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The category breaker: U3's U3 Smart Drive technology
Selected by James Kobielus, senior technical systems analyst at trading exchange Exostar, "Above the Cloud" columnist
What makes this product so special? U3 Smart Drive technology is the latest step in client virtualization. A client becomes virtualized when its GUI grows abstracted
from the resources of the local-access device, be it a PC, handheld or other computer. With client virtualization, users are
blissfully unaware of what blend of local and remote resources - CPU, storage, network connectivity - is driving their presentation
experiences.
What's truly innovative about U3 smart drives is the extent to which they bring blade-style virtualization to the client PC. U3 smart drives consume a partitioned slice of the host's CPU, storage, connectivity and other hardware resources, and integrate into the Windows file system. But they do so only as temporary plug-in modules and without access to other services offered by the host operating system and applications. U3 technology could one day transform a PC into a blade chassis (or souped-up docking chassis) within which applications, files and other resources from diverse client environments can coexist, each within its own smart-drive sandbox. As the number of USB ports on today's PCs grows, the concept of a USB client blade chassis becomes more feasible.
In this sense, U3 smart drives might be regarded as the inverse of another promising client virtualization approach: server-side blade PCs. Blades from pioneers HP, ClearCube and IBM virtualize desktop resources into manageable slices of a server's centralized resources, transforming the innards of each PC into a blade that can be installed in a server chassis and accessed remotely via a thin client windowing protocol such as Citrix's Independent Computing Architecture. U3 smart drives put the guts of the virtual client into a flash "thumb drive" that users carry around on them.
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Copyright 2008 Network World Inc.
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