Tarantella New Moon Canaveral iQ

Canaveral iQ 2.0 is the latest iteration of the Canaveral iQ server series from Tarantella / New Moon. Tarantella's focus is to bring to the market a less expensive alternative to MetaFrame. Canaveral iQ maintains about 80% of the functionality of MetaFrame for about 40% of the price.

Canaveral iQ can run on Windows Terminal Server 4.0, Windows 2000, or Windows 2003. Canaveral has all the "major" features of a third-party application server, including application publishing, seamless windows, a web interface, and application-level load-balancing.

Load balancing is accomplished independent of Windows through the use of the Canaveral Load Balancer. This operates in much the same way as the Citrix Load Manager to achieve a load-balanced environment. This fact alone can save a company several thousand dollars in a farm with several servers when compared to using pure Terminal Server since Canaveral load-balancing doesn't require the Enterprise Edition of Windows 2003.

One of the features of Canaveral iQ that sets it apart from the rest of the pack is the ability to publish applications to specific terminals or groups of terminals, rather than simply to users and groups. This is very beneficial in a kiosk or shop floor environment, where terminals have one, dedicated purpose.

Tarantella is one of the few companies that officially licensed Microsoft's RDP technology, and therefore they provide their own version of Microsoft's Terminal Services Advanced Client (TSAC). While using the RDP protocol at its core, the Canaveral client also provides access to additional services like seamless windows and the web interface. Tarantella offers Canaveral clients for 32-bit Windows and Windows CE, and a Java client is in currently in beta testing for use on Linux and Macintosh platforms.

The feature set of Canaveral iQ, albeit less robust than MetaFrame, is significantly more robust than Windows Terminal Services. Tarantella has succeeded in adding the most used features of Citrix MetaFrame to Windows Terminal Services and has made their product available at a fraction of the cost of MetaFrame.