Wyse Technology is offering software to speed up remote virtual desktops, regardless of what distance they are from the host's data center.

A global company with workers in Bangalore or Beijing frequently needed a data center nearby to be able to implement virtual desktops, due to latencies and packet loss in the Internet's TCP/IP network. "The further you were from the host server, the lower the quality of the end user's experience" was the old rule that prevailed in desktop virtualization, said Jeff McNaught, chief strategy office at Wyse Technology in an interview.

McNaught said the San Jose company started researching how to overcome those weaknesses a year ago and Wednesday launched its answer, the Wyse Virtual Desktop Accelerator, which can be used with either VMware's View and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, Citrix Systems XenDesktop and XenApp, or Microsoft's Terminal Services. All three link terminals to a central server for virtual application services.

The launch also marks a shift for Wyse from providing software that optimizes its thin client hardware to supplying software that optimizes virtual desktops, whether they're running on one of its thin clients or on a full-bore PC.

The Wyse Virtual Desktop Accelerator suspends TCP/IP's packet loss correction, a major source of network latencies, and substitutes Wyse's packet loss correction. "We shield TCP/IP from seeing the packet loss, then use our own error correction techniques," explained McNaught.

The technique isn't just a sleight of hand that overlooks dropped packets. " We resupply the packets that got lost from our own information to insure the packet stream is 100% accurate," he said.