CloudVolumes announced a partnership with VMware to enhance ThinApp management and performance. CloudVolumes' new ThinApp Edition integrates with ThinApp technology to leverage any VMware vSphere datastore and make individual ThinApp packages instantly available to users logging in to virtual desktops, Citrix XenApp, or Microsoft RDSH, in real-time and on demand through a service catalog. VMware(R) ThinApp(R) is designed to deliver virtualized instances of applications in order to help IT administrators with software migration to a newer operating system and eliminate specific conflicts and compatibility issues.

The integration with CloudVolumes will enhance the ease of management, speed of deployment, and performance of applications, all while leveraging customers' existing storage infrastructures. It will also allow IT to scale up without sacrificing the benefits of application virtualization and centralized management. CloudVolumes has broad applicability beyond just enhancing ThinApp.

CloudVolumes enables a hybrid-persistence model: the desktop pool is non-persistent, saving on hardware and storage; however, the user has a persistent desktop experience with their profile and user-installed apps managed and delivered separately. CloudVolumes can also deliver complex server applications such as databases, Web servers, and middleware. These virtualized applications and data are placed into one or more virtual disks (VMDK and VHD files), which are dynamically attached and shared across all virtual machines.

This approach provides the faster and most scalable way to deliver applications to any virtualized datacenter or cloud. CloudVolumes' shared volumes significantly decreases I/O traffic from the network and improve application performance, while maintaining isolation between the applications and the operating system. This turnkey solution provides predictability in performance and removes the network as the limiting factor, allowing companies to leverage high-speed and SSD-based storage.

To ensure simplicity, IT can utilize its existing ThinApp packages with CloudVolumes ThinApp Edition. It complements ThinApp's dense application environment by dramatically enhancing the responsiveness of applications for end users. It enables IT to scale while leveraging existing infrastructure without sacrificing the benefits of application virtualization and centralized management.

Key features of CloudVolumes ThinApp Edition include: Flexibility of deployment: Deploy ThinApp packages from shared VMDKs on any datastore that VMware vSphere supports and scale as needed; Centralized management: Manage a single virtual disk containing one or many ThinApp packages and share them across all users. Assign one or more CloudVolumes virtual disks to any active directory user or group. Searchable activity logs for compliance, analytics and audit; Dynamic delivery: Security administrators and IT helpdesk can quickly respond to issues or helpdesk requests by updating or delivering new applications to a running VM; Access to file automation: Automatically create file associations and shortcuts at log on for all ThinApp packages the user is entitled to; Enterprise scale: Solution is design to support over 5,000 ThinApp packages and 10,000 users per Manager with the ability to scale out to 50 CloudVolumes Managers; Increase VM density and simplify hardware support: Increase user density per VMware ESX host by decrease the amount of hardware required to support end users; Reduce network usage: Significant reduction of network I/O dramatically increasing the performance and responsive of ThinApp packages by 100% compared to hosting ThinApp packages on a CIFS file share.