Latest News from Virtualization Journal

AMD Sales Chief Out

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

AMD said late Tuesday that its chief sales officer Emilio Ghilardi had left the company and that CEO and president Rory Read is going to do his job while a replacement is sought. AMD didn’t say why Ghilardi left but it’s assumed Read wants his own people. Read is relatively new to the company so the sales experience will be good for him. He knows how to do it judging from his record at Lenovo although it does leave him with a full plate. Ghilardi joined AMD from HP to run EMEA in 2008 and was named sales chief the next year. Read last week told Wall Street that AMD is switching to a new “ambidextrous” strategy that includes other people’s technologies and IP to deliver differentiated products such as a tablet.

iomart Hosting Carries Out Group Wide Virtualization for office2office

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

Cloud computing and managed hosting services provider iomart Hosting has announced that it has carried out a group-wide virtualisation for office2office (o2o), the sole provider of offices supplies and Closed Loop document recycling services for the UK government. o2o's IT had been focused around a single set of offices and one server room in Norwich as a legacy of its days as part of Her Majesty's Stationary Office (HMSO). However a series of acquisitions over the last few years saw it grow to such an extent that its IT environment became extremely fragmented. Vincent Cassidy, Group IT Director for o2o, explained: "As we made new acquisitions I knew we needed to reduce our risks and put in a scalable platform. Essentially we needed to evolve from a traditional IT department that was just keeping the lights on, to a flexible IT infrastructure that added value for our customers, enabled us to adopt more modern technological processes and allowed flexibility for future growth. We wanted to get to the point where our IT was having a positive impact on our bottom line."

AMD Vows Not to Be Road Kill

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 06:00:00 EST

AMD Thursday told financial analysts it’s gonna try not to become road kill by addressing the “trends around consumerization, the cloud and convergence” and switching to a new “ambidextrous” strategy that includes other people’s technologies and IP to deliver differentiated products such as a tablet. That means AMD might pump for mobile maven ARM, whose low-power chips are challenging Intel enough for AMD CEO Rory Read to prophesy “the breakdown of proprietary control points.” Such a move has been suspected. The fact that AMD didn’t have a mobile strategy cost the company’s last CEO Dirk Meyer his job.

2012 Storage Predictions: Vblock FastPath, VI SAN Probe and Hadoop

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:44:41 EST

Yearly prediction blogs are so clichéd hence why I’ve always tried to avoid writing one. Despite this I’ve always made a mental note of technology, products or companies that I thought were going to really do well in the upcoming year. Back in 2008 I felt VMware were going to really take off after the release of 3.5. In 2009 I had a gut feeling DataDomain would explode just before they were bought by EMC. In 2010 I spoke to a friend about how 3PAR’s technology could no longer be ignored and in 2011 I still wasn’t convinced that FCoE would overtake FC in revenue despite all the analysts’ claims. But why believe me when I’d never put these thoughts on paper? So now at the beginning of 2012, I’ve decided to put my money where my mouth is, pull out my crystal ball and document my predictions.

Just What Is a Storage Hypervisor?

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 10:00:00 EST

There’s a new segment emerging in the industry around storage hypervisors. This is a simple idea that makes a lot of sense. We all understand the benefits that server hypervisor technology brought to servers in terms of utilization, flexibility and cost savings. The promise of a storage hypervisor is to do for storage what server hypervisor technology did for servers, providing the same utilization, flexibility, and cost savings benefits. Keeping with the analogy, a storage hypervisor must meaningfully improve the utilization of existing storage resources to drive lower costs and, second, it must provide the level of virtualization necessary to offer unfettered management flexibility. Let’s face it: we have been over-provisioning storage for years. The wastage this has caused has driven the development of some interesting technologies like storage capacity optimization (the most well-known example of this technology is de-duplication) and thin provisioning, among others. Most enterprises didn’t really have a good handle on just how badly they were underutilizing storage resources along the lines of performance and capacity consumption. A “storage resource management” push about a decade ago attempted to help enterprises quantify this but not surprisingly, storage administrators weren’t too keen on making it easy for others to see just how underutilized the storage was.

Roadmap for Data Virtualization

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:45:00 EST

Just as business and technology continuously evolves, so too will the scope and impact of data virtualization adoption and offerings. The offerings that best meet expanding access, optimization, deployment, ease-of-use, and governance requirements, along with the organizations that adopt them, will thrive.

Nicira Launches: Changes the World of Networking Giants and Enterprise IT

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 05:18:00 EST

My friend Peter Thorp has a way of sensing great technologies and then helping teach others of the relevance of those to enterprise missions. He did that with amazing firms like Netscape and Opsware and has been key in teaching many of us about dozens of other incredible capabilities. For the last year he has been telling a few of us about a story that can now be broadly shared. His latest project is leading all federal activities of a firm called Nicira. Nicira has just exited “stealth-mode” and is now providing information broadly on what they do and how they do it. One of their press releases is copied below for your information. The press and analysts in the IT community are now diving deeper into Nicira’s capability and are already concluding what Peter told me long ago. Nicira will deliver powerful capabilities that can transform network operations and economics. We will be writing more about Nicira here in the future and will also be capturing reference information at our companion site CTOlabs.com, so please stay tuned for more.

Desktop VDI May Be Ready for Prime Time but Is the Network?

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 08:45:00 EST

Considering the innate differences between just the two most popular mobile operating systems – Android and iOS – gives rise to understanding how costly and complex an infrastructure might need to be to support both. It’s not at all unlike the issues with server virtualization. Management and delivery architectures require different solutions depending on the platform, so despite potentially costly investments to scale, organizations are often staying single-vendor with respect to its virtualization platform strategy.

Performance Management in Virtualized Environments

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 15:00:00 EST

Virtualization technologies have changed the ground rules on monitoring and managing your IT services. Most of us in the IT operations world tend to focus on the nuts and bolts of the infrastructure – our key concerns are: How hot are my Linux servers? How many IOPS are happening to the disks? Is Active Directory working? Is DNS working, etc.? On the other hand, end users are focused on the business services that they are accessing. After all, that’s what they see and care about to get their jobs done. So a user complaint always relates to the service – bill payment is not working, my CRM service is slow, my online reservation crashed, etc. Clearly, there is a disconnect between the end users with their focus on the business and the IT operations staff with their IT focus. This disconnect threatens the success of any IT infrastructure transformation initiative to deliver on the user experience and ROI promise. The disconnect is partly caused by the way IT operations teams are organized and managed. A single business service involves multiple infrastructure silos – the firewall tier, the web server tier, the database tier, the server tier, the application tier, and so on. Virtualization is yet another tier added to the mix.

Requirements for Capacity Management in Virtual Environments

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:15:00 EST

Any data center with a virtualized environment has a real need for effective capacity management. This article discusses the reasons why capacity management is critical to achieving the benefits of server virtualization and outlines the three key requirements to consider when evaluating capacity management systems. A major advantage of virtualized environments is their ability to improve resource utilization by running multiple virtual machines (VMs) on the physical servers in a shared infrastructure. With such an architecture, utilization can increase from as low as 10% for dedicated servers to 60% or more for virtualized servers. The enhanced resource efficiencies make it possible to more fully utilize ever-increasing server power and provide significant savings in capital expenditures, power consumption, rack space and cooling. This concept of greater efficiencies through resource-sharing is not new. Mainframe systems have long employed time-slicing to enable multiple applications to run concurrently. With mainframe systems, the dedicated and quite sophisticated “capacity planning” is performed by the operating system, which ensures that no application can cause any others to suffer from resource contention issues. The high cost of mainframes created a strong incentive for IT departments to maximize mainframe resource utilization by running as many concurrent applications as physically possible.

Data Virtualization Best Practices

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 06:00:00 EST

With hundreds of organizations deploying data virtualization, a number of best practices have emerged. In this article, I will pass along the lessons these ten organizations learned along the way, as they are a valuable to help other organizations avoid common pitfalls and realize the benefits of data virtualization as quickly as possible. Several organizations stressed the need to centralize the initial design, development and deployment responsibility for data virtualization into a focused data virtualization team. The key benefit here is the ability to advance the effort quickly and to take on the bigger concepts, such as defining common canonicals and implementing an intelligent storage component to speed development, reduce time to solution and deliver a more powerful and complete data virtualization environment.

IT and Storage Economics 101, Supply and Demand

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 09:30:00 EST

In my 2012 (and 2013) industry trends and perspectives predictions I mentioned that some storage systems vendors who managed their costs could benefit from the current Hard Disk Drive (HDD) shortage. Most in the industry would say that is saying what they have said, however I have an alternate scenario. My scenario is that for vendors who already manage good (or great) margins on their HDD sales and who can manage their costs including inventories stand to make even more margin. There is a popular myth that there is no money or margin in HDD or for those who sell them which might be true for some. Without going into any details, lets just say it is a popular myth just like saying that there is no money in hardware or that all software and people services are pure profit. Ok, lets leave sleeping dogs lay where rest (at least for now).

Five Stages of a Data Breach

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 19:52:00 EST

One thing I've noticed over the last couple years is that there are Five Stages of a Data Breach: Denial: We do not believe these attacks breached our critical servers. Anger: We want to make it clear that we take security seriously! Bargaining: We'd like to offer our affected customers a credit monitoring service. Depression: We wish we could have done things differently. Acceptance: Well, it just shows that no one is safe from hackers.

Vulnerability Assessment with Application Security

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:45:00 EST

Protecting web applications is an around-the-clock job. Almost anything that is connected to the Internet is a target these days, and organizations are scrambling to keep their web properties available and secure. The ramifications of a breach or downtime can be severe: brand reputation, the ability to meet regulatory requirements, and revenue are all on the line. A 2011 survey conducted by Merrill Research on behalf of VeriSign found that 60 percent of respondents rely on their websites for at least 25 percent of their annual revenue. And the threat landscape is only getting worse. Targeted attacks are designed to gather intelligence; steal trade secrets, sensitive customer information, or intellectual property; disrupt operations; or even destroy critical infrastructure. Targeted attacks have been around for a number of years, but 2011 brought a whole new meaning to advanced persistent threat. Symantec reported that the number of targeted attacks increased almost four-fold from January 2011 to November 2011.

Cloud Computing: Three Down: Another HP Director to Leave Board

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

HP told the SEC Monday that long-time board member Lawrence Babbio won’t be standing for re-election at the stockholders meeting in March. Babbio’s been on the notoriously dysfunctional HP board since the divisive Compaq acquisition, made over accusations of vote-buying, there through the pretexting spying scandal, the fallout resignation of chairwoman Pat Dunn; the Mark Hurd ouster; the questionable Léo Apotheker hire, the Apotheker ouster 10 months later; the shopping of the HP PC unit; the repudiation of the $1.2 billion Palm acquisition; the unpopular ~$12 billion Autonomy acquisition and assorted other overpriced board-approved acquisitions. Babbio was vice-chairman and president of Verizon and currently advises Warburg Pincus.

Jon Rubinstein, Father of webOS, Leaves HP

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 07:45:00 EST

HP has dispensed with the services of former Palm CEO and pivotal Apple graduate Jon Rubinstein, according to AllThingsDigital. Rubinstein has been like a man without a country since HP, after spending billions on the stuff decided it couldn’t go toe to toe with Apple and Google, and up and dumped Palm’s webOS-based phones and TouchPad last August then announced that by September it would open source the operating system on which Rubinstein spent four-and-a-half years of his life.

Blitzkrieg and VDI Edge Protection

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:00:00 EST

By now, everyone even vaguely familiar with information security knows the military maxim of blitzkrieg – burst through the hardened defense at a single point and then rush pell-mell to the rear where the soft underbelly of any static army lies. It is a good military strategy, provided you have the resources to break through the defenses and follow up with a rapid advance into the rear areas. While there are variants of this plan, and a lot of discussion about how/when it is strategically worth the risk, historically speaking it has been a smashing success. Germany did it to France and the Low Countries in 1940, to Russia in 1941, Russia returned the favor in 1943, and the western allies joined used it successfully at Normandy in late 1944. Sherman’s March to the Sea in the American Civil War was just such a ploy (though Sherman was more willing to hit civilian targets than a 20th century general would have been, it was still a rush to the soft rear), and the first Gulf War had the coalition forces doing much the same. These are just the large-scale instances of this theory in operation, but you have to admit it works. The risk is high though, as the Germans found out at Prokhorovka, and that alone makes generals cautious that they have the resources and intelligence reports to burst through in the first place.

Disruptive Technology from the Desktop to the Data Center

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 06:45:00 EST

According to Wikipedia, a disruptive technology or disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network (over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technology. The term is used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically first by designing for a different set of consumers in the new market and later by lowering prices in the existing market. Virtualization and software design have been the main drivers in the development of disruptive innovations in hardware.

Evolving (or not) with Our Devices

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:34:00 EST

When I talk on the phone, I've always used my left ear to listen. Listening in the right ear just doesn't sound right. This might be due to being right handed, doing the shoulder hold to take notes when needed. As corded turned to cordless and mobile along with the hands-free ear-plugs, that plug went into the left ear whenever I was on the phone. Recently, I've been listening to some music while walking the dog and have run into an issue. The stereo ear plugs do not fit, sit or stay in my right ear. I have no problem with the nub in my left ear but need to keep re-inserting, adjusting and holding the plug in my right ear. I'm sure I was born with the same size opening for both ears years ago and my only explanation is that my left ear has evolved over the years to accommodate an ear plug. Even measuring each indicates that the left is opened more ever so slightly. I seem to be fine, or at least better, with the isolation earphone style but it's the ear-bud type that won't fit in my right ear. I realize there are tons of earplug types for various needs and I could just get one that works for me but it got me thinking. If my ears or specifically my left ear has morphed due to technology, what other human physical characteristics might evolve over time.

My Server and Storage IO HolidayBreak Projects

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 10:30:00 EST

Following up from a flurry of posts in the closing days of 2011 including industry trends perspective predictions for 2012 and 2013, top blog posts from 2011, top all time posts, along with a couple of other items here and here, its time to get back to 2012 activity. Also if you missed it, here is the Fall (December) 2011 StorageIO news letter. Actually I have been busy working on some other projects the past several weeks most of which are NDA so not much else can be said about them, however there are some other things Im working on that will show themselves in the weeks and months to come. Here is a link to a webinar and live chat that I did the first week of January on CDP (Continuous Data Protection) and how it can be applied to many different environments. But let's take a step back for a moment and let me share with you some of the things I did or started during the holiday break between christmas and the new years. Like many others, I found time to relax and get away from normal work activities during the recent holiday season.

Managing Virtual Data Centers

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 05:45:00 EST

A new episode of the screencast series is now available at the OpenNebula YouTube Channel. This screencast, second part of the oZones screencast, shows how to manage and use Virtual Data Centers, both with the oZones CLI and with the oZones web-based interface, to isolate virtual infrastructure environments. It shows how to create a VDC by assigning a group of users to a group of physical resources and by granting one of the users, the VDC administrator, with privileges to manage all virtual resources in the VDC. The users in the VDC, including the VDC administrator, only see the virtual resources and not the underlying physical infrastructure, and can create and manage virtual compute, storage and networking capacity. Enjoy the screencast!

The Fundamental Problem with Traditional Inbound Protection

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 11:00:00 EST

The past year brought us many stories focusing on successful attacks on organizations for a wide variety of reasons. Why an organization was targeted was not nearly as important as the result: failure to prevent an outage. While the volume of traffic often seen by these organizations was in itself impressive, it was not the always the volume of traffic that led to the outage, but rather what that traffic was designed to do: consume resources. It’s a story we’ve heard before, particularly with respect to web and application servers. We know that over-consumption of resources impairs performance and, ultimately, causes outages. But what was perhaps new to many last year was that it wasn’t just servers that were falling to an overwhelming number of connections, it was the very protections put in place to detect and prevent such attacks – stateful firewalls.

HP Gets New Chief Strategist

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 07:45:00 EST

HP has named Bill Veghte its chief strategy officer, replacing CTO Shane Robison who was ousted three months ago. Veghte, who used to run the $15 billion Windows unit at Microsoft, joined HP in 2010 as head of software, a job he will keep. He is also supposed to head HP’s cloud and webOS open source initiatives. HP said that as chief strategy officer, Veghte’s supposed to “help define the IT industry’s future and make certain HP continues to lead the way,” adding that his “new role reaffirms HP’s commitment to providing customers with the latest platforms, products and services needed for success in a rapidly changing world.”

Three Ways Virtualization Benefits Infrastructure

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 06:15:00 EST

Virtualization offers obvious benefits from the beginning. Certainly, the prospect of reduced capital costs is enticing. The security and redundancies offered by the right virtualization setup are compelling, as well. One of the areas that virtualization can help that many people don’t realize, however, is in the area of IT infrastructure. Here are three ways in which virtualization helps to boost IT infrastructure: 1. Flexibility Virtualization products are designed to work with multiple hardware and software platforms. This includes things like storage technology, network equipment, and security devices. By choosing virtualization technologies that allow for interoperability, you can be sure that you choose the right solutions for your exact needs, and that you don’t get tied down to having a specific vendor.

HP Ecosystem Provides Support for VMware Virtualized IT Environments

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 12:00:00 EST

Advanced and pervasive virtualization and cloud computing trends are driving the need for a better, holistic approach to IT support and remediation. Virtualization isn’t just server-by-server, but really impacts the entire data center. You need to think about it more holistically, particularly in regard to things like security, performance and how your brands and businesses are perceived across the globe. Many of the companies that I deal with day in and day out are up at 80 percent and even 90 percent virtualized. When they think about virtualization, they go beyond just server virtualization. It’s really now looking at storage, applications, networks and even the end-user desktop experience, or desktop as a service (VDI). Successful virtualization is no longer just about servers, it’s about managing complexity when you get beyond the 20 percent or 30 percent level and expand into converged infrastructure virtualization without failures.

The Time Is Right for Data Virtualization

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 12:00:00 EST

Data Virtualization: Going Beyond Traditional Data Integration to Achieve Business Agility is the first book published on the topic of data virtualization. In writing the book’s foreword, well-known IT industry analyst Colin White of BI Research, summarizes data virtualization’s history and value, concluding that data virtualization’s time has come. This article includes excerpts from the book’s foreword. Providing business users with the data they need to make effective decisions has always been difficult. Increasing data volumes, varieties of data and heterogeneous data stores are not making this task any easier. For the past two decades, the solution to accessing disparate data has been to consolidate the data into a data warehouse, and provide users with tools to access and analyze this consolidated data.

SCVMM in System Center 2012 and Managing Citrix XenServer

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 11:05:00 EST

This question came from Randy at our TechNet Event in Saint Louis: “Are the VMM management capabilities for a Citrix XenServer based VM the same as for a Hyper-V based VM? (example: can you still live migrate, change RAM, etc?)” The simple answer is: The capabilities are pretty much the same. Live Migration, for example, will simply drive VMs in a managed pool through XenMotion. There are a couple of considerations in some areas (such as XenServer Templates and networking), but being able to build a Cloud of Citrix XenServer resources right alongside Hyper-V or VMware based clouds is pretty amazing.

Dual Source "Grown Up" Virtualization Comes of Age

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 10:05:00 EST

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 launches today with what is labelled as "significantly expanded" management tools and enhancements to its Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor. Technology analysts at IDC have argued that this is an "increasingly competitive" time in the virtualisation marketplace, so Red Hat has clearly played to up its game and offered more capabilities than the product it initially launched in November 2009. For its part, Red Hat asserts that its virtualisation software is being used in increasingly "mission-critical production deployments" and that many customers are deploying dual-source virtualisation strategies. Dual-source virtualisation?

CiRBA Announces Control Console for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 07:00:00 EST

CiRBA on Wednesday announced support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 in its latest release of CiRBA Version 7.0. CiRBA’s new Control Console provides IT organizations with control over risk and efficiency in virtual and cloud infrastructure. The console provides a visualization revealing in a single view where attention is required at the VM, host, and cluster level and explicit instructions on what to do in order to eliminate risk and increase efficiency. “CiRBA and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization provide a powerful solution for enabling organizations to gain control over virtual infrastructure while significantly reducing its cost,” said Chuck Tatham, SVP, Operations and Business Development at CiRBA. “CiRBA’s analytics help organizations place workloads and allocate resources in order to safely maximize efficiency and VM density. Organizations benefiting from the efficiency gains provided by CiRBA analytics along with the performance and cost advantages of leveraging Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization-based infrastructure have opportunities to achieve substantial savings on infrastructure over VMware-based alternatives.”

Why SSL VPN Still Matters

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 07:30:00 EST

We were very excited to announce recognition of our hard work on our SSL VPN solutions: F5 Positioned in Leaders Quadrant of SSL VPN Magic Quadrant. Second, we were even more excited to announce adding industry-leading support for Android’s 4.x OS, enhancing its SSL VPN capabilities. Why would be excited about that? Because mobile devices and virtualization (desktop, a la VDI, and server, a la cloud) continue to drive the need for secure remote access at a scale never before experienced by most IT organizations. While web monsters and primarily web-focused organizations have long understand the critical nature of scalability to their business, IT shops for whom a web presence was only somewhat important have not necessarily invested in the infrastructure or architecture necessary to truly scale to meet the increasing demand. It is increasingly the case that IT orgs of all shapes, sizes, and concerns must look to the scalability of its infrastructure to ensure its ability to service users inside and outside the data center via an often times dizzying array of clients and technologies.

Convirture Reports Strong 2011 as Virtualization Management Takes Off

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 05:00:00 EST

Convirture, which makes management software for Linux virtualization, had an excellent 2011. Convirture announced its fifth consecutive quarter-over-quarter growth, including increasing its customer base ten-fold for its commercial product, ConVirt Enterprise. The company now has customers in every global region, including North and South America, EMEA and Asia. The open source version of ConVirt has now been downloaded more than 60,000 times. In total, ConVirt software, which is available for most major Linux distributions including Debian, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu, is now being used by more than 8,000 businesses. "Linux-based virtualization is here, it's real and clearly there is an appetite for something other than VMware when it comes to managing cloud computing and virtualization technologies," said Arsalan Farooq, CEO of Convirture. "As KVM and Xen continue to gain traction with enterprise customers, we expect to see even faster growth through 2012."

Security’s Rough Ride

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:10:00 EST

1 if by land, 2 of by sea, 0 if by IP I know I’ve said this before but it sure seems like almost daily there is a security breach somewhere. Over the years, the thought process has changed from prevent all attacks to, it is inevitable that we will be breached. The massive number of attacks occurring daily makes it a statistical reality. Now organizations are looking for the right solution (both technology and practice) to quickly detect a breach, stop it, identify what occurred and what data may have been compromised. Over the last couple of days various entities have had their security breached.

Atlantis Launches Solution That Eliminates Storage for VDI

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 15:40:17 EST

Atlantis Computing, a provider of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) storage and performance optimization solutions, has announced the release of Atlantis ILIO Diskless VDI, a solution to eliminate storage for Citrix and VMware virtual desktop images. Atlantis ILIO Diskless VDI enables customers to reduce VDI CAPEX to under $200 per desktop and eliminates all storage related CAPEX and OPEX, while at the same time providing a stellar user experience with desktop boot times of 12 seconds. In November 2011, PAETEC Communications with over 4,000 employees (now a Windstream Company – Nasdaq: WIN), purchased Atlantis ILIO Diskless VDI and the Cisco UCS Blade System with Extended Memory Technology (EMT) for their Citrix XenDesktop VDI deployment.

AMD Names Chief Strategist

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 06:00:00 EST

AMD has named Rajan Naik chief strategy officer, reporting to CEO Rory Read. Naik, 40, was a partner in McKinsey’s technology practice. His charter will embrace both the company’s short- and long-term strategy development, including market opportunities, strategic partnerships and investment strategies. Read said Naik “possesses a strong track record of execution in strategic planning, product and market strategy, and operational performance. He will help ensure strategic and operational alignment across our business to take advantage of growth opportunities in lower power, emerging markets and cloud computing.”

HP Gets No Itanium Relief from the French

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 13:00:00 EST

France’s antitrust regulator Autorité de la Concurrence Tuesday refused to order Oracle to keep on supporting Itanium with its software on grounds there was no immediate threat to HP although it has clearly hurt its sales. However, the regulator promised HP it will continue investigating the complaint HP made last summer. The process is going to take way longer than HP can afford. The regulator also rejected HP’s request that it order Oracle to align the Itanium pricing on its database with x86 pricing. HP accused Oracle of discriminating.

The VMware Virtual CPU Dilemma

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 09:30:00 EST

2011 was a year where despite the economic constraints everything Big was seemingly good: Big Data, Big Clouds, Big VMs, etc. Caught in the industry's lust for this excess, 2011 was also the year I lost count of how many overprovisioned resources to ‘Big' Production VMs I witnessed. More often than not this was a typical reaction from System Admins trying to alleviate their fears of potential performance problems to important VMs. It was the year where I began to hear justifications such as "yes we are overprovisioning our production VMs..but apart from the cost savings, overallocating our available underlying resources to a VM isn't a bad thing, in fact it allows it to be scalable". Despite this 2011 was also the year where I lost count of the amount of times I had to point out that sometimes overprovisioning a VM does lead to performance problems - specifically when dealing with Virtual CPUs.

Performance Tuning Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 03:26:00 EST

This is our second article in our series about tuning performance of your Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V environment. In our first article we discussed the considerations you should make when selecting the hardware components for your Hyper-V server(s). We mentioned in our first article that the way the hypervisor virtualizes the physical processors is by time-slicing between the virtual processors. Obviously, moving a workload into a virtual machine increases CPU usage. In this article we’ll discuss how to optimize the processor(s).

NComputing Showcases 'Classroom in a Box'

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 01:00:00 EST

NComputing is showcasing the latest version of its 'Classroom in a Box' solution which slashes desktop economics for teaching establishments by enabling up to 100 students to run virtual desktops from a single operating system instance. A classroom environment will be created on Stand J50, for visitors to experience firsthand NComputing's desktop virtualisation and its benefits for the classroom. Visitors to the stand will also be able to enter a competition to win a 12 user NComputing Classroom in a Box solution. NComputing 'In a Box' technology is the simplest, most powerful and affordable desktop virtualisation solution on the market today, offering the lowest cost per seat available to schools, colleges and universities. It supports both Windows and Linux platforms and comes with all peripherals, virtual desktops and software pre-tested for compatibility and integration.

The Epic Failure of Standalone WAN Optimization

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 10:15:00 EST

Yes, yes I did say that. There's a reason for that, and after more than a decade of watching the markets that tangentially revolve around making applications faster I'm here to tell you it's a failure of monumental proportions. The very term WAN Optimization has always stuck in my craw (whatever and wherever that may be). That's because optimizing the WAN implies that you're making the WAN faster. The problem is that a WAN is either a dedicated link between two locations (old skool) or a connection to a remote site across the Internet (new skool). In the case of the former there really isn't a whole lot you can do to that network to make it faster. In the case of the latter there really isn't anything you can do to influence the networking components out there, on the Internet (or "in the cloud" as some are wont to call it these days) to make it faster.

IBM to Acquire Green Hat

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 09:00:00 EST

IBM's intended acquisition of Green Hat (announced 4 January 2012) shows commitment to the importance of the lifecycle virtualization category by IBM. As application complexity continues to expand lifecycle virtualization technology is absolutely critical to delivering a faster time-to-market and reducing both capital and operational expenditures. Lifecycle virtualization is defined as the use of technologies such as virtual lab management, service virtualization, defect virtualization, device virtualization, virtualized cloud platforms, etc., to enhance the application or product lifecycle through reducing defects, lowering costs, speeding time-to-market, and increasing customer satisfaction. Lifecycle virtualization is as evolutionary for testing as the advent of the IDE (integrated development environment) was for the development organization.

Brocade’s Reportedly Entertaining Bids

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 08:45:00 EST

Brocade Communications Systems, which has tried to get bought at least twice before, is entertaining bids according to Reuters, which explains why its stock was up 8% Monday. The wire service heard from nameless knowledgeable sources that Brocade has gotten “first-round bids from a handful of potential buyers.” The switch maker has reportedly had Qatalyst Partners out looking for a leveraged buyout and Qatalyst is famous for bringing home juicy deals. However, Brocade is apparently no easy sell. According to Bloomberg Qatalyst has been looking for two years. Meanwhile, Dell bought Force 10 and HP bought 3Com. Reuters says Qatalyst was brought back in in November.

OCZ Technology Acquires SANRAD

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 07:45:00 EST

OCZ Technology Group on Monday announced it has acquired SANRAD Inc., a privately held provider of flash caching and virtualization software and hardware. According to Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology Group, the transaction "significantly enhances the ability for customers to increase datacenter performance and efficiency by putting more virtual machines (VM) on a server without slowing down the VM's ability to access stored data, thus substantially lowering the overall cost of deployment.” SANRAD was founded in 2000 and its R&D center is based in Tel Aviv, Israel. SANRAD currently sells its line of flash caching and virtualization software and hardware to storage and networking OEMs such as NEXSAN and Brocade as well as directly to the enterprise through its network of Value Added Resellers.

Managing Virtualized IT Workloads and Private Clouds

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 10:00:00 EST

Better managing virtualized IT workloads and private clouds is a top concern for IT leaders going into 2012. They may want to follow the lead of global travel and tourism giant TUI Group. The IT organization there, TUI InfoTec, has found ways to manage highly virtualized IT operations better, especially in mixed environments like hybrid clouds. The critical need to better identify performance issues and outages prompted TUI InfoTec to find ways to cut time to troubleshooting, resulting in a 50 percent reduction in the time needed to identify the causes of such problems.

Virtual Storage in the Cloud

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 08:00:00 EST

“We’re a storage vendor that doesn’t sell storage – physical hardware – we sell software and it’s in the public cloud; we’ve taken storage virtualization to a new level,” explains Mark Spowart, Co-Founder and CEO at Zadara Storage, in this SYS-CON.TV interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 9th International Cloud Expo, held Nov 7-10, 2011, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Cloud Expo New York, June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, and Cloud Expo Silicon Valley, November 5–8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

355 Shopping Days Left

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 10:17:00 EST

After just being bombarded with the endless options of gifts for your loved ones, a simple reminder that the next blitz is just around the corner. And you are a target. 2011 started relatively tame for breaches but when hacktivism and a few other entities decided to take hold, it became a massive year for lost data. From retail to healthcare to government to schools to financial institutions – no one was immune. Household names like Sony, RSA, Lockheed and Sega were all hit. Privacy Rights Clearinghouse reports that 535 security breaches in 2011 exposed 30 million sensitive records to identity thieves and other rip-off artists. Since 2005, 543 million records have been breached – almost double the US population and about 7% of the entire world’s population. Looking at the entire Privacy Rights Clearinghouse list is staggering both in numbers and names.

Desktop Virtualization and Cloud Services

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 07:00:00 EST

“Virtualization is a key product for Parallels. Today everybody has more work to do than they have time, so if we can make certain tasks a little more efficient for users that’s a productivity solution,” states K. Michaels of Parallels, in this SYS-CON.TV interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 9th International Cloud Expo, held Nov 7-10, 2011, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Cloud Expo New York, June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, and Cloud Expo Silicon Valley, November 5–8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

Data Virtualization Adoption Propelled by Significant Business Benefits

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 05:45:00 EST

Data virtualization is a data integration approach and technology used by innovative organizations to achieve greater business agility and reduce costs. Data virtualization middleware platforms provide critical data integration functionality within integrated offerings that support the full software development life cycle, high-performance run-time execution and reliable, 24x7x365 operation.

Case Study: Navy Marine Corps Intranet and VMware Infrastructure

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 07:30:00 EST

The Navy Marine Corps Intranet is the largest individual network in the world. The only larger network is the Internet. This huge network sprawl requires a great deal of strategy, concern and planning. Over 700,000 users rely on the intranet to receive IT services. This is a huge network, and the NMCI cannot afford to [...]

Data Virtualization at Northern Trust: A Case Study

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 06:30:00 EST

Northern Trust is a leading provider of innovative fiduciary, investment management, private banking, wealth management and worldwide trust and custody services. Clients include corporations, institutions, families and individuals in more than 40 countries. Based in Chicago, Illinois, the company has over 13,000 employees. At the end of 2010, the company had assets under custody of $4.1 trillion, assets under management of $643.6 billion and banking assets of $83.8 billion. Annual revenues in 2010 were almost $3.7 billion. For this case study, we interviewed Leonard J. Hardy, Senior Vice President, Operations and Technology. Hardy is a member of Northern Trust’s Rapid Solutions group, which provides a solution architecture and consulting facility to other Northern Trust application development groups. Hardy also manages the company’s Integration Competency Center (ICC), which helps other application areas figure out the best way to integrate data. The ICC supports several tools for this, including data virtualization, ETL and data integration best practices. Hardy participated in this case study project in his ICC role.

How Data Virtualization Improves Business Agility – Part 3

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 11:00:00 EST

While the benefits derived from greater business agility are significant, costs are also an important factor to consider. This is especially true in today’s extremely competitive business environment and difficult economic times. This article, the last in a series of three articles on how data virtualization delivers business agility, focuses on resource agility. In Parts 1 and 2, business decision agility and time-to-solution agility were addressed. In the recently published Data Virtualization: Going Beyond Traditional Data Integration to Achieve Business Agility, resource agility was identified as the third key element in an enterprise’s business agility strategy, along with business decision agility and time-to-solution agility. Data virtualization directly enables greater resource agility through superior developer productivity, lower infrastructure costs and better optimization of data integration solutions. These factors combine to provide significant cost savings that can be applied flexibly to fund additional data integration activities and/or other business and IT projects.