IT architect Marco Simoncini was enjoying Friday evening supper in a restaurant in Rome with his colleague Piernunzio Pennisi when inspiration struck. Simoncini began sketching out his vision on a napkin. Before long, he headed home. By 2am the following morning, he had finalised the design for a new kind of desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) service.
“He left the restaurant without paying,” says Pennisi. “But it was an incredible idea: using container technology to create a new way of delivering desktop environments via a low-cost user interface.”
Today, Simoncini’s design is a patented technology called KARL: a system for creating virtual workstations based on container technology, rather than virtual machines. The technology gave birth to two software solutions: Karl Platform and Karl O.S..
IT buyers will be familiar with the argument that it makes sense to equip employees with thin clients, rather than over-specified PCs. But KARL pushes the thin client approach to its ultimate conclusion: the system works on a Raspberry Pi, or a $100 Single-Board Computer (“no bigger than a cigarette box in your pocket,” says Pennisi).
The new element is the use of efficient, lightweight containers – long associated with microservices-based application development – to replace virtual machines running Microsoft Windows applications.
Sustainability is a major attraction: because KARL’s infrastructures uses ephemeral PersistentVolumeClaims (PVCs) and pooled instances, a single hard drive can support an entire group of similar machines.
KARL products allow each cluster node to host a number of KARL instances (bubble or pods). The ephemeral nature of each “pod “ is a big positive in terms of security.
“Endpoints are the biggest source of security problems,” says Pennisi. “When a malware threat is detected, KARL simply terminates the user’s session and rolls back automatically a new threat-free session.” Work that the user has completed within the previous “pod” becomes available within the new session.
Pennisi says that the technology has already been deployed in Europe and North America by one major partner: a SaaS-based air traffic control system vendor.
He adds that he is looking for system integrators who are interested in deploying the technology further afield.
Pennisi says: “We aim to build an open-minded community of partners who understand the technology’s potential to shape compute infrastructures in ways we can’t even imagine at the moment.”
Today, KARL operates as a Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) offering, the kind of technology that typically attracts smaller organisations with modest IT resources and a need for agility.
Although the DaaS market remains smaller than the traditional market for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), it is growing much more rapidly.
KARL products are being launched at a moment when VDI and DaaS are responding to the dynamic demands of hybrid working, the increasing maturity of cloud computing and the cost pressures bearing down on IT organisations.
The results have included an uptick in competition, and the private equity acquisitions of both Citrix and VMware’s end user computing business. In addition, the hyperscalers have started to show interest in the segment, including Google (acquisition of Cameyo) and Amazon (launch of WorkSpaces).
The results include new opportunities for independent challengers. Shankar Iyer, the CEO of Omnissa, which launched itself on to the world this summer after being spun off from VMware, talks of a $26bn market opportunity.[1]
Pennisi shares the same optimism, but from a very different perspective: “Imagine you had a computer that only exists if you need it: low cost, low maintenance and highly secure. That’s KARL. An average size company with perhaps 1,000 employees and relatively limited in-house IT organisation stands to gain a lot from this approach.”
Learn more about KARL here.
