tuCloud has announced a new Desktop as a Service (SaaS) solution called CloudTop. CloudTop provides applications, data and the user profile from the cloud capable of running on top of Apple Macintosh hardware. The offering is currently in beta and is scheduled to be released in Q2 this year. It will be offered for 1$ per day, just as they do with their current DaaS offering for Windows based desktops which leverages the Kaviza VDI platform.
The platform providing the functionality is called DiscCloud, which is a fork of BSD Unix, and designed in such a way that it can run Mac OS X applications. tuCloud states DiscCloud it has an agreement for using the technology with Apple.
tuCloud claims that it can run 1000 hosted VMs from the cloud running HD Video, CS5 and VOIP from two 1U blades in the DC with no noticeable loss of user experience or degrade in performance when all users are doing it at once, audio and video processing is offloaded to the client device for better performance.