Lenovo Teams With Intel On Cloud-Ready Clients

Lenovo on Tuesday launched Cloud-Ready Clients, the China-based PC vendor’s term for its new ThinkPad and ThinkCentre desktops that run on Intel’s Sandy Bridge integrated graphics processors as well as Intel’s Core VPro desktop virtualization processors.

Lenovo’s cloud-optimized desktop systems also feature Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) from Intel that share their hardware attributes with cloud applications on the back end. In addition, Lenovo launched Secure Cloud Access (SCA), its first commercial application designed to optimize the experience of its Cloud Ready Clients.

Lenovo worked with Intel to develop Application Programming Interfaces that expose key hardware attributes of all Lenovo ThinkPad and ThinkCentre desktops to cloud applications.

’Cloud Secure Access is ready to take advantage of Web-based APIs and drivers and use them to access information on hardware, expose information on cloud content, and provide a more optimized end user experience,’ Bryan Thomas, manager of alternative client computing and server software at Lenovo, said an interview.

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SCA is based on Stoneware’s webNetwork product, which allows cloud-based applications to run more effectively on a range of Lenovo devices -- from cloud-ready desktops to mobile handhelds. Thomas said Stoneware’s WebNetwork product makes desktop virtualization solutions such as Citrix and VMWare available to a broader range of devices without requiring additional software installation. ’It’s 100 percent browser-based,’ he said. ’We saw that we can take the product to the next level by exposing hardware information to it.’

Lenovo said SCA offers access to Windows applications to any Internet-connected, Java-enabled client device using a browser-based interface designed to mimic a traditional Windows desktop experience and run on widely-used browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari.

Thomas said the browser-based interface runs entirely on HTML, yet it looks like a physical desktop in a browser window. However, bringing a traditional Windows OS-like desktop user experience to mobile devices isn’t easy, as shown by Microsoft’s experience with adding user experience optimizations to its Windows Phone 7 platform.

’There’s definitely a challenge that exists in the IT industry on, 'How do I use a Touch-based pad or smartphone to access a traditional x86 legacy application?' We’re not trying to solve that problem specifically," Thomas said. "We’re just trying to provide a mechanism to get access to virtual applications that you’d normally get via a Citrix receiver or something similar installed on the endpoint. We’re saying you don’t have to contaminate the endpoint to access that information, you can use a browser already installed on that device.’

Next: Hardware Attributes In The Cloud

Lenovo said SCA delivers cloud applications based on hardware attributes such as the device’s capabilities, processor, built-in memory, graphics, and bandwidth. It also allows enterprises to deploy a private or a hybrid cloud on physical or virtual data centers.

’Instead of having all the compute power for cloud applications in the data center, we’ve taken a more balanced approach,’ Thomas said. ’The only way to have both end point and data center systems using compute is to share information about that end point device.’

Thomas said that Lenovo’s Cloud Ready Devices will run on Intel’s Sandy Bridge and V-Pro chips, but won’t offer any new Lenovo hardware as part of its cloud-oriented solution. ’There’s no specific Lenovo hardware differentiation in there,’ he said. ’All of our ThinkPad and ThinkCentre systems are designed to run RSA. What we’ve done is work in collaboration with Intel and WebNetwork based on our common belief that the current environment is unbalanced. The bottom line is there’s nothing a customer has to do to order a cloud-ready version of a ThinkPad, the hardware is being exposed throughout.’

Finally, Lenovo said SCA offers enhanced security settings, reduced cloud virus contamination, additional layers of user authentication, simple sign-on access and a built-in fingerprint reader that replaces passwords.

’Now you can have an application published on a Citrix server securely access the Cloud Ready Client on a Web browser,’ Thomas said. ’Lenovo ThinkPads can share authentication information by running a cloud application on the back end for an enhanced level of security around cloud offerings.’