Technology

Virtualization Technologies Everywhere

Pano Logic eliminates desktop computers

By Alexandru Pancescu, Hardware Editor

27th of August 2007, 12:55 GMT

Adjust text size:

Virtualization technologies are nothing new on the computer market, but the startup company Pano Logic is really bringing them to the next level by creating a system that may very well make desktop computers in offices and small and medium businesses as obsolete as the wooden abacus. Pano Logic simply proposes an alternative radical design that relies heavily of virtualization technologies and thin client computing.

Combining the

best of both worlds, Pano Logic created an all hardware appliance that is designed to replace the old fashioned desktop computer, but unlike the traditional design of a thin client, the Pano machine needs no software layer in order to run; besides that, it uses some pretty unusual hardware components too. According to the news site pcmag which cites information from Pano Logic, the small device is very similar in effect to a PC as it acts like one by providing a virtualization layer to input and output operations, storage capabilities and so on. The little appliance, about the same size as a deck of cards, was designed to be fully supported by Windows XP or Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system.

As what the usual user sees is only the hub connecting all inputs and outputs, the heavy duty computing is done on a behind the scenes server that runs with VMware Server and which can virtualize any operating system. The Pano Logic device is different at the hardware level from a thin client as it has no central processing unit and no memory of its own and it is not able to host an operating system, just a virtualization chip and audio-in and audio-out ports, as well as three USB connections, a VGA video connection, 10/100 Ethernet, and a power connector. "I don't think you're going to see us replacing thin client or terminal services. It's not our area of interest," said Nick Gault, the chief executive of Pano Logic, and the former chief executive of virtualization company XenSource, which he left a year ago.
"This is really a replacement for desktop PCs. This is a strong statement. Why is this a strong statement? Because thin clients share a server, so that it is not a true Windows experience. There's a limited degree of customization, limited to certain drivers and applications. It's not all the way Windows."

From the hardware, energy and security points of view, the Pano Logic solution is better than either a pure thin client or a traditional desktop computer environment and besides that, using that platform would require almost no IT services as all the important hardware as well as all the software reside on the server side. The main trade off when adopting this approach is the latency of using a network-based operating system, but as Pano Logic claims, average latency on a local area network is around 5ms, which is too low to consider.

TAGS:

Pano Logic | thin client | computer | desktop | server

SEARCH THE NEWS ARCHIVE :

Today's News | Yesterday's News | News Archive

User opinions:

No user comments yet.

Be the first to express your opinion using the form below!

Share your opinion:

SUBMIT PROGRAM \| ADVERTISE \| GET HELP \| SEND US FEEDBACK \| RSS FEEDS \| ENTER NEWS SITE \| ENGLISH BOARD \| ROMANIAN FORUM
© 2001 - 2008 Softpedia. All rights reserved. Softpedia™ and the Softpedia™ logo are registered trademarks of SoftNews NET SRL.	Copyright Information \| Privacy Policy \| Terms of Use \| Update your software \| Archive

NEWS CATEGORIES: