Pano System 3.0 Backs Win7, Empowers Users
Zero-Client desktop virtualization provider Pano Logic released Pano System 3.0, which includes support for Windows 7, puts more control over virtual desktops in the hands of admins and end users, and enables closer integration with VMware View.
On the Windows 7 side, Pano Logic is facilitating the move from Windows XP to Windows 7 by allowing users to choose at logon whichever environment they want to work in. The company now supports Windows 7 Enterprise, Professional and Ultimate editions with no price change. In support of its Windows 7 product, Pano quotes a happy user saying he realized "dramatic savings" out of the box with Pano, and he "looks forward to the day when I've finished swapping out all our company-wide PCs for Pano Logic virtual desktops."
Pano further announced a failover capability that allows customers to deploy more than one Pano Manager virtual appliance and provide active-passive failover clusters across them. According to VP of engineering, Parmeet Chaddha, "This capability starts to become more critical as customers deploy Pano broadly and they start looking for some semblance of high availability on the backend."
When it comes to giving admins and end users more control over their virtual desktops, Pano System 3.0 delivers workflow-like control via an intuitive interface that enables users, for example, to perform such actions as trashing and recreating their Windows VMs, which allows them to keep working and save the problem VMs for subsequent analysis. V 3.0 also makes it possible for users to maintain and click their way among multiple VMs.
"A lot of these actions have been put in the hands of users pretty much from the logon screen," Chaddha notes, adding that Pano System 3.0 also allows admins to allocate control of these actions. He also cites responding to "a very big request" from admins regarding production VMs, saying Pano Logic not only provides the state of any given VM--e.g. whether it's powered on or not--but also gives some visibility into the state of support tools, such as those offered by VMware, that may need to be updated, and allows admins to update them from the Pano Management interface.
Pano says 3.0's enhanced View integration with VMware View Manager bolsters the value of their zero client approach by easing the management of heterogeneous desktop environments. According to Pano, "IT administrators can now use a single, seamless and comprehensive console through VMware View for managing small to large-scale virtual desktop deployments of infrastructures comprising a mix of both Pano Logic virtual desktops and PCs or thin clients."
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 04/28/2010 at 12:48 PM