CloudVolumes recently announced a partnership with VMware to enhance ThinApp management
and performance. The company's new ThinApp Edition integrates with ThinApp
technology to leverage any VMware vSphere datastore and make individual ThinApp
packages instantly available to users logging in to virtual desktops, Citrix
XenApp, or Microsoft RDSH, in real-time and on demand through a service catalog. To find out more, I spoke with Shaun Coleman, co-founder and VP of products and marketing at CloudVolumes.
VMblog: CloudVolumes recently partnered with VMware. Can you give
us some information about the news?
Shaun Coleman: Our VMware partnership is a significant milestone for us. We
are working with VMware to enhance the management and performance of ThipApp,
including enabling user entitlement and drastic performance improvements over
streaming ThinApp packages. We've seen significant interest from customers in
this particular integration as the CloudVolumes solution simplifies management,
and accelerates deployment speeds and performance of the packaged
applications.
VMblog: And how does this offering and partnership benefit IT?
Coleman: IT can now scale without sacrificing on the benefits of
application virtualization and centralized management. We also wanted to
simplify implementation so IT can use their existing ThinApp packages with the
new CloudVolumes ThinApp edition. This integration also complements the dense
application environment of ThinApp to dramatically enhance application
responsiveness for end users. IT will see a significant reduction in the time it
takes to provision, maintain or decommission ThinApp packages. Additionally IT
will now be able to entitle ThinApp packages on a per user or group
basis.
VMblog: What are the specific features for CloudVolumes ThinApp
Edition that should be highlighted?
Coleman: Definitely - our objective with this integration was to
significantly increase the delivery and response time for ThinApp packaged
applications, while making it even easier to use. We make deployment very
flexible so that ThinApp packages can be deployed from shared VMDKs on any
datastore that VMware vSphere supports, including iSCSI and NFS, allowing for
the best possible storage to be used for that particular app. It also provides
centralized management so IT can manage a single virtual disk containing one or
many ThinApp packages, and share them across all users. Scalability is also a
very important factor and with CloudVolumes integration, the solution can
support over 5,000 ThinApp packages and 10,000 users per CloudVolumes Manager
with the ability to scale out to 50 CloudVolumes Managers.
There are also benefits that CloudVolumes ThinApp Edition
provides for the overall hardware and network requirements. It increases user
density per VMware ESX host by decreasing the amount of hardware required to
support end users. Further, there is significant reduction of network I/O, which
in turn increases the performance and responsiveness of ThinApp packages by over
100%, compared to hosting them on a CIFS file share.
VMblog: What can we expect from CloudVolumes in
2014?
Coleman: You will definitely be seeing updates from CloudVolumes in
the next few months. Be on the lookout for new product updates and support for a
variety of additional technologies. Stay tuned!
VMblog: And is there any other information that you'd like to share
with us?
Coleman: CloudVolumes is committed to making the delivery of
applications to desktop, servers and to the cloud easy and blazingly fast all
while helping customers save on infrastructure and hardware costs.
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Once again, thanks to Shaun Coleman, co-founder and VP, products and marketing, at CloudVolumes, for speaking with VMblog.com.