Citrix Systems Inc. announced on Wednesday it has finalized the purchase of Mountain View, Calif.-based RingCube Technologies Inc., a vendor of personalization software for virtual desktop infrastructure.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Giving users the ability to set personal preferences on a virtual desktop housed in a data centre “really feels like the desktop is theirs (as much as) a physical desktop,” said John Fanelli, vice-president of product marketing for Citrix’s enterprise desktops and applications division. “(And) IT really likes the idea of VDI” for the control, maintenance, management and security advantages.
There are two models of VDI, according to Fanelli. Dedicated VDI effectively stores each desktop as its own virtual machine image, while pooled VDI, often used in call centres, shares a single desktop image among all desktops.
Dedicated VDI is much more expensive to implement and manage, since each image contains its own operating system and applications. But while pooled VDI is cheaper, users also get a fresh screen every time they log on; their preferences, files and applications aren’t stored.
RingCube’s technology allows an enterprise to use a single, pooled disk image, but consult a preference profile called a vDesk to recall preferences, data and applications on the desktop. The information is stored in Microsoft Corp.’s VHD format.
“This technology really simplifies the move from physical to virtual,” Fanelli said.
He called the technology “complementary” to Citrix’s existing universal profile manager.
