Mellanox Adopts Wanova Mirage Software

Wanova, Inc., in distributed desktop virtualization, announced that Mellanox Technologies has selected Wanova Mirage to manage, support and protect its enterprise laptops.

Mellanox is recognized for its products that deliver bandwidth, performance, scalability and power conservation to Fortune 500 data centers and the world’s largest supercomputers. As a highly distributed organization, Mellanox has hundreds of employees around the globe with laptop computers, and the IT department needed a cost-effective way to manage and backup each employee’s laptop – even if the employee was remote and/or mobile.

"As our company increases in size, Mirage lets us manage and support our employees more effectively, and without increasing our helpdesk staff," said Alexander Smirnov, senior director of IT and IS at Mellanox Technologies. "Mirage gives us the foundation to back up a user’s complete desktop – including the operating system, user files, user-installed applications, and email – and mobilize this desktop wherever it is needed with minimal user downtime."

Wanova Mirage software efficiently centralizes the entire desktop contents in the data center for management and protection purposes, while distributing the execution of desktop workloads to endpoints for performance and superior user experience. Wanova Mirage software is unique in that it is optimized for remote and mobile PCs. Mirage allows end users to work offline, install applications and retain personalization, yet synchronizes bi-directionally with the data center when they are connected to the network.

While Mellanox considered alternative provisioning, desktop management, backup, and software distribution technologies, Smirnov’s team chose Mirage for several reasons. Mirage is the only solution that worked well over a WAN, ensuring that even remote employees’ data was protected and could be easily restored. Further, Mirage provides comprehensive single image management, so his administrators can distribute, patch and enforce one Base Image, including the operating system and core applications, across many users regardless of their location and without overwriting user settings, data and applications. Because Mirage maintains snapshots for each user’s centrally stored desktop, Mellanox is able to address user PC problems by rolling a PC back to a centrally-stored last best known state. Users can also restore deleted or overwritten files themselves, without launching a call to the helpdesk.

"While traditional desktop virtualization makes sense for LAN-connected task workers, it has not provided a viable approach to address the needs of remote or mobile users," said Howard Greenfield, vice president of sales at Wanova. "The IT department at Mellanox exemplifies innovation in solving some of today’s most challenging remote laptop management, support and protection issues and we are proud to have them as a customer."