OpenStack Manufacturer Piston Release Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

Piston Cloud Computing is the first OpenStack based company to support Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), thus bringing OpenStack into the dominant VDI market.

Piston's VDI, which is scheduled for release in Tuesday, is provided through cooperation with gridcentric companies. Gridcentric is a start-up in Toronto, specializing in the development of VDI technology, and ironically, the company has been supported by Jie (Citrix). So far, VDI technology is supported only by piston cloud operating system products in OpenStack. However, Piston chief executive Choshua Mckaiti (Joshua mckenty) says VDI and Daas (desktop as services) are natural technological advances. The OpenStack community, including HP, Dell, Rackspace and IBM, may expect to do it in the near future.

McKenty says the virtual desktop allows for centralized management of a number of desktop computers. These desktops can be accessed through thin client computers or some gateway applications. A growing number of users are asking about the functionality of the virtual desktop, in part because of the mobile device management approach that addresses the trend of BYOD (self-contained devices).

Gridcentric uses a cloned technology to drive its VDI technology called virtual Memory Stream (VMS). The company says this technology allows for faster deployment and more efficient management of virtual desktops. The technology is a research effort by the University of Toronto and Carnegie Mellon University. Gridcentric uses this technique to store a desktop computer host on the server. This desktop host will be cloned and released as a virtual desktop to the user. Previously in VDI, each new desktop required a new boot configuration. This will consume time and compute resources.

Because a similar application runs on the desktop for most employees in an enterprise setting, the gridcentric cloning method retains ram memory and computing power only for the sole component of the desktop, McKenty said. McKenty is also excited about application cases outside of VDI. Similar cloning ideas can be used for any number of services, such as load balancers. This process allows hundreds of desktops to be created and delivered within a few seconds. This VDI application case is really exciting. We have always seen a lot of demand. However, cost and complexity hinder the application of this technology.

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Piston is one of the major OpenStack distributors to date. Cooperation with piston is also an interesting problem for gridcentric. One of Gridcentric's investors is Si Jie. Jie is not only a leading virtual desktop provider with its Xen desktop products, but also a OpenStack competitor with its Cloudstack products. VMware view is another popular VDI product. Eric Shefler, chief executive of Gridcentric Eric Cheffolt, said there had been some talk about Jie's use of VMS for its xendesktop products. However, this technology is not applied to Usije's Apache Cloudstack Open source Cloud deployment project.