The VDI market gets more crowded every day. All the biggest players in the space are developing, releasing, or rearranging their solutions to offer an end-to-end VDI platform to make the client consolidation through virtualization a viable option.
This is a space where Citrix, VMware and Quest/Provision networks lead, followed by aggressive newcomers like Red Hat (which acquired Qumranet and plan to use KVM), Pano Logic (which has its own platform), Leostream, Ericom (which supports many hypervisors but seems to bet on Oracle VM), Propalms and more.
Each one is trying to working to offer some sort of performance booster for the RDP protocol (while we all wait for Microsoft to enhance it with the technology acquired by Calista), or to completely replace it.
HP has some technology to push in this space so yesterday with a notable marketing exercise it relaunched its offering under the name of Virtual Client Essentials.
The new platform includes the connection broker Session Allocation Manager (SAM), a brand new Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) Enhancements package, and its own remoting protocol called Remote Graphics Software (RGS).
The bundle doesn’t include a specific hypervisor as HP doesn’t own one but SAM supports both VMware and Citrix ones.
Update: virtualization.info just received multiple confirmations that the new HP RDP Enhancements package is a licensed version of the Quest/Provision Networks Desktop Optimization Pack launched in September.
The product can score up to 8x compression for RDP sessions and it’s remarkable that HP decided to use it despite the existence of its RGS protocol.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been updated accordingly.