During the evening reception yesterday at the Dell Enterprise Forum I spent some time speaking to some of the vendors and Dell staff on the stands on the show floor. Amongst one of the stands that grabbed my attention was the desktop virtualisation stand with Dell Wyse Thin Clients and the nVidia GRID technology on display. The Dell Wyse Cloud Connect is a pocket sized Thin Client Dongle, I had read about it when it was released but hadn’t had a chance to see it in action.
The Cloud Connect was demonstrated on a lovely Dell 27” touchscreen display (I really need to find out more about this), the Cloud Connect runs an Android OS and as well as supporting remote connectivity to all the usual VDI and Session Host providors it also supports local Android Applications and web browsing. The unit itself has built in WIFI, Bluetooth as well as a limited amount of storage, room to add further storage and USB host ports for external devices.
With its mobile form factor and the fact that you can manage these devices via a cloud portal, this could potentially make a very interesting device for remote workers and education environments amongst others. I work with a number of companies that wish to enable staff to use their home PCs to connect into VDI environments, but due to legislation that dictates only company owned devices can connect to the VDI environment this isn’t possible. With a cost effective device like this, potentially this situation could be solved?
I need to spend some time with one of these units to figure out actually how feasible it is to use as regular thin client, but when I manage to get my hands on one I will post my results. If you are at Dell EF be sure to check it out on their stand.
Virtualised Reality 