In-Depth
Canaveral iQ: Low-Cost Solution
Just need a few redundant servers, some shared apps and a quick, inexpensive setup? Check out New Moon Systems.
- By Bill Boswell
- 06/01/2002
If you work in a law office, call center or manufacturing facility, you
may like the convenience and centralized control offered by Windows 2000
terminal services; however, you may not have the money to set up a full-blown
server farm nor the inclination to sit through lots of training learning
to operate it. Your idea of a terminal server deployment may be setting
up a couple of redundant servers, installing a few shared applications,
and getting the whole shooting match into operation as quickly and inexpensively
as possible. If this describes you, check out a new product called Canaveral
iQ from New Moon Systems,
www.newmoon.com.
The feature set in Canaveral iQ focuses on the needs of organizations
with 50 to 1,000 PC users, although there’s no reason it can’t scale above
that number. The product leverages the existing multi-user architecture
and Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) in Win2K, so it doesn’t require an additional
protocol layer. Instead, it uses a separate management layer that permits
combining several terminal servers into a "team" that can be centrally
managed.
The appeal of Canaveral iQ is its simplicity and price. The folks at
New Moon make no secret that they want to be the "value player" in the
application-sharing market. At a per-connection price of about $175 (not
including the cost of the Microsoft TSCAL licenses, if needed), Canaveral
lets even a cost-conscious IT manager justify putting application sharing
in his or her budget thanks to the savings inherent in centralized management.
Canaveral boasts a variety of features in spite of its relatively low
cost. Unlike standard terminal services, you can publish individual applications
from multiple servers. Users select their applications from a Web browser
or from items on the Start menu. You can even publish an entire desktop
if you want to give users maximum flexibility. A Web-based management
console lets you associate Canaveral applications with Active Directory
groups so you can target applications to specific departments or functions.
A load balancing service spreads user connections among several servers
in a Canaveral team of terminal servers.
Canaveral also overcomes a few of the key limitations in RDP version
5.0 that ships with Win2K. It displays drives from the user’s PC in a
terminal server session to simplify file transfers. It implements a shared
clipboard, something that normally requires a special utility from the
Resource Kit. Best of all, Canaveral has a universal printer driver that
eases the pain of printer configuration in a shared environment. The driver
runs at the server where it creates a standard Enhanced Metafile (EMF)
that’s delivered back to the client for processing and printing. This
approach avoids multiple printer drivers and overloading of the spool
engine at the terminal server, a common cause of problems. Canaveral is
still subject to the 256-color limit and lack of audio redirection in
RDP v5, but these will be alleviated when Windows .NET is released later
this year.
Canaveral is a new product and, as such, it still has a few rough edges.
The most significant problem is user account handling. In the current
product version, the Canaveral database contains copies of the users’
Win2K credentials used for authenticating connections to Canaveral terminal
servers. Maintaining a separate user database not only creates synchronization
issues, it represents a potential security risk by storing the users’
password hashes outside of AD. New Moon engineers are modifying user account
management in the next release of Canaveral iQ so that credentials are
stored using Microsoft-approved security methods.
The other major issue is lack of support for terminals and non-Windows
platforms. Although Canaveral uses RDP as a wire protocol, it still requires
a client that understands how to connect to the Canaveral servers. As
of this writing, the only Canaveral client is an executable that runs
on Windows 9x, Win2K/NT and XP. New Moon is working with terminal manufacturers
such as Wyse and NCD to include the Canaveral client, similar to the way
it now includes Citrix clients. New Moon is also working on alternate
clients that will run on Linux/Unix.
Canaveral faces stiff competition from Citrix MetaFrame, but the engineers
and product managers at New Moon are a scrappy bunch determined to carve
out a place for their product in the large and growing application sharing
market. For example, Robert Blanden from the University of Connecticut
Health Center is in the final stages of evaluating Canaveral for deployment
to more than 2,500 users. Blanden likes Canaveral for its comparatively
low price and ease of use. He isn’t deterred by a few product snags and
praises New Moon for the speed at which it to responds to issues.
If your organization uses Windows PCs and needs basic application sharing
at a reasonable price, you should include Canaveral iQ in your evaluation.
About the Author
Contributing Editor Bill Boswell, MCSE, is the principal of Bill Boswell Consulting, Inc. He's the author of Inside Windows Server 2003 and Learning Exchange Server 2003 both from Addison Wesley. Bill is also Redmond magazine's "Windows Insider" columnist and a speaker at MCP Magazine's TechMentor Conferences.