The ideal client computing solution doesn’t yet exist. The traditional model is very expensive, requiring lots of troubleshooting and 1×1 support to keep users up and running. Left uncontrolled, users will add more applications or inevitably use their systems for both work and personal tasks. This anarchy leads to more system problems and thus more support. Organizations typically try to minimize these problems by locking down the PC configuration – sort of the old-style Soviet Politburo approach, which leads to unhappy users burning effigies of CIOs.

Virtualization can provide some relief; it’s easier to completely lock down a virtual image that’s stored on a server than an image that sits on a laptop. However, desktop virtualization (depending upon the approach) can require heavy investment in other areas of the infrastructure (network and storage, primarily) and yet not yield significant savings – or make users happy.

The cloud has also been put forward as a solution, but from a desktop perspective, it’s more like old-school terminal service with a full color interface. They still don’t give users what they need in terms of feature and function. Walking the line between total anarchy and total lockdown is difficult and expensive, but there is a middle ground that will cut support costs significantly while ensuring that users have the performance and freedom they need to do their jobs.

Wanova, a company founded two years ago, is announcing today the general availability of Wanova Mirage software, its Distributed Desktop Virtualization solution. The company states that Wanova Mirage “lets IT centrally manage the desktop, simplify support and protect remote and mobile PCs, while optimizing the end user experience.” Their goal is to centralize the desktop with no repercussions to the end user – which is very ambitious, to say the least.

Its key component is the Centralized Virtual Desktop (CVD). What they’ve done is separate the PC (desktop or laptop) into three distinct layers. The first layer is the centrally-controlled base, an image (think “golden”) of OS and core apps that most everyone has. The second layer is what users have installed themselves and the current state of the machine. The final layer is the user-generated data and personality settings. These are aggregated into the CVD and accessed over a WAN or the Internet. Systems on the net automatically send small packets of data to keep the CVD updated. (The frequency is, of course, adjustable).

So here’s the sequence: The entire CVD sits in Mirage Server. This is where the base image (layer one of the CVD) is updated. The server sends the update to remote/mobile clients outfitted with Mirage Client, the local cache for the entire CVD. End-user data (layers two and three of the CVD) travels back to the Wanova Mirage Server for update and storage.

To avoid bottlenecks, this data is streamed on-demand and can occur asynchronously, when traffic is low, taking advantage of the end-users’ usage patterns – that’s Wanova’s Distributed Desktop Optimization (DDO) piece. (Wanova’s founders began their careers in networking, and let us know in no uncertain terms that “bandwidth was not an afterthought.”) If anything is corrupted during use, the server automatically re-images the client.

Someone using a system in a WAN environment can be up and running within a few minutes – the image is optimized to send out what the user typically wants first, so they can be happily working away while the rest of the image is being loaded onto the local system. A user can easily move from using a laptop on the road to a desktop at the office without wasting time moving email files, documents, or anything else that’s changed during their trip. Provisioning a new system is very quick and easy – just lay down the new image and start using it.

This approach pays a lot of dividends. One of the biggest things that jumped out at us (and their beta customers too) is that it eliminates many of the help desk functions. Got a problem? Make a call and your friendly help desk person will say, “Let me re-image you. Call back in 10 minutes if it doesn’t work.”

And it does work, on a scale of 1,000 desktops per server. With always-on availability and single-image management that maintains user personalization. With a Type-1 hypervisor, or a Type-2 hypervisor, or on bare metal. With users switching instantly from online to offline. With file-level deduplication, single-image management, and user personality preservation – it’s quite a package.

What’s interesting is that Mirage doesn’t fit neatly into any of the standard industry buckets. It’s not just virtualization, or just back-up, or just system ghosting – it’s all of these and more. What Wanova has done is to use the problems causing the most pain in desktop support/management as their starting point, and then build a solution. This is a much better approach than that of vendors who are attempting to force-fit server virtualization onto end-user client systems.

This technology has a lot of implications, and it’s going to be interesting to see how it fares in the market. As far as we can tell, there isn’t anyone else pursuing the same approach. Did they get it right? Take a look.