HP confesses love for Citrix with mobile thin client

'Intends' to stream the heck out of graphics

By Ashlee Vance, 19th May 2008

Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup/Recovery

Like a good partner, HP has rolled out some thin client/virtual desktop bits and pieces this week to complement Citrix's Synergy conference taking place in Houston.

HP issued a massive press release to back up what's a relatively short set of announcements.

For one, the company is shipping a new mobile thin client device called the 2533t. This unit runs on a Via chip and, as you would expect, has no spinning disks. Instead, you can get it with up to 1GB of flash memory and 2GB of RAM.

The 2533t runs an embedded version of the Windows XP operating system and is obviously aimed at business users. HP thinks it might be a popular choice for folks in the government or health care industries who would prefer not to see their names in the papers when they've lost a laptop with lots of precious data on it. With the 2533t, most of your important data will sit on a server somewhere.

Careless spooks everywhere can rejoice.

The 2533t weighs in at three pounds and as a 12.1-inch display. So, that makes it a bit smaller and lighter than the existing 15.4-inch 6720t.

The laptop starts at $825, which seems pretty pricey for the task at hand, but there you have it.

HP has been going at this thin client thing for awhile and has a number of products, ranging from the thin client devices themselves to blade systems for running PCs in the data center. Well, HP is now saying that all of its thin clients are part of the Citrix-Ready program and are capable of running Citrix's XenDesktop software.

Citrix-Ready, you ask? That just means that the kit has been certified to run smoothly with Citrix's software.

The last part of HP's virtual desktop showing centers on the company's homegrown Remote Graphics Software (RGS). HP has provided this software for awhile in blade PC setups where it's used to stream heavy-duty graphics loads out from the data center to desktops. RGS gives a bit of extra kick to the popular remote desktop protocol (RDP).

Now, don't get too excited because there's not much actually new happening with RGS. HP, however, is "announcing an intention" to do more with RGS by allowing other software makers to work with the technology. That means that virtualization software types might one day use RGS to give their own streaming code a multimedia injection. ®

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