The Calista Solution

The Calista Virtual Desktop (CVD) platform directly addresses the two major barriers to widespread virtual desktop adoption: the quality of the user experience and the cost per desktop. CVD provides a traditional desktop quality experience, including rich media and 3D graphics, to virtual desktops. CVD also dramatically increases the number of users per virtual desktop server resulting in decreased costs and form factors; thus, CVD is well suited to multi-core CPU and virtualized server trends and today’s densely populated datacenters.

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CVD has been designed to virtualize the industry-incumbent Windows desktop, supporting both the Windows XP and Windows Vista platforms. The product’s host software component interoperates with a broad range of client devices via RDP (Remote Display Protocol). CVD runs on industry-standard servers and features broad client operating system support including Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows XP Embedded, Windows CE and Linux. The support for industry-standard servers, clients and protocols make CVD a completely open system and ensures cost advantages over proprietary solutions. The costs of standard-based hardware are lower due to higher volume production, and existing hardware can also be reused and redeployed as required. Most importantly, the use of standard hardware and protocols increases the flexibility of the solution while avoiding any undesirable “vendor lock-in”. Upon release, CVD will be tested and certified with leading server, virtual machine and client technologies for best of breed and most cost-effective, integrated solutions.

CVD’s industry-first and patent pending virtual GPU technology enhances the end user experience for virtual desktops and increases the user density per server conducive to a central compute environment with reduced floor space, power and cooling requirements.

CVD provides support for 100% of all file and streaming media types available for a modern Windows desktop experience without the need for dedicated hardware or software on the client. Specifically, CVD eliminates the need for media player software and software codecs that increase client management costs, and which impact client interfaces when media codecs  are not available for a particular application or client platform.

CVD optimizes the RDP protocol to drastically reduce network bandwidth requirements and improve the user experience in bandwidth-constrained and high-latency environments. For example, CVD’s patent pending, visually lossless compression algorithm achieves data accelerations of as much as 20x supporting a high quality standard business desktop usage, including rich media, at 1Mbit/s per user.

The CVD product integrates into three possible virtual desktop architectures. CVD products and associated architectures are:

• Calista Virtual Desktop for multi-user virtual machine servers from VMware, Xen and Citrix
• Calista Virtual Desktop for single-user blade servers from HP and IBM 
• Calista Virtual Desktop for multi-user Terminal Services environments