Ericom PowerTerm WebConnect Receives InformationWeek’s Editor’s Choice !

InformationWeek conducted a thorough comparison of all the leading VDI solutions, and awarded its coveted Editor's Choice award to Ericom PowerTerm WebConnect:

Here are a few choice quotes from the article:

the award for the most robust back-end hypervisor support goes to Ericom

For quick provisioning of virtual desktops, it's a toss-up between Ericom and Quest ... only Ericom and Quest handled the task of SID regeneration and domain addition quickly and painlessly.

Ericom was also impressive in this area. We found Ericom surprisingly robust at aggregating many information sources onto a single Web-enabled interface controlled by an Active Directory login ID.

Click here for more information about PowerTerm WebConnect for VDI.

Ericom Blaze and PowerTerm WebConnect

In my previous post I described the simplicity of installing and using Ericom Blaze, our new RDP Acceleration and Compression product. As I explained in that post, one reason Ericom Blaze is so simple to use is that it does not include or require a centralized management / brokering component (some have called Ericom Blaze "brokerless"). There are situations, however, where such centralized management and brokering is desired, or even required. For this reason we are also integrating the Ericom Blaze technology into PowerTerm WebConnect, our enterprise-wide desktop and application access solution. PowerTerm WebConnect provides managed access to Terminal Servers, virtual desktops (VDI) and Blade PCs / remote workstations, in a single unified solution. And Ericom Blaze can accelerate and compress RDP access to all these host types. In addition, like PowerTerm WebConnect itself, Ericom Blaze is hypervisor agnostic. This means that it will work with most any virtualization platform, supporting heterogeneous environments and avoiding vendor lock-in.

The Simplicity of Ericom Blaze

Since announcing Ericom Blaze three weeks ago, we have received a lot of interest and very positive feedback about this product. Slow RDP performance is a real problem for many people, and Ericom Blaze addresses this problem head-on with a simple drop-in solution, that can make RDP 10 to 20 times faster. How simple is it? Check out the Ericom Blaze installation and usage guide - it's only 17 pages, many of which contain mostly screenshots. This product can literally be installed in minutes.

How is it that Ericom Blaze is so easy to set up and use? That's because it's comprised of just two small software components: the Ericom Blaze server, which can be installed on any standard RDP host (up to, and including Windows Server 2008 R2), and the Ericom Blaze client, which is used instead of the Microsoft RDP client (mstsc). The Ericom Blaze server is small – less than 4MB – and does not replace or modify any standard Windows component. In fact, after installing Ericom Blaze, you can still accesses the host using regular RDP (for example, from devices that don't have the Ericom Blaze client installed).

The Ericom Blaze client is also small – less than 7MB – and supports every version of Windows, from XP on up. (Please contact Ericom if you require a version for Linux or Mac.) It is designed to look and work like the Microsoft RDP client (mstsc), including the ability to read and write standard .rdp files. This means that little or no training is required for the end-users. In fact, installing the Blaze Client is so easy and straightforward that users can install it at home by themselves, for fast remote access.

Both the Ericom Blaze server and the Ericom Blaze client support unattended installation, so they can be easily deployed throughout an organization. Moreover, to make the evaluation of this product even easier, we have set up our own demo server. Simply install the client, and use the pre-configured connections to experience the difference between regular RDP and Ericom Blaze accelerated RDP.

Given the benefits and simplicity of Ericom Blaze, there is no reason not to download an evaluation copy of Ericom Blaze today. Or maybe you enjoy slow remote access ...

First Impressions of Ericom Blaze RDP Acceleration

Stephan Bussjaeger writes about his first impressions of Ericom Blaze:

today I took the chance to try out Ericom Blaze and I was surprised how easy it was to install and how simple it worked. ... OK, first I was skeptic…but when I first connected to my terminal server from home to work over a very slow internet connection I was very surprised about how fast you can see complex pictures like Google maps (satellite version) on the remote screen.

You can read Stephan's entire post here.

Ericom is now on Twitter

Ericom is now on Twitter. Get the latest Ericom news and links to Ericom resources:

Introducing Ericom Blaze – Breakthrough RDP Acceleration and Compression

Ericom has just announced Ericom Blaze, a breakthrough in RDP acceleration and compression, which makes RDP, well, blazingly fast. I'm extremely excited about Ericom Blaze because it can overcome both bandwidth and latency limitations to provide significantly enhanced end-user experience on both WAN and LAN. This is crucial for successful SBC and VDI deployments. Ericom Blaze achieves this by performing three key operations:

1. Compresses RDP by a factor of 10 or more (in some cases much more)
2. Performs packet shaping to optimize network utilization, and to speed up transmission
3. Intelligent frame display renders screens as single units rather than as a sequence of blocks

Check out this video comparing Ericom Blaze with standard RDP 6:

Some important information about Ericom Blaze:

1. Ericom Blaze will be available both as a feature of PowerTerm WebConnect and as a stand-alone product. In addition it will support VMware View Commercial client and Open client for Linux (support for VMware View client for Windows is scheduled for early next year).
2. Ericom Blaze is a software-only solution. It does not require specialized hardware on either the client or the host.
3. Ericom Blaze works with any standard RDP host, including Terminal Servers, virtual desktops (VDI) and remote physical machines.
4. Ericom Blaze is compatible with the RDP server platforms from Windows XP all the way to Windows 7 (both x86 (32-bit) and x64 (64-bit) for all platforms).
5. On the client-side, Ericom Blaze supports Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 and various Linux distributions. Versions for Mac and Windows CE will be available later this year.

Register here to test-drive Ericom Blaze.

Free BriForum Video – Two-Tier versus Three-Tier SBC Architectures

This is my second post in a short series about presentations I delivered at BriForums. In my previous post I discussed my presentation about Web Interfaces – how they work and their limitations. In this post I'll discuss my presentation about the architecture of Server Based Computing / Terminal Services solutions.

Two-Tier versus Three-Tier SBC Architectures

A key difference between Ericom PowerTerm WebConnect and Citrix XenApp (Presentation Server / MetaFrame) is that XenApp was originally designed for Windows NT 3.51 where as PowerTerm WebConnect was originally designed for Windows Server 2000 / 2003. This is an important distinction because NT 3.51 was a single-user operating system and did not include Terminal Services. As a result, Citrix was required to implement this functionality itself, making XenApp a large and complex package that replaced various internal Microsoft components. Windows Server 2000, 2003 and 2008 are multi-user operating systems, and provide Terminal Services as a built in feature, however XenApp remains large and complex, and still replaces internal Windows components instead of utilizing them. PowerTerm WebConnect leverages modern Windows capabilities, and does not replace or modify any system components.

Another key distinction is that the original MetaFrame (WinFrame) was designed as a single server solution. When Citrix enhanced it for clusters (farms) they did this by elevating a specific server to a controller status (Zone Data Collector). However, the architecture remained that the entire software package must be installed on each server, so that the controller and all the other servers in the clusters are identical in terms of the components installed on them. Conversely, PowerTerm WebConnect was designed for Terminal Servers clusters from the get-go. A single PowerTerm WebConnect server (or a cluster of servers) can manage hundreds of Terminal Servers. On the Terminal Servers themselves only a small (2MB) agent needs to be installed.

In this session I delved into the consequences of these design distinctions, in terms of how the solutions are architected, and described the resulting capabilities and limitations. I also predicted that VDI solutions will utilize the same architecture as PowerTerm WebConnect, which I termed "three-tier architecture" – a prediction that has proven to be correct. You can find the presentation here.