ReviewCam: Sychron's VDI

Sychron is a compelling platform for provisioning and managing virtual desktops, and while it can make managing VMWare's ESX and Microsoft's Hyper-V much easier, it is also going up against capabilities both companies offer. In our latest ReviewCam, we took a hands-on look at some of the product's capabilities and they seem pretty impressive.

Fritz Nelson

Vice President, Editorial Director InformationWeek Business Technology Network

September 11, 2009

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InformationWeek's Randy George did a full review of Sychron back in June. The company just announced version 4.0 of its OnDemand Desktop, which it says offers better scalability and performance and a more powerful user interface -- we did examine the latter, and it's really a fairly simple operation to assign resources to what Sychron terms a Cluster, and user roles to what it calls a Habitat.

What I liked best is the visibility the product provides into resource availability and ongoing performance metrics of the Clusters and Habitats. The ability to define service-level objectives, based on performance criteria, provides a level of automation that is very promising. The level of automation, Sychron told me, allowed a school to re-provision 180 deskstops between classes.

Sychron lists OnDemand Desktop for $1,000 per core.

Fritz Nelson is an Executive Editor at InformationWeek and the Executive Producer of TechWebTV. Fritz writes about startups and established companies alike, but likes to exploit multiple forms of media into his writing.

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