By DANIEL BAKSHI

Technical Account Manager | EMEA

Blast Extreme Adaptive Transport, or “BEAT”’, is changing the Business Mobility game!

As a TAM, I’m spending most of my time at customers’ sites and that gives me the opportunity to witness personally the drastic improvement Blast provides to both End Users and the Infrastructure!

For the last few months we see in the field that customers are adopting BEAT protocol in a rapid pace.

Blast dynamically adjusts itself to the state of the network at any given moment: Bandwidth, Packet Loss and Latency. Combining with the fact that its default video codec is H.264, Blast is able to securely deliver an exceptional user experience even on WAN, WIFI, and Mobile networks!

To help demonstrate how much value Blast protocol provides to both end users and the network infrastructure, I’ve conducted a test in a Horizon 7.2 environment.

I have played the same video in a VDI session: one time using Blast Extreme Adaptive Transport, and a second time using PCoIP, And I will compare some data between the two protocols:

Frames per second (FPS) – will show me how “smooth” the video played. (High value is better)

The CPU and Memory usage – we will see how much resources each protocol takes from the guest vdi machine. (Low value is better)

Network Bandwidth – to see how much bandwidth each protocol consumed from the network. (Low value is better)

Let’s start with testing Frames Per Second (FPS)!

In the sample video, we should expect around 20 FPS. In image-1 below is a comparison of the FPS during the video from Windows PerfMon tool. Both gave similar result of the expected FPS for the test video. Blast however seem to be a little more stable in keeping the FPS on the upper level. The higher the FPS – the smoother a video will be played in the session.

-1: Frames Per Second comparison via Windows Performance Monitor. (High is Good)

Moving on to CPU & Memory consumed by each process of the two protocols.

Both Blast (BEAT) and PCoIP had similar cpu and memory usage during the time the video was played and during the session. Blast seem to be use slightly less cpu and mem resources from the vdi machine. (which means from our vSphere infrastructure in the datacenter as well) Generally, we want to use less resources while keeping the same quality. Image-2 below will show the results.

Image-2: CPU & Memory usage by each protocol via Task Manager. (High is Bad)

Keeping the best part for last: Let’s compare the Network bandwidth consumed by each protocol during the video.

Network usage is a critical factor when planning a large scale EUC Environment, because even when the numbers per session are small, multiple that by few thousands of concurrent users – and the numbers suddenly have a huge weight. Image-3 and Image-4 will show the network bandwidth we used in each protocol during the same video. In my test I chose to use Wireshark (Packet capturing and network analysis tool) to get a good look at the Data.

Image-3: Network bandwidth by Blast via Wireshark. (High is Bad)

Image-4: Network bandwidth by PCoIP via Wireshark. (High is Bad)

As you can see, while Blast and PCoiP provided pretty much the same FPS and used very similar CPU & Memory resources from the VDI Machine, PCoIP took MORE THAN DOUBLE the Network Bandwidth.

Higher Network Bandwidth is very bad at scale. Imagine that for the same amount of network resources, in my example you could have doubled the amount of concurrent users with Blast!

As a TAM I have helped my customers Migrate from PCoIP to Blast (BEAT), and can say proudly that this technology made two type of people very happy:

The Admins/IT Team, because we are using around half the network bandwidth playing Video in VDI sessions. The End Users, because not all customers’ sites have high speed LAN connections, and the end users who don’t have such connections – see drastic performance improvement with Blast.

Blast Extreme Adaptive Transport, as the name suggest, adapts itself to any network scenario to give the user maximum performance and the best experience.

In a Mobile-Era, when users could connect from WIFI, Mobile 3G/4G network, or WAN connections, Blast seem like a smarter choice.

For more details about Blast please download and read our Technical Deep Dive document .

Daniel Bakshi is Technical Account Manager at VMware.