Sentillion Overhauls Remote Access Offering

Published: December 6, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Sentillion this week unveiled the second major release of vThere, a product that leverages VPN connections and desktop virtualization technology so users can securely access their Windows applications while they're away from the office. With vThere 2.0, Sentillion has switched out VMware for Parallels desktop Windows virtualization software, introduced a new way for its customers to distribute vThere virtual desktop "images" over the Web, and also bolstered the all-important de-provisioning process.

It's been only six short months since Sentillion introduced vThere version 1 to help Windows shops simplify the provisioning and management of remote desktop and laptop computers. Sentillion, which was spun out of Hewlett-Packard's Medical Practice Group in 1998, previously offered identity and access management solutions for the healthcare industry, and figured there had to be simpler and better alternatives to Citrix and Microsoft Terminal Services for delivering secure, remote access to server-based applications. With the popularization and growing maturity of Virtual Private Networking (VPN) and desktop virtualization technology, they had the key pieces to the puzzle. All they had to do was put them together.

So that's what Sentillion did with vThere 1.0. That product piggybacked on the VMware Player and the customer's choice of VPN technology to create an entirely separate and secure Windows operating environment on a user's off-site PC or Windows laptop. These environments are created by administrators using the vThere Image Creator, and they include all of the software a user will need, including productivity tools, ERP clients, security tools, or terminal emulators.

Once it's set up and deployed, administrators can manage the vThere environment in the same way they manage in-house workstations, without the need for another set of servers, as the Citrix or Microsoft emulation offerings require. Likewise, life was supposed to be simplified for the business user, since he wouldn't be bothered with mundane administration tasks. Most security concerns are similarly alleviated, since viruses, worms, or other malware that's found its way onto the host PC or laptop cannot affect the virtual vThere environment, which is practically hermetically sealed (aside from some printer functionality that passes the "membrane" and, with version 2.0, the option to activate copy and paste between the environments).

Sentillion made some pretty big changes to the virtualization layer with vThere 2.0, which was formally announced yesterday. The company elected to use the virtualization technology from Parallels instead of the VMware Player due to the simplicity of deployment and use, officials say.

Some users of vThere 1.0 were befuddled by the level of technical knowledge required to use VMware's software, says Paul Roscoe, president of the Andover, Massachusetts, company. "The average, non-technical users--journalists, nurses--they don't, and shouldn't, have to understand the vagaries of virtualization," he says. VMware was not receptive to working with Sentillion to make the necessary changes, so the company looked elsewhere.

Parallels, a young virtualization software provider based in Renton, Washington, is better known in the Macintosh world, but it also supports Windows, as well as Linux. The Parallells-powered vThere 2.0 release does not yet support Mac or Linux, but that is something that users may see in the near future, the company says. What can be counted on is support for the new Windows Vista operating system to be delivered in the second half of 2007.

Sentillion has also bolstered the vThere image distribution process through an agreement with Amazon. The software company and the e-tail giant have signed an agreement whereby Amazon will host vThere images for Sentillion's customers as part of its Simple Storage Services, or S3, offering. Users will still download the images from www.vthere.net.

David Fusari, vice president and CTO for Sentillion, says the S3 offering is a win-win for Sentillion and its customers, especially considering that customers will need to distribute dozens of vThere images, each of which ranges from 1.5 GB to 3 GB. "That's lot of disk space to start building a solid, robust infrastructure around," he says. "The fact that Amazon provides truly what we need--a highly reliable disk storage infrastructure--[means] that we didn't have to build it ourselves . . . and we could get moving much more quickly."

The overall administration process has also been boosted with this release. vThere 2.0 enables centralized activation management for the process of provisioning and de-provisioning users. Administrators also have more fine-grained control over services that cross the real-virtual barrier, such as copy and paste, file sharing, and local USB port access. Lastly, the new release also introduces network-sensing capabilities that enables a vThere environment to detect when it's connected directly to the off-site network and doesn't need the VPN.

vThere 2.0 is available immediately. Licenses cost $125 per user, while the vThere Image Creator toolkit costs $795 per workstation. For more information visit www.vthere.net.

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