RDP and ICA. But multimedia support and WAN connectivity unfortunately raises some special challenges that will redefine Net2Display capabilities.

 

If we have a look at ICA as an example, you have separate audio and video channels and run them at different priorities. Throw in different compression technologies for audio and video as well  then synchronisation of audio and video becomes hit or miss, mostly the latter. 

 

The only way to handle multimedia redirection effectively is by redirecting the multimedia content to the appropriate player on a thin client device with enough buffereing to deal with bandwidth variability. That unfortunately results in increasing the complexity of the operating system at the client end with a multitude of codecs, players and IE plugins. If you've got embedded XP or XP/Vista running on all your thin client machines just to support multimedia, at least some of the promised TCO savings compared to managing traditional fat clients get swallowed up managing the thin client device operating systems.

 

The challenge for the Net2Display protocol is that playing multimedia content on the thin client device is still the most efficient way to do it in terms of bandwidth utilization even with stuff like lossy compression. That doesn't matter on a LAN or where you've got lots of bandwidth, but it does matter on a high-latency and slow or variable bandwidth WAN connections.

 

We also haven't addressed latency effects that need stuff like a local text echo, local cursor, additional TCP/IP optimization and so on to make an acceptable user experience. That's going to require somewhat more intelligence at the thin client end and means that at the least we will need a minimal latency-aware operating system that supports multimedia players.

 

So for WAN connected thin clients, Net2Display probably isn't going to provide the functionality needed unless it's a piece of client software running on an operating system that supports multimedia redirection and all the other latency reduction stuff. That sounds a lot like what we've got already with ICA and RDP. 

 

I'd better finish rambling now with a bit of a summary.

 

Net2Display has a very good chance of dominating the LAN-connected thin client market. While I'm not discounting the effects of the Callista technology on RDP, Microsoft is going to have to do something really interesting on the thin client o.s. licensing side to make RDP competitive in that area.

 

The outcome in the WAN connectivity area is still wide open. Provision Network's enhanced RDP is catching up with ICA and unless Citrix do something really smart like WANScaler based ICA bitmap caching to give ICA a profound advantage, the ICA/RDP comparison is becoming irrelevant. Combine Net2Display with latency reduction and multimedia redirection and you've got a LAN and WAN solution that actually has a good chance to replace RDP and ICA.

 

regards,

 

Rick

 

--
Ulrich Mack
Quest Software
Provision Networks Division