Quoting from Yahoo! Finance:
Serenity Systems International (SSI) has announced the release of their Serenity Virtual Station, SVISTA, family of virtual machine products. This is the latest entry into the hot field of virtual machine software which allows users to run multiple operating systems on their PC. A field dominated by VMWare and Microsoft’s Virtual PC.
“I have a lot of respect for the market leaders. But we have a value proposition which allows us to compete. Part of our strategy is to go into areas not well served by other products,” according to Bob St.John, Director of Business Development for SSI. “For example, some Citrix® users have tested the product and found it to be surprisingly responsive in that environment.”
This opens the door for organizations running Citrix on thin clients to extend the application support available. By providing these users with a complete desktop, including the complete operating system, applications which run on fat clients or additional versions of Windows, including NT 3.51, NT4, and Windows 3.1, can be supported. SVISTA also supports DOS, Linux, OS/2, and FreeBSD, greatly increasing the applications available to thin client users which, in turn, may significantly improve the return on their investment in Citrix products.
What allows SVISTA to be so Citrix friendly is the relatively small hardware footprint required. This is combined with an architecture which allows multiple VMs to run on the same hardware while providing a responsive desktop to the user. This has some value to every user but it makes SVISTA especially useful in shared environments, like Citrix and Linux Terminal Services .
In fact, the greatest interest in SVISTA has focused on its support for Linux Terminal Services. Likely because this provides these users with support for Windows and other non-Linux applications. “There is a very interesting presentation on our homepage and on http://www.serenityvirtual.com under Presentations and other information. It is called IBM EWWS presentation on Desktop Virtualization (PDF, 500 kB). It is a presentation by IBM which accurately represents how SVISTA is being implemented by IBM Global Services in several financial organizations in Germany and Austria.” according to St.John.
SVISTA’s “Virtual Client Pool”(TM), as outlined in the presentation, is unique in the industry and offers flexibility which many organizations, large and small, will find interesting. “Our focus right now is finding solid services partners. Groups providing services who can recognize the value these products offer to their customers. We want to contact them and move forward with a training and certification program which will help them to help their clients,” said St.John.