2010 Prediction: Doug Dooley, RingCube

By Doug Dooley
published: Thursday, January 07 2010

2010: The Year of the Virtual Desktop on USB
How and Why USB Drives and Workspace Virtualization Will Unite

For years, I’ve been a “mobile worker” living the old desktop computing paradigm or, in my case, laptop mobile computing paradigm. My life before virtualization included a heavy laptop bag, down time whenever my laptop had problems and a lot of frustration when my PC had hardware issues. My life after virtualization can best be described by the word freedom. I have the freedom to access my desktop on a PC, streamed over the network or by using my portable USB drive. If my laptop breaks, I can run a recently synchronized copy of my desktop over the network or download it to a USB drive to work at home for the day or even on another laptop.

There’s certainly nothing new about running a desktop on a PC and you may already be familiar with accessing a desktop or applications over the network, but the portable USB drive option is probably new to most with the exception of the virtualization gurus out there. A new type of virtualization called “workspace virtualization” is making it possible to deliver a full desktop experience with a user’s personal applications, data and settings on a portable USB drive to any PC without a second/bootable copy of the Windows operating system.

The low cost, portability, speed, integrated security and ubiquity of USB 2.0 drives and ports makes delivering desktops on portable drives an attractive, economical and secure alternative for pandemic planning, mobile professionals, and unmanaged workers. According to Gartner, the total cost of ownership to deliver a locked-down and well-managed corporate desktop for a travelling worker on a  laptop is $7,030 , $3,413  for a desktop and $3,286  for a hosted virtual desktop (VDI). In the case of a consultant or temporary worker, why spend that much money if they already have access to perfectly good PC? Why give an employee who works for a few hours at home on nights and weekends a slower and more costly laptop that costs $3,617 more? Why spend $3,286 to create a hosted virtual desktop (e.g. VDI) for pandemic planning just to have it go unused?

Instead, employees can be given a portable USB drive with a full desktop at a fraction of the cost that can run on any PC during their consulting project, when a pandemic hits or to just work from home. A company’s CFO will undoubtedly be grateful for the savings, users will be grateful to be able to eliminate a laptop from their bag and IT colleagues will have technology envy at the sight of the encrypted USB drive the size of pack of gum dangling from a key chain that runs a virtual desktop, boots up quickly, runs at +90 percent of native performance and includes all your applications, data, and settings.

This Sounds Familiar: Don’t Virtual Machines run off USB drives? App virtualization? U3/Portable Apps? What’s the difference?

Before workspace virtualization, there have been several other technologies that have attempted to run something that looks like a Windows desktop off a USB drive. Most solutions have failed to be adopted as a way to deliver enterprise virtual desktops because they were either to slow, too big, didn’t support enough enterprise-class applications or didn’t provide a full Windows desktop experience.

Factors Making Virtual Desktops on USB Devices a Reality in 2010

Virtual Workspace Running on a USB Drive

Workspace Virtualization

Sitting in the architectural middle-ground between application virtualization and hypervisor-based virtualization (virtual machines) is workspace virtualization. Workspace virtualization encapsulates and isolates an entire computing workspace including applications, data, settings, and operating system subsystems required to provide a functional Windows desktop computing environment. In contrast to Virtual Machines, workspace virtualization does not require a second copy of the Microsoft Windows Operating System, making it much smaller in size, requiring less memory and CPU, and performing several times faster. Compared with application virtualization, workspace virtualization can run several more applications, isolate network traffic and appear to the user as a separate windows desktop environment.

USB Drive Capacity and Price

USB drives can be found to fit any price range and capacity requirement. If the goal is to limit costs and provide the smallest footprint, a 16GB USB flash drive for $30 or less would make a good choice. Tiny USB flash drives the size of a thumbnail that can fit on a keychain almost unnoticed can be purchased in capacities of up to 8GB. If a larger capacity (100GB or more) with high performance at a low cost is required, there are USB portable drives available for about $100.  Of course, as history has shown, in six to nine months the capacity of those drives will double at that same price point.

SPEED: USB 2.0, ESATA, and USB 3.0

The faster USB 2.0 Hi-Speed drives can read at about 25MB/s and write at a rate of about 18MB/s, which can run a virtual desktop using workspace virtualization with reasonable performance.  Of course, external SATA drives offer portability with a similar performance to today’s internal drives but require an additional power supply and ESATA ports are not common on all PCs. However, in 2010, USB 3.0 SuperSpeed drives will be hitting the market and are expected to have ten times the transfer rate of USB 2.0 Hi-Speed.  With USB 3.0 drives, the USB drive will be as fast as internal PC hard drive with no need for an additional power supply like ESATA currently requires.

SECURITY: Enterprise USB Drives

Of course, if you are deploying enterprise virtual desktops with confidential data, you will need to define security requirements. There should already be a level of security features built into the desktop virtualization product itself but other important security measures such as encryption, fingerprint biometric authentication, remote termination and malware protection can be built right into the USB drive. For secure enterprise USB drives, you may want to consider solutions such as McAfee Encrypted USB drives, MXI Security drives, or IronKey flash drives.

Success Story: Pandemic Planning

Around the world, businesses are putting pandemic plans in place to ensure that they remain productive while as many as 40 percent of the workforce might be unable to come into work at the peak of the H1N1 flu season. Recently, one of the largest governments and the top commercial banks in the world deployed a workspace virtualization product on a USB drive to allow their employees to access their corporate desktops using a secure portable USB drive on a home PC or at a secondary site.  The capital cost was 5-7 times less expensive than purchasing new laptops or the extensive data center build-out required for VDI solutions.

Getting Started: 5 Steps to Test Virtual Desktops on a USB Drive

1. Secure an evaluation version of a workspace virtualization product.
2. Obtain one or more USB Devices. Remember, speed counts. So, choose wisely.
3. Build a virtual workspace master with Microsoft Office, Firefox, a VPN client and any other native windows applications you want to test.
4. Download the virtual workspace to your USB drive and plug it into a PC.
5. Compare the performance and usability of the various virtual desktop offerings and choose the one that best suits your needs.