Cloudpaging: Perfect to fulfill the commitment to the user

As far as demand is concerned, the development of software distributed from a centralized server to the cloud is a great advantage promised by the application of streaming technology. However, Numecent, the chief executive of Endeavors Technologies, a new company, said differently that the promise would be significantly less than expected. He believes that the time has come for the technology to finally deliver on its promises.

"Many customers in the industry have been reluctant to trust these solutions after they have tried solutions such as legacy application Virtualization, block streaming (block-streaming download) or incremental downloads (progressive download)," says Mr Kent. The above schemes do not really deliver on promises, as they can only distribute 50% of applications, and the term "streaming" has been clouded by the fact that development has so far been made available to users. ”

Recently Numecent company has surfaced, and it plans to use its cloudpaging technology to change the situation; it claims that the technology can distribute 100% of Microsoft Windows applications (including applications that have plug-ins) and distribute them as a cloud-enabled version. and full control of the license. It can even distribute the operating system itself. This 姕 application does not need to be installed, and as long as the native x86 instructions are circulated, they can be run almost immediately on any PC, tablet, or even mobile phone. The application appears in the Start menu exactly as local software does, and all data is stored locally. Once the user finishes using the application, it disappears, leaving no trace on the target device. It does not change registry entries and does not drop any DLL files.

"With the help of cloudpaging technology, we can solve the problem of digital transmission that has long been overlooked, and provide consumers and businesses with a complete end-to-end solution for deploying virtualized applications," Kent said. We want to be as important to the software as Dropbox is to the data, but also to use a security that the copyright owner needs without causing a conflict of license control mechanisms. ”

Using cloudpaging technology to shorten digital distribution time

Kent said that Numecent's cloudpaging technology could shorten the distribution of digital distribution of any native software and other non-linear content by 20 times to 100 times times by first virtualizing the digital assets that need to be distributed.

Numecent came from a uci/darpa project in the late 90 that divides legacy applications into small fragments (called "pages"), which are stored on the server side and can be used, as needed, using the virtual memory snap-in (MMU) on the client, through http/ s to get, thereby "cloud" the legacy application.

"In the modern computer architecture, MMU is used to virtualize memory to reduce the memory resources consumed by the application," Numecent, co-founder and chief technology officer Art Hitomi, explained. By using virtual MMU in the communication path, we actually reduce the amount of network resources that are used to distribute content. ”

The application stream relies on the fact that only parts of the application need to be available at all times to ensure that the end user performs a feature. The larger the application, the more complex, and the richer the functionality, the more efficient it is to distribute with this pattern. With Numecent's application streaming technology, these sections are pages that can be distributed over the network as needed. For example, numecent can use a 66GB-size Hyper-V virtual machine as long as it gets 900Mb fragments. Once the client obtains such a small fragment of 100Mb, the user accessing the 10GB size application can begin to use it. The page is cached locally, so Kent says that later visits to the same page provide a user experience as good as a local installation. This also means that users can access the application in the offline state. The party distributing the application can control how many portions of the application are allowed to be cached on the local machine.

Heuristic predictive engine for performance improvement

To really improve performance, numecent a step further: using the predictive engine to push pages in an inspiring way, the predictive engine is based on the so-called "software genome" (software genome). The system generates a statistical tree that shows multiple user page requests for an application, and actually paints the "DNA" of global software behavior. It then infers the relationship between page requests and uses the predictive engine to push the page to the client before the client requests the page. In addition to allowing applications that are distributed using this method to respond as quickly as locally run applications, it provides a detailed number of details about how users are using the application incrementally, which may be a valuable detection tool for developers.

With this technology, even graphic-intensive applications, such as the game Unreal Arena, can be distributed to clean machines in an instant, running without a sense of performance degradation.

One of Numecent's clients is a multinational architectural and construction company. Eight years ago it faced a big problem before adopting the numecent (then called endeavors Technologies) solution. The company has about 2000 end-users: engineers and CAD designers, all of whom require high-performance workstations and need access to a handful of the more than 400 windows-based applications used in the company's work.

The chief technical officer, who declined to be named, explained: "Our end users need access to a large number of users ' machines by accessing an application to process a project." This becomes difficult to maintain. ”

Before resorting to Numecent, the CTO-led team had to deploy the software to each workstation and spend several hours configuring each application for use.

"You have so many things to do before engineers or CAD designers can start drawing," he said. ”

Application flow allows employees to work in minutes

And now, he says, engineers simply go to the portal site (using a single sign-on mechanism), select the project they are working on from the portal site, and then select their jobs and the applications they need, and the system distributes the application so that engineers can start working in about five minutes.

This, he says, has brought many other benefits. First, companies can link application distribution systems to their license management servers, which means that each license is tracked and managed, and software reviews become easy. In addition, he says, IT departments have somewhat avoided the need to reach end-user machines, as all patches and updates are deployed to the server hosting the application at once.

"There is no need to worry about changing the configuration for end users," he said. We have virtually eliminated all such calls for the Technical support department. ”

In fact, he says the company's overall support costs have not increased in the eight years since the initial deployment of the solution.

He also noted that Cloudpaging technology provides the company with a wealth of information about how deployed applications are used.

"We've got a lot of information on the back end that we can tap into," he said. We get statistics in real time to see how many concurrent users are using what applications, who is using them, how many times per day, how long they are used, and so on. We have recorded the completeness of every work we have done for eight years. ”