Editor's Pick of the Week, 9 in a Series

By Anthony J. Lockwood

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

Teradici, a British Columbian outfit you probably never heard of, has developed this technology that delivers your PC desktop from a centralized host computer across a standard, secure IP network. On the surface that’s no big deal, except that the network can be your entire enterprise network, not some small satellite system. They call it PC-over-IP. I call it cool in a back-to-the-future sort of way.

I can hear you engineering IT guys now. We know all about desktop consolidation. What about network latency? Media and graphics will gag the network. How about OS image management and peripheral interoperability?

Good questions. Teradici says they’ve solved them, and I think they may have, because IBM is incorporating Teradici's technology into its BladeCenter’s Workstation Blade and ClearCube has implemented it in its new ClearCube I9400 series I/Port quad-monitor over IP solution.

PC-over-IP is a hardware and software combination for both ends of the communication. It provides hardware-accelerated display compression and network propagation techniques. And that’s the key. Teradici figured out how to compress display data and send it anywhere across a network without compromising network responsiveness or end-user expectations. That means that a CATIA image appears and responds to the end user as if it were running locally even though CATIA is actually running on a server in parts unknown.

For engineering IT managers, this means that you can centralize PCs and workstations in your secure datacenter and update applications across the enterprise easily. Best of all, you’ll have less, um, interaction with irrational desk jocks annoyed that their PC has crashed.

PC-over-IP is its own self-contained system. It connects a gizmo to a keyboard, a monitor, and your network – wireless or wired. It doesn’t require a specialized networking protocol or operating systems. No drivers. Nothing outlandish. It works with the network that you have and supports bridging of UBS peripherals, which eliminates peripheral management at the desktop.

You can read more about PC-over-IP from today’s Pick of the Week write-up. There are a bunch of links to lots more information, including one to an online video and another to an evaluation kit so that you can check out the technology yourself.

Thanks, Pal. – Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood
Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering magazine