Teradici

Teradici, Inc.

Type	Private
Industry	Computer software, Computer hardware
Founded	B.C., Canada, 2004
Founder	Dan Cordingley Dave Hobbs Ken Unger Maher Fahmi
Headquarters	Burnaby, B.C., Canada and Santa Clara, CA, United States
Products	PCoIP Protocol, PCoIP Zero Client SOC, PCoIP Workstation 1:1 Host SOC, APEX 2800 Server Offload, PCoIP Management Console
Number of employees	200+
Website	www.teradici.com

Teradici is a privately held software company founded in 2004,^[1] with head offices in Metropolitan Vancouver, BC and Santa Clara, CA. Teradici initially developed a protocol (PCoIP) for compressing and decompressing images and sound when remotely accessing blade servers, and implemented it in hardware.^[2][3] Later, this technology was expanded to thin clients/zero clients^[4] for general Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.^[5][6] Teradici's protocol and/or hardware is used by HP, Dell-Wyse,^[7] Amulet Hotkey, Samsung, Amazon Web Services,^[8] Fujitsu,^[9] and VMware.

Front shot Teradici PCoIP zero clients. From left to right Tera1, Tera2 (four ports) and Tera2 (two ports)

History

Teradici was founded in 2004 by Dan Cordingley, Dave Hobbs, Ken Unger and Maher Fahmi.^[10][11] It operated in stealth mode until 2007 when they announced their first products, a blade server card and a small hockey puck shaped client, utilizing a Teradici-designed chip which implemented the PCoIP protocol.^[12] In 2008, VMware announced it was licensing Teradici's PCoIP protocol. Teradici developed a software implementation of PCoIP, which VMware started shipping in VMware View 4.^[13]

Previous Teradici Corporate Logo (circa 2013)

The Teradici name originated from a previous company the founders were incubating. That company's product involved a 100-gigabit datacenter networking device. One-tenth of a tera is a deci, but "Teradeci" didn't roll off the tongue. "Teradici" was unique, sounded better and the domain name was available at the time.^[14]

PCoIP Protocol

PC-over-IP (PCoIP) is a proprietary remote display protocol developed by Teradici.^[15] The protocol is available in hardware and in software. In 2008, VMware licensed Teradici's PCoIP protocol,^[1][16][17] and supports it in VMware Horizon View.^[18] In 2013 Amazon licensed the PCoIP protocol for use in AWS Amazon Workspaces.^{[8][19][20][21][22][23]}

PCoIP is a UDP based protocol that is host rendered, multi-codec and dynamically adaptive. Images rendered on the server are captured as pixels, compressed and encoded and then sent to the client for decryption and decompression. Depending on the image, different codecs are used to encode the pixels sent since techniques to compress video images differ in effectiveness compared to those for text.^[15][24] The protocol also dynamically adapts its encoding based on the available bandwidth. In low bandwidth environments it utilizes lossy compression where a highly compressed image is quickly delivered, followed by additional data to refine that image, a process termed "build to perceptually lossless". The default is to use lossless compression which is used when there is minimal network congestion or when explicitly configured, as might be required for scenarios where image fidelity is more important than conserving bandwidth, e.g. for medical imaging.^[25][26]

Products & Solutions

Partner and OEM products

• PCoIP Zero Client SOC (System on a Chip): SOC for OEM's to implement Zero clients either with the Teradici-developed Tera1 or Tera2^[27] chip, which implement the PCoIP protocol.

Rear shot Teradici PCoIP zero clients. From left to right Tera1, Tera2 (four DVI ports) and Tera2 (two DVI ports)

• PCoIP Workstation 1:1 host SOC (System on a Chip): An SOC allowing an OEM to implement a PCIe card which plugs into a workstation (typically a blade computer), allowing it to be remoted and controlled by a client device, either a PCoIP Zero Client or PCoIP Software Client. The connection is 1:1, meaning one host system to one remote user, it is not virtualized or shared and can capture the output from a GPU for full HD and 2K remoting along with redirecting audio and USB peripherals.
• PCoIP software clients: Software implementation of the PCoIP protocol for flexible client device support. Select OEM's include this in their products for x86 and ARM based thin clients. This is also the basis for the VMware and AWS Amazon Workspaces^[19] software clients for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android which use Teradici developed core PCoIP protocol and decoding technology.

Direct Products

• Teradici APEX 2800 server offload card: A PCIe coprocessor Hardware Accelerator board for VMWare Horizon offloading the compression and encryption of graphics and audio to Horizon Software Client or PCoIP Zero Client improving server consolidation in a VDI environment.^[28]
• PCoIP management console: A web-based management tool for administrative control of PCoIP Zero Client devices from a central console.
• Workstation Access Software: Enables remote access via PCoIP Software Client or PCoIP Zero Client to physical Windows PC or Virtual Machine in the Cloud.
• Host Card: Enables remote access to a physical Windows or Linux workstations via PCoIP Software Client or PCoIP Zero Client.

See also

• Comparison of platform virtualization software
• Desktop virtualization
• x86 virtualization
• Virtual machine
• Virtual appliance
• Thin client
• Comparison of remote desktop software

References

External links

• Official website