Rackspace, which provides hosting and cloud solutions will be offering a Desktop as a Service solution using the Desktone Platform 3 hosted VDI solution, as announced by a press release from Desktone. Pricing for the solution will start at $30 per desktop per month, which is almost equal to $1 a day.
By partnering with Desktone, Rackspace can now offer a competitive solution against the recent announcement made beginning this month by tuCloud, which offers a DaaS solution together with Kaviza. This solution offers a Desktop as a Service solution for $29.99 per month.
Desktone also announced version 3 of it’s Desktone Platform solution, offering the following new features:
- Mobile device accessibility
- Desktone DaaS Mobile Client, which allows Apple iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch users to access their desktops anywhere, anytime.
- Desktone DaaS Client, providing integration with corporate VPNs to allow seamless remote connectivity.
- Hypervisor agnostic, with added support for Citrix XenServer and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (based on the Kernel-based Virtual Machine – KVM) hypervisors, in addition to existing support for VMware vSphere.
- Linux desktop support.
- New support for Citrix HDX and HP RGS in addition to existing support for Microsoft RDP, giving service providers the choice of multiple remote display protocols.
- Extended localization via the Desktone web console, which allows for administration in 20 languages, including newly added support for French, German, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, and Japanese.
Desktone also announced a partnership with Liquidware. Liquidware Labs will make its ProfileUnity product available in the cloud hosted Desktone VDI platform, CBR reports.
ProfileUnity is a user environment management offering for Windows desktop infrastructure, with benefits for virtual environments. It separates user profiles, configurations, and data from the Windows OS.
Update: Rackspace has let us know that they will not directly provide this DaaS offering to customers, but the service will be provided by Desktone, calling it the Desktone Cloud ad part of their membership into the Rackspace Partner Network.