Wanova, Inc, headquartered in San Jose, California, provides software to help IT organizations manage, support and protect data on desktop and laptop computers. Wanova's primary product, Wanova Mirage, was designed as an alternative to server-hosted desktop virtualization technologies. History Wanova was founded in January 2008 by Ilan Kessler and Issy Ben-Shaul, previously co-founders of Actona Technologies, which was acquired by Cisco in 2004 and became the foundation for Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS). The company received its first round of funding from Greylock Partners, Carmel Ventures and Opus Capital in the sum of $13 million. As of May 22, 2012 Issy Ben-Shaul announced on Wanova Blog that Wanova has become a part of VMware. Products As of February 2011, there is one primary product, Wanova Mirage hybrid desktop virtualization software, which has three components: Wanova Mirage Client, Wanova Mirage Server, and Wanova Network Optimization. The Mirage Client is a small MSI that installs on the PC of an end user, and allows the endpoint to become managed by the Mirage Server. The Mirage Server provides tools for creating, managing and deploying a Base Image, which typically consists of an Operating System (OS) and core applications that an administrator wants to manage centrally, such as Microsoft Office or Antivirus. Mirage Server also manages the backup and restore synchronization process. Distributed Desktop Optimization incorporates capabilities such as deduplication and compression that make the product effective over a low bandwidth, high-latency WAN. Once Mirage is installed, IT administrators maintain a complete, bootable desktop instance in the data center. This instance is hardware agnostic, and can be instantiated on both physical hardware or in a virtual machine. No hypervisor is required when the instance is deployed into PC hardware. How VMware Mirage Works Mirage logically splits the PC into individual layers that can be independently managed: a Base Image; a layer including user-installed applications and machine information, such as machine ID; and a layer including user data, files and personalization. In this manner, IT can create a single read-only Base Image, typically including an operating system (OS) and the core applications they will manage centrally, such as Microsoft Office and an antivirus solution. This Base Image can be deployed to the locally stored copy of each PC, and then synchronized as a whole with the endpoint. Because of the layering, the Image can be patched, updated, and re-synchronized as needed, without overwriting the