Qumranet, the creator, maintainer and global sponsor of the KVM Open Source Hypervisor Project, has dropped out of stealth mode to offer its answer into the seamingly very crowded VDI or virtual desktop infrastructure market where desktops are served up to end users from a centrally controlled server infrastructure in the datacenter. Established at the end of 2005, Qumranet has around 45 employees and was co-founded by CTO Moshe Bar, one of the co-founders of both XenSource and Qlusters.

After a two year quiet period, Qumranet dropped into the scene at DEMOfall '07, where it premiered its technology strategy and unveiled its first commerical product called Solid ICE (Independent Computing Environments).

Solid ICE is the first virtualization product offered that runs on top of the KVM virtualization platform that was added into Linux kernel 2.6.20 back in October of 2006. The product allows an organization to host what the company believes is thousands of Windows or Linux desktops running as KVM virtual machines on servers in the datacenter.

To complete its VDI solution, the company has also created its own proprietary remote protocol that it calls SPICE (Simple Protocol for Independent Compting Environments) that provides a way to manage connections between the server and the virtualized desktops. SPICE has been optimized for virtual desktop environments and provides users with a superior interactive experience, especially with respect to graphics and multimedia. In addition to SPICE, the company has stated that it will also support Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).

Like other VDI solutions, Solid ICE provides usefulness within a number of scenarios such as: providing a secure desktop to outsourced groups or contract workers; enabling developers to self-provision machines as required; running legacy applications without having to maintain older equipment; providing clean machines to training classes without long provisioning times; and avoiding painful desk side PC upgrades.

"Virtualization is changing the way we interact with computing resources. We have only seen the tip of the iceberg in terms of applications for virtualization," said Benny Schnaider, Qumranet's CEO and co-founder. "Qumranet's new desktop virtualization solution, Solid ICE, is taking computing to the next level by separating the user environment from the underlying hardware. This separation creates a wide variety of very attractive use cases and solves many of today's desktop provisioning and management problems."

The product is expected to be generally available later this year.

Posted by David Marshall on September 29, 2007 01:47 PM