I spend a lot of time with our vendor partners hearing their messaging and I’m definitely sensing a theme over the past year. That theme is pre-packaged “solutions”. As a solutions provider, I wonder how many customers really want this? I’m not saying they don’t but I rarely get asked about it from our clients. Here’s some examples of what I’m talking about to make sure we’re on the same page here: VCE – EMC, Cisco, VMware Flexpod – NetApp, Cisco, VMware HP Matrix / Converged Infrastructure message Microsoft and Citrix have also joined in with this theme and even to the extent of an “appliance” approach in some cases Not to leave out Oracle either with their Exadata DB appliance ….to name few…. These solutions are not only pre-integrated and designed, but they also include a single support model so you don’t have to call several vendors if you have a problem. Is this what customers want? I can see the upside of integration and support, but do customers like choice more than single support and integrated solutions? Vendor lock-in is a fear of some customers as well. Some fear they lose negotiating power when committing at this level too. Many customers also like to be involved in the design process and if IT is considered strategic to a customer’s business they may want to “roll their own” solution to find some strategic advantage over their competition by finding niche products or other optimized combinations that don’t align with the large vendors product lines. We will continue to help our customers build custom solutions that fit their business needs and we will continue to add niche vendors/products that we think our customers want to know about. Part of our value is being more agnostic and seeking out unique solutions that compliment our larger vendors portfolios. We can be the glue, the integration and the support when building solutions that aren’t “packaged”. Ultimately the larger vendors will buy these smaller ones anyway. We just need to stay a little ahead of the curve There’s more questions here than answers, but just wanted to share some thoughts.

http://lifehacker.com/5613900/duckcapture-is-a-screen-capture-tool-for-long-and-multi+page-documents?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+lifehacker%2Ffull+%28Lifehacker%29

Who’s going to TechEd 2010 in the Big Easy?  Email me if you are!

dan.brinkmann@lewan.com

(twitter) http://www.twitter.com/dbrinkmann

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/27/hp_3_layer_storage/

They’ve had most of the components for years and recently acquired some of the missing pieces of the puzzle, but conceptually, this makes so much sense to me.  I had harped on HP to buy DataDomain, LeftHand, PolyServe and others literally 5 years ago and it seemed obvious to me that you could bake all these pieces into a seamless strategy by providing access a variety of “access methods” to storage utilizing standard hardware and virtualization technology.  I just read this post from the Register and I felt like I was reading an old article I left in the drawer from years ago.  We’ll have to see if/how this will all work out, but they need to do something to rejuvenate their storage lineup.

HDX MediaStream is our name for a set of Citrix technologies for delivering video and audio content from virtual desktops and hosted applications. The foundation of HDX MediaStream is the ability to deliver any media format from any media player over any network connection to any device. (Did I use the "any" word enough?) That’s what Server-Rendered Multimedia Delivery is all about. Then, on top of this solid foundation, we look for opportunities to achieve higher server scalability by offloading media processing to the user device when possible. For example, since Adobe Flash content is so prevalent and the Flash Player consumes quite a lot of CPU, last year we introduced HDX MediaStream Flash Redirection to complement our existing Windows Media Redirection.

Even for Flash and Windows Media, server-rendered multimedia delivery comes into play when network latency is too high for Flash redirection or effective bandwidth is too low for Windows media redirection. The SmartRendering feature of HDX Adaptive Orchestration selects the appropriate technology based on the dynamic network conditions at hand. Likewise, SmartRendering recognizes if the user device is not capable of client-side rendering.

Server-side multimedia delivery also supports alternative media formats and players such as QuickTime and Silverlight. The user experience for these media formats over a high bandwidth connection is very similar to client-side rendering, "just like local". XenDesktop 4 supports an out-of-the-box frame rate of 24 fps (just like at the cinema) and can be adjusted to deliver a full 30 fps if required for certain demanding use cases.

So, how do you get the best performance out of server-rendered multimedia delivery? Here are my top three tips:
1. Configure Progressive Display to compress images in motion.
2. Use Branch Repeater when delivering video to remote locations.
3. Use the new High Definition audio codec

http://community.citrix.com/display/ocb/2010/03/22/Tuning+HDX+MediaStream+server-rendered+multimedia+delivery

For those of you who have attended our Virtual Desktop training and are waiting for the slidedecks I told you I would post here I haven’t forgot, I’m just waiting for our 3rd and final event to complete before I post them…otherwise it won’t be a surprise for the last group.  So keep checking and expect the slides after March 24.