There’s a lot of buzz in the IT industry at the moment about ‘desktop virtualisation’, which is predicted to boom next year because virtual desktops can help businesses cater better for home and remote workers, improve security and are cheap to deploy and maintain. They can also cut the carbon footprint of a traditional PC desktop environment.

Desktop virtualisation is the hosting of virtual computers on a central machine or data centre. The ‘desktop’ and all its applications are then streamed to all the PCs on the network. Nothing resides on the actual physical desktop and and all the data input by the user is sent back to the central machine.

The big players in this market are VMware, Citrix and IBM but one smaler new product caught Greenbang’s eye this week, with Nebulas Solutions is touting the Pano virtual desktop cube (pictured).

The shiny, silver Pano cube connects keyboard, mouse, display, audio and USB peripherals over an existing IP network to a virtualised server – meaning the unit itself has no memory or operating system. Nebulas Solutions claims the total cost of ownership of the virtual desktop cube could be up to 70 per cent less than a traditionanl PC over three years, and as it consumes only three per cent of the power used by a PC it will also cut electricity bills.

The Pano relies on a virtualised server infrastructure and can be managed from a central point either by an in-house IT team, a data centre or remotely – meaning desktops can be upgraded and installed centrally. On the security front if the cube is stolen the device itself holds no local data, applications or files.

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