{"id":9551,"date":"2012-03-27T16:16:18","date_gmt":"2012-03-27T21:16:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techcitement.com\/?p=9551"},"modified":"2012-03-27T02:00:03","modified_gmt":"2012-03-27T07:00:03","slug":"out-of-stealth-ready-to-change-the-world-cloudpaging-by-numecent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/software\/windows-os\/out-of-stealth-ready-to-change-the-world-cloudpaging-by-numecent\/","title":{"rendered":"Out Of Stealth, Ready To Change The World: Cloudpaging By Numecent"},"content":{"rendered":"

A start-up company has recently come out of stealth-mode and its technology is going to change how companies think about cloud-computing. Numecent<\/a> announced new technology they’re calling cloudpaging. It allows companies to turn software, any software, into a cloud app and rent the apps out for whatever length of time they want. The first step is using their Jukebox Studio tool to “‘cloudify” an application. This doesn’t require any changes to an application or access to source code. In Numcent’s own words,\u00a0 “This process pre-virtualizes the application, encrypts it and divides it into small fragments called ‘pages’.”<\/a> This process is completed once per application and takes anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours. Unlike other offerings out there, Numecent says it will work with 100 percent of \u00a0Windows applications and even work on plug-ins for applications. Numecent even says they can deliver the operating system and large virtual machines this way. The application is then published to a server hosting the Jukebox Server. With their Jukebox Server, licensing can be applied to an app so that users can check out a license to use an app and then check the license back in when they’re done. This cloudified application is now open to users who have the Jukebox Player installed on their local machine.<\/p>\n

So, how is this different from other technologies? Numecent’s cloudpaging is only delivered one page at a time using demand paging. After enough pages have been fetched, the application starts to run. Numecent says most applications only require about 6.5 percent to be fetched before a user can start using the program and that this is nothing like pixel streaming<\/a>. Pixel streaming is when a program is run on a server and the display, the actual pixels, of the application is delivered to a PC over the internet. The biggest problem with pixel streaming is that this works great for video and music, where content is linear and bits follow one another, but it doesn’t work well for applications, which are non-linear, because users bounce around an application. This can be a huge problem for a processor intensive application.<\/p>\n

Cloudpaging solves this problem by basically sending processor instructions over the internet instead of pixels. Numecent calls this friction-free computing. When you virtualize anything, an application or a virtual machine, there’s a virtual memory manager unit (MMU) that manages the physical RAM available to the virtualized environment. Numecent’s MMU doesn’t manage local RAM, but instead it manages demand paging by only fetching the parts of the application needed to run locally. Basically, you can run any application on-demand from any computer in an almost instant-on manner. Numecent\u00a0 has a video demonstrating the launching of a 66 GB Hyper-V virtual machine from a server after only downloading 900 MB, and the company claims 20 to 60 times reduction in time needed to launch a virtualized applications. When the user is done with an application, they shut it down and there’s virtually no trace left on their computer.<\/p>\n