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You may have already seen the Tolly Group's report on how SpeedScreen Progressive Display enables delivery of PACS images to healthcare workers over a variety of network types. But for me it is even more exciting to hear from customers actually experiencing this technology in the field. Recently I learned of a hospital network using XenApp 4.5 (formerly known as Presentation Server) to deliver radiography images from their Agfa IMPAX 6.2 image and information management system. I haven't asked permission to publish the name of the customer but I can share their observations with you. Interestingly, IMPAX 6 is billed by Agfa as a web-deployable PACS system since it offers a Java plug-in for Internet Explorer, yet the hospital found that performance over their WAN is significantly better using XenApp to publish the IMPAX application (Win32). On Windows XP PCs with at least a Pentium III processor and 256 MB of RAM (the oldest production PCs still in service across the 7,000 PCs on their network), performance is "exceptional". In fact, XenApp has successfully delivered "cine loops" where a series of up to 300 splices of a CT scan is displayed at 27 frames per second -- a very challenging use case! These observations were made with the users situated 5 miles down the road from the hospital's data center, connected over a gigabit network and through a 10 Mbps switch.
Have you started using SpeedScreen Progressive Display in your business? If so, please post a comment or send me an email.
Derek Thorslund
Product Strategist, Multimedia Virtualization
Comments (4)
Feb 29, 2008
Derek Thorslund says:
One note I'd like to add regarding the scenario above is that it is very importa...One note I'd like to add regarding the scenario above is that it is very important to configure the user policies in XenApp appropriately according to the use case. Radiographers/radiologists demand 100% pixel perfect images. There are two settings for SpeedScreen Image Acceleration and SpeedScreen Progressive Display that control how compression is applied. They are described in the Administrator's Guide for 4.5 FP1 on pages 177 and 178. You can think of them as the "fuzzy setting" for images in motion and the "sharp setting" for images that are still. For medical imaging, you would want to turn off lossy compression on still images. A radiographer/radiologist would want lossless compression even though it takes a little longer for the extra bits to be sent across the wire. Or put another way, they'd need decent bandwidth to get the optimal user experience of pixel perfect images and fast response time.
Mar 13, 2008
Anonymous says:
Derek, How does one measure Frames Per Second with SSPD? As far as I knew...Derek,
How does one measure Frames Per Second with SSPD? As far as I knew there was not instramented way to do this. One could attempt to count the frames they see manually, but at that frame rate there is no way you are going to be able to keep up. We have been using this technology long before it was release in XenApp 4.5 and were never able to acurately measure frames per second.
Thanks,
Kevin
Anonymous replies:
Mar 21, 2008
Derek Thorslund says:
You're right, there does not appear to be any instrumented means of accurately m...You're right, there does not appear to be any instrumented means of accurately measuring Frames Per Second in the current release of XenApp. I believe our engineers have a way of tracing the server ThinWire driver but there is no Perfmon counter at this time. Sounds like a good enhancement request.
Derek
Mar 26, 2008
Anonymous says:
Hey Derek, Even tracing ThinWire does not garner good results for a FPS metric....Hey Derek,
Even tracing ThinWire does not garner good results for a FPS metric. Part of the problem is that ThinWire does not deliver true frames, but rather paints the screen in columns. Therefore, if ThinWire tells you are getting 24 updates per second that really only means 24 screen updates where multiple updates could make up a single "frame."
Like you said this could be a nice enhancement request, and should be a feature in the Virtual Design Studio client.
Kevin
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