Two Irish companies, Cloudium in Limerick and RedZinc in Dublin, have been awarded an EU contract worth more than €200,000 to boost the performance of cloud-based desktops across internet connections.
The companies were awarded the contract as part of the EU BonFIRE initiative. The BonFIRE initiative was set up under the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission to design, build and operate a multi-site cloud prototype facility. The BonFire consortium includes HP Labs, SAP AG, Cloudium Systems, ATOS, RedZinc, 451 Group and various academic groups.
Cloudium Systems and RedZinc will tune operation of cloud-based desktops against internet operational limitations.
The project, called TurboCloud, will validate several man years of research on a large-scale environment. Cloud-based desktops are believed to represent the next paradigm in computing.
Gartner forecasts the growth of cloud-based desktop access devices to grow from 3m units in 2010 to more than 15m units in 2014.
Building the TurboCloud
The Cloudium VCA2000 family of advanced ZeroClients incorporates their cloudRDP software and cloudAccel silicon device to optimise real-time tuning of a cloud desktop connection.
Cloudium Systems’ CEO, John Hickey, explained: “Our goal with this project is to optimise the user experience across a wide range of network conditions in a manner difficult to reproduce without access to a large, multi-site cloud testbed such as provided by BonFire.”
RedZinc’s VELOX is a service delivery platform which integrates to IP networks as a control plane overlay which enhances the quality of experience of multimedia cloud applications.
Donal Morris, CEO of RedZinc, said: “The partnership with Cloudium and BonFire is an ideal platform to validate the integration of RedZinc’s virtual path slice controller with Cloudium’s desktop virtualisation solution and showcase with multimedia applications.”
