Latest News from Virtualization Journal

The Importance of Cloud

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 13:00:00 EDT

Three HP executives discuss the implications and business value from the Converged Cloud, the major focus of discussion at HP Discover 2013. What's happening in the market today, is that on one end, you have startups that are rushing to the cloud very quickly, that use cloud and don't use anything else, because they don't want to spend a penny on building up an IT department. On the other extreme, you have very large corporations that look at all the things that are unknown around cloud and are sticking their toe in the water. And you have everything possible and every possible scenario in the middle. That's where things are getting interesting. You have forward-looking CIOs who are embracing clouds, and understand how cloud can help them add value to the business and, as such, are an important part of the business. You have other CIOs who are very reluctant and that prefer to stay managing the traditional boat, if I can put it that way, in keeping and providing that support to our customers. It's a interesting market right now.

HP Removes Bradley as PC Chief

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 08:00:00 EDT

Todd Bradley, the former Palm CEO who’s been running HP’s PC unit since 2005 and added printing last year when the Printing and Personal Systems (PPS) organization was formed, has apparently been pushed aside. He is trading his job running half of HP’s revenue for a newly created position as executive vice-president, strategic growth initiatives, where he’s supposed to increase HP’s business in China, extend its channel partner relationships worldwide and identify potential partners among early-stage start-ups. He will work directly with CEO Meg Whitman, who said in the Tuesday morning announcement that “There’s nothing more important to HP than our channel partners and the future of our business in China. I’ve asked Todd to use his expertise to focus on these areas. I’ve also asked him to study the landscape of small companies and start-ups that could partner with HP to spur growth.”

Icahn Now Dell’s Largest Outside Stockholder

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 07:00:00 EDT

Last Friday calm seemed to be descending on Round Rock, Texas. Reports were circulating that activist shareholder Carl Icahn was losing the stomach for scuttling the Michael Dell-Silver Lake Management plan to buy the company for $24.4 billion and take it private.

Lunch Keynote at Cloud Expo New York | CIOs Are Transforming the Cloud

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 10:00:00 EDT

Cloud computing is the #1 topic for most CIOs this year. In her Lunch Keynote at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Krishna Subramanian, VP Marketing & Business Development at Citrix Systems, will walk you through how customers have transformed the way they do business using Citrix Cloud Solutions. Learn best practices and architecture from companies who have embraced the cloud in their datacenter environment. Krishna Subramanian is VP Marketing & Business Development at Citrix Systems.

Cloud Expo New York: Enabling Cloud-Scale Desktop Virtualization

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 09:30:00 EDT

In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Steve O'Donnell, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of GreenBytes, will discuss the emerging technologies that are enabling a scalable desktop virtualization platform that will support tens and even hundreds of thousands of users which, to this point, has been both a financial and technical challenge. Attendees will hear about new technologies that are resolving mission-critical desktop virtualization business challenges such as limited scalability, complex integration, high capital cost of storage, and a disappointing user experience, and come away with a clear plan of attack to implement a cloud-scale desktop virtualization project.

Cloud Expo NY: Enterprise Bare Metal & Virtualization Move to CloudStack

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 09:00:00 EDT

In their session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Chris Swenson, Director, Platform Operations at WebMD Health Services, and Ilya Musayev, a CloudStack Contributor at The Apache Software Foundation, will explain how the most common enterprise setups of bare metal and some virtualization can go to Private Cloud using CloudStack and other tools to solve common business and technical problems. Chris Swenson is Director, Platform Operations at WebMD Health Services. He works with technology teams in all areas to collaborate and move from clunky non-scalable bare metal to flexible auto scaling cloud solutions.

Cloud Is All About Simplicity

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 12:00:00 EDT

"For organizations just getting started the move to cloud is about rapidly turning on IT infrastructure," said Nicos Vekiarides, CEO & Co-Founder of TwinStrata, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. "For mature organizations where IT has started to become unwieldy," Vekiarides continued, "it is about cost and administrative savings." Cloud Computing Journal: The move to cloud isn't about saving money, it is about saving time – agree or disagree? Nicos Vekiarides: I would say that it is a combination of both. Ramp-up time is a very important consideration for organizations deciding whether to deploy IT infrastructure locally or in the cloud. Saving time is particularly compelling for organizations in the midst of new "green field" deployments, where data center space needs to be built out. Without the need to purchase and deploy any infrastructure, cloud reduces the ramp-up cycle dramatically.

Cloud Expo NY: Virtualization, Compliance, and Healthcare in the Cloud

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 09:45:00 EDT

Learn about the complex regulations surrounding HIPAA compliance and other considerations for running sensitive data in the Cloud. In their session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Frank Nydam, Director of Healthcare Solutions at VMware, and Ken Ziegler, CEO of Logicworks, will discuss the best practices for leveraging virtualization and cloud technologies without sacrificing security or compliance. Care providers, State and Federal entities, integrators and SaaS providers large and small will benefit from understanding the basics of protecting sensitive healthcare data, including PHI and EMR, in today’s fast-paced environment. The HIPAA Omnibus Rule and Business Associates Agreements (BAA) will also be covered in this important session for compliance-sensitive organizations.

AMD Takes Lead in HyperScale Chips

Thu, 30 May 2013 09:00:00 EDT

Once upon a time, children – though this might sound like a fable, it’s a true story – little AMD scared the bejesus out of mighty Intel and forced it to change all it’s carefully laid 64-bit server chip plans. Until it did AMD ruled the server roost and made a little money. Then AMD frittered away its lead with manufacturing glitches. That was a long ago in Internet time, beyond the ken of some younger readers, but now AMD is going to try repeating the experience by introducing cloud- and Big Data-oriented x86 server chips that beat out Intel’s current x86 Atom parts. Since the first Opteron and the advent of the cloud, things have changed. Newfangled companies like Google, Amazon, Baidu and Facebook that buy massive numbers of servers aren’t buying machines with faster, more powerful Intel chips inside. Instead they want dense, low-cost boxes that save on power and handle new workloads that cater to simple things like storing and calling up web pages and photos taken on smartphones rather than complex databases.

Cloud Expo New York: Building Open Interoperable Cloud Infrastructure

Tue, 28 May 2013 09:00:00 EDT

At pennies per virtual machine-hour, the economics of cloud computing are both compelling and daunting to replicate. Whether you are building your own cloud infrastructure, building a public cloud or choosing a cloud service, there are key strategy and technology decisions that make the difference between success and failure. In his General Session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Jason Waxman, VP in the Intel Architecture Group and general manager of the Cloud Platforms Group within Intel's Datacenter and Connected Systems Group, will share industry best practices for deploying cloud infrastructure that maximize the benefits of cloud economics, agility and interoperability. Learn how Intel is working with industry leaders to deliver open, secure and efficient cloud computing based on optimized compute, networking, storage and software technology and what are key tools and resources to help you achieve your cloud computing goals.

Big Data on OpenStack

Tue, 28 May 2013 09:00:00 EDT

The massive computing and storage resources that are needed to support big data applications make cloud environments an ideal fit. In Nati Shalom's upcoming session at next month's 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York [June 10-13, 2013], delegates will learn how to build your big data "database on-demand" using MongoDB, Cassandra, Solr, MySQL, or any other big data solution, as well as manage your big data application using a new open source framework called “Cloudify.” All this, on top of the OpenStack cloud.

The Rise of the Thin Client

Mon, 27 May 2013 15:00:00 EDT

Imagine there was a technology that could solve some of the top issues for IT managers of large companies: managing a large fleet of users’ devices, with all the associated maintenance tasks, and maintaining the security and integrity of devices by preventing malicious software installation. Now imagine this solution also provided unparalleled energy efficiency. Thin computing is the answer. Thin clients are basic computer systems that work with a server to process applications and store data through virtualization – almost all of the actual computing occurs on the server, and most of the software is installed and managed virtually by an IT manager. Many clients can run the same applications on a shared sever, which finds its best usage among workers in massive buildings, with a lot of turnover, where many employees will use the same fundamental programs repeatedly.

Optimize Your Virtual Environment to Obtain Maximum Business Value

Mon, 27 May 2013 07:00:00 EDT

Everyone is virtualizing, but are they realizing any of the promised savings? This overview of IBM's new virtualization optimization solutions will show you how integrated Cloud Solutions like SmartCloud Provisioning and SmartCloud Monitoring can deliver the savings virtualization promises. Organizations are using intelligent management and analytics to provide the insight needed to optimize their virtualized infrastructure and dramatically improve availability, reduce data storage footprints and streamline patch management. In his session at 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York [June 10-13], IBM's Dan Carr will review lessons learned from real-world experience.

Developing the World’s First IaaS Marketplace

Sun, 26 May 2013 08:30:00 EDT

The world’s first vendor neutral marketplace for IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) cloud computing is being built. This marketplace fills the current gap in the value chain by offering standardized products and by addressing the needs of providers and consumers of cloud computing resources. Zimory is the technical partner for the settlement process of this project.

In his session at 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York [June 10-13, 2013], Zimory CEO Rüdiger Baumann session will introduce the marketplace from the technical point of view, focusing on the initial software requirements and later implementation of the software by buyers and sellers. An insight into the status of the project will be given as well the importance of standards when trading computing power in the same way as other utilities, such as energy.

Guided Lab: Capacity Planning for Disaster Recovery with Hyper-V

Sat, 25 May 2013 15:00:00 EDT

Hyper-V Replica is our included asynchronous site-to-site VM replication capability for Windows Server 2012 and our free Hyper-V Server 2012 bare-metal enterprise-grade hypervisor. Using Hyper-V Replica, you can quickly implement a cost-effective disaster recovery plan for your business critical VMs without the high costs involved in traditional DR solutions – you just need a Hyper-V host and/or cluster at each site and an IP WAN or Internet connection between them. No expensive shared storage or extra licenses are required! In this article, you’ll walk through a Guided Hands-on Lab for planning host and network capacity for Hyper-V Replica using our new Capacity Planner for Hyper-V Replica tool.

Adaptive Planning Gets $45 Million

Wed, 22 May 2013 08:00:00 EDT

Adaptive Planning, which likes to stress that it’s the first and only pure Software-as-a-Service outfit in the performance management space, has taken in a $45 million D round, bringing its total funding to a nice round $100 million.

Disaster Recovery as a Service for VMware Users from TwinStrata

Wed, 22 May 2013 06:00:00 EDT

“Our cloud disaster recovery service enables VMware users to recovery data and applications seamlessly at a fraction of the cost, making disaster recovery, business continuity and compliance with recovery objectives and regulations attainable for nearly any organization,” said Nicos Vekiarides, CEO of TwinStrata, as TwinStrata today announced CloudArray Disaster Recovery as a Service (CloudArray DRaaS) for VMware users on-demand.

“Why Cloud?” vs “What’s Next For Cloud?”

Sat, 18 May 2013 14:00:00 EDT

We all talk about cloud differently, but is there a way we should be speaking about this tech? Cloud computing is now a widely reported, if not accepted, IT movement that, depending on who you talk to, has changed or is changing the way businesses utilize infrastructure.

AMD Productizes Facebook Dream Box

Fri, 17 May 2013 08:45:00 EDT

Poor benighted AMD has new servers based on what it calls its Open 3.0 specification that are part of the open source Open Compute Project put in train by Facebook to deliver premium workload performance equal to competing proprietary OEM servers at half the cost. In comparison to benchmarks running virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), the AMD Open 3.0-based system supported just as many virtual desktops and reportedly cuts total cost of ownership (TCO) by 57%: $4,589 versus $10,669 for just a single server. This cost effectiveness translates into a dramatic reduction in cost per virtual desktop from $91.19 to only $38.24. “Global IT organizations have the difficult task of choosing between price and performance when investing in servers,” cloud evangelist and AMD Fellow Bob Ogrey said. “We don’t believe organizations have to compromise one for the other. Using systems based on the AMD Open 3.0 specification – the first open source modular platform for the masses – enables high performance and energy efficiency at a reasonable price, making it the best choice for organizations.” In May of last year AMD released its Open specification, and in January demonstrated systems based on the spec for the first time. Monday the company said systems are now in full production and available through a number of partners including Avnet, Hyve, Penguin Computing and ZT Systems. With the supposedly ideal combination of power, space and cost, this tailored solution is the foundation of Open Compute Server 3.0. Powered by the high-performance AMD Opteron 6300 Series processor, AMD Open 3.0 systems can be installed in all standard 19-inch rack environments without modification, as well as in Open Rack environments. And they can be managed using standards such as Systems Management Architecture for Server Hardware (SMASH) from the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF). The motherboard is 16-by-16.7 inches and fits into 1U, 1.5U, 2U or 3U rack servers. It features two Opteron 6300 chips, each with 12 memory sockets, allowing up to 384GB of DDR3 DRAM (four channels with three DIMMs each,) six Serial ATA (SATA) connections per board, one dual-channel gigabit Ethernet NIC with integrated management, up to four PCI Express expansion slots, a serial port, two USB ports and a mezzanine connector for custom module solutions such as a Mellanox I/O module or a Broadcom management module. Specific PCI Express card support is dependent on use case and chassis height. AMD says Open 3.0 enables substantial flexibility, efficiency and operating cost by simplifying the motherboard design with a single base product to address multiple enterprise workloads, including high-performance computing, VDI, cloud, infrastructure and storage. The design is optimized to eliminate features typically over-provisioned in traditional server offerings. The platform is designed to enable IT professionals to customize the server to meet specific workload requirements.

NetApp Put in Play

Fri, 17 May 2013 08:00:00 EDT

Activist shareholder Elliott Management, the hedge fund that pushed Novell and BMC into selling out and has Compuware on its list, is muscling in on NetApp. According to Bloomberg it has taken a “significant” position still under 5% in the data storage house, meaning to push for changes to the board and a cash return strategy.

Atlantis Computing Gets $20 Million

Wed, 15 May 2013 07:30:00 EDT

The money boys have carved off a $20 million slice for Atlantis Computing’s D round. That makes $35 million altogether. The round was led by new backer Adams Street Partners with existing investors Cisco, El Dorado Ventures and Partech International kicking in. The funding will be used to accelerate the company’s worldwide expansion.

Forget Managing Each VM; Single Image’s the Ticket

Mon, 13 May 2013 08:00:00 EDT

CloudVolumes started out a couple of years ago as SnapVolumes and shed its stealth cocoon in November when it announced $2.3 million in seed financing and began beta testing its enterprise-class Instant Workload Management (IWM) solution to what IDC has dubbed the “virtualization management gap.” CloudVolumes began because, like IDC, it reckoned there was no way to manage the virtual sprawl that’s being created with the processes and tools that are in place. The traditional tools that managed applications in the world of physical servers and desktops aren’t suited to virtual environments. IDC has even imagined the virtualization and cloud markets stalling and people dialing back while they wait for or seek management solutions.

Build Your Private Cloud in a Month

Sat, 11 May 2013 09:00:00 EDT

My fellow Technical Evangelists and I have authored a content series that steps through building your very own Private Cloud by leveraging Windows Server 2012, our FREE Hyper-V Server 2012, Windows Azure Infrastructure Services ( IaaS ) and System Center 2012 Service Pack 1. Week-by-week, we walk through the steps to envision, plan and implement your very own Private Cloud to take your existing data center to the next level and give you the tools and time back in your day for improving IT services and being able to change and shift with your business / IT needs.

EMC ViPR Virtual Physical Object and Software Defined Storage (SDS)

Wed, 08 May 2013 10:00:00 EDT

ViPR is not a technology creation developed in a vacuum instead includes customer feedback, wants and needs. Its core themes are extensible, open and scalable. What is ViPR addressing? IT and data infrastructure (server, storage, IO and networking hardware, software) challenges for traditional, virtual and cloud environments. Data growth, after all, there is no such thing as an information recession with more data being generated, moved, processed, stored and retained for longer periods of time. Then again, people and data are both getting larger and living longer, for both little data and big data along with very big data. Overhead and complexities associated with managing and using an expanding, homogenous (same vendor, perhaps different products) or heterogeneous (different vendors and products) data infrastructure across cloud, virtual and physical, legacy and emerging. This includes add, changes or moves, updates and upgrades, retirement and replacement along with disposition, not to mention protecting data in an expanding footprint.

Static Analysis & Development Testing for Embedded Devices

Wed, 08 May 2013 09:45:00 EDT

You know those conversations that you have more times than you can count? Well, I recently had one of those at Design West with a very bright software engineer. This poor guy had a number of experiences with static analysis tools that left him with the “compiler warning equivalence” impression. If your static analysis experience is largely with freeware and your training is limited to Internet forums, then I certainly understand how that impression can form. On top of that, he said that the static analysis tools he tried reported “over 20,000 messages.”

EMC ViPR Software Defined Object Storage | Part 2

Tue, 07 May 2013 13:34:00 EDT

EMC ViPR software defined object storage part II

By Greg Schulz

This is part II in a series of posts pertaining to EMC ViPR software defined storage and object storage. You can read part I here and part III here.

Some questions and discussion topics pertaining to ViPR:

Whom is ViPR for?

Organizations that need to scale with stability across EMC, third-party or open storage software stacks and commodity hardware. This applies to large and small enterprise, cloud service providers, managed service providers, virtual and cloud environments/

What this means for EMC hardware/platform/systems?

They can continue to be used as is, or work with ViPR or other deployment modes.

Does this mean EMC storage systems are nearing their end of life?

IMHO for the most part not yet, granted there will be some scenarios where new products will be used vs. others, or existing ones used in new ways for different things.

As has been the case for years if not decades, some products will survive, continue to evolve and find new roles, kind of like different data storage mediums (e.g. ssd, disk, tape, etc).

How does ViPR work?

ViPR functions as a control plane across the data and storage infrastructure supporting both north and southbound. northbound refers to use from or up to application servers (physical machines PM and virtual machines VMs). southbound refers target or destination storage systems. Storage systems can be traditional EMC or third-party (NetApp mentioned as part of first release), appliances, just a bunch of disks (JBOD) or cloud services.

Some general features and functions:

Provisioning and allocation (with automation)
Data and storage migration or tiering
Leverage scripts, templates and workbooks
Support service categories and catalogs
Discovery, registration of storage systems
Create of storage resource pools for host systems
Metering, measuring, reporting, charge or show back
Alerts, alarms and notification
Self-service portal for access and provisioning

ViPR data plane (adding data services and value when needed)

Another part is the data plane for implementing data services and access. For block and file when not needed, ViPR steps out-of-the-way leveraging the underlying storage systems or services.

Object storage access

When needed, the ViPR data plane can step in to add added services and functionality along with support object based access for little data and big data. For example, Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) services can support northbound analytic software applications running on servers accessing storage managed by ViPR.

Continue reading in part III of this series here including how ViPR works, who it is for and more analysis.

Ok, nuff said (for now)

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

twitter @storageio

Cheers Gs

New Boost from Dell for Virtualization

Mon, 06 May 2013 09:45:00 EDT

Dell Software this week delivered Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition to extend the depth and breadth of managing and optimizing server virtualization as well as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Building on the formerly named Quest vFoglight Pro virtualization management solution, Dell re-branded vFoglight to Foglight for Virtualization to make it the core platform to the Foglight family. Foglight is not sitting still either. Improvements this year move beyond monitoring support for VMware View VDI, to later support for VMware vCloud Director, OpenStack, and Citrix Xen VDI. The higher value from such ecosystem and heterogeneous management support is the ability for virtualization server and system administrators to comprehensively optimize various flavors of data-center server virtualization, as well as the major VDI types, with added capabilities to track and analyze performance from the application level all the way to the server and storage hardware level. This week's announcements have also shown a spotlight on the recently updated Foglight for Storage Management 2.5.

Clouds Unchained – How Enterprises Will Seek a Better Network to the Cloud

Wed, 01 May 2013 06:00:00 EDT

How do we connect clouds and improve SLA control? As the internet has no SLA many organizations are concerned of being exposed to the vagaries of the internet. There are only a few options for concrete quality of service (QoS) when accessing public clouds. Identifying a need for connectivity solution that enables clouds to be connected, Jelle Frank van der Zwet will show in this session how to enable cloud providers to extend their coverage and offer hybrid cloud solutions. The session includes a market overview and multiple use cases.

Cloud Expo New York: Optimize Your Virtual Environment

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:00:00 EDT

Everyone is virtualizing, but are they realizing any of the promised savings? This overview of IBM's new virtualization optimization solutions will show you how integrated Cloud Solutions like SmartCloud Provisioning and SmartCloud Monitoring can deliver the savings virtualization promises. Organizations are using intelligent management and analytics to provide the insight needed to optimize their virtualized infrastructure and dramatically improve availability, reduce data storage footprints and streamline patch management. In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Dan Carr, an Executive IT Architect at IBM, will review lessons learned from real-world experience.

Telecom Reaps Benefits from Service Virtualization

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 11:00:00 EDT

TTNET, the largest internet service provider in Turkey, with six million subscribers, significantly improved applications deployment while cutting costs and time to delivery. What was the situation there before you became more automated, before you started to use more software tools? We're the leading ISP in Turkey. We deploy more than 200 applications per year, and we have to provide better and faster services to our customers every week, every month. Before HP SV, we had to use the other test infrastructures in our test cases.

How the 'Internet of Everything' Impacts Financial Services

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 09:45:00 EDT

What does today's retail banking customer expect from a financial institution, and how can business technology be applied to enhance the overall experience. The latest results from the Cisco Customer Experience Report focused on the retail banking sector. The global report examined consumers' desire for a banking experience that is more personalized to help simplify the management of their finances over multiple channels -- including online, mobile phones, telephones, video conferencing and bank branches. It also examined views about the privacy of their personal information and the value of financial management tools used in their daily lives. Consumers globally identified the most important attributes when interacting with their financial institution or financial advisor as: availability (63%), competence (65%), and efficiency (68%).

Fusion-io Acquires NexGen Storage

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 06:30:00 EDT

Flash house Fusion-io has bought NexGen Storage, a developer of software- defined hybrid storage appliances based on Fusion ioMemory. It paid around $114 million in cash and approximately $5 million in stock. It also assumed all unvested NexGen employee equity awards. The 50-man NexGen targets SMEs with a supposedly affordable entry point for flash-powered application acceleration.

Mobile App Development Strategies

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 13:00:00 EDT

In mobile app development, we're seeing a major philosophical split between the "nativists" (running directly on the device hardware) and the "virtualizers" (with their scripting and interpretive layers and containers). Both enterprises and independent software vendors (ISVs) know the software-development game's changed. Not only do they need to rapidly develop and deploy more mobile apps across multiple interfaces and device platforms, but they need to really rethink all of their client development -- and even try and come up with a singular approach to most of them. Fast to their rescue, the suppliers of development tools and testing systems are tripping over each other to appeal to them in this new game. And as in the past with other deployment advances, we're seeing a major philosophical split between the "nativists" (running directly on the device hardware) and the "virtualizers" (with their scripting and interpretive layers and containers).

Targets of Opportunity

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 15:06:00 EDT

…Is one of the findings in #Verizon’s 2013 Data Breach Investigations Report, which is chuck full of interesting data. 75% of the attack victims were selected because they had a weakness that an attacker knew how to exploit rather than being specifically chosen. The difficulty of the initial compromise was low for 68% of the breaches meaning the attackers used basic methods or automated tools and scripts. It also means that there are sloppy configurations, needless services and exposed vulnerabilities that are bringing this attention.

Cloud Expo NY: Best Practices for Architecting Your Cloud Infrastructure

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 13:00:00 EDT

Before you start to envision and design your cloud, you’ll need to make sure it’s built on a solid architectural foundation. In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Matt Mullins, Principal Consultant – Cloud Platform Implementation Engineer with Citrix Systems, will cover critical concepts and principles for architecting your cloud and best practices for supporting multiple workloads from a single cloud platform. You will learn about: Components and architecture of a cloud orchestration How workloads and workload availability drive cloud architecture Sample reference architectures from leading implementations

Day 4 Keynote at Cloud Expo New York | Go Beyond IaaS

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 08:00:00 EDT

Many organizations want to expand upon the IaaS foundation to deliver cloud services in all forms – software, mobility, infrastructure and IT. Understanding the strategy, planning process and tools for this transformation will help catalyze changes in the way the business operates and deliver real value. In his Day 4 Keynote at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Sheng Liang, CTO Cloud Platforms Group, Citrix Systems, will discuss the new ITaaS model and how to begin the transformation. Sheng Liang is CTO Cloud Platforms Group, Citrix Systems. Formerly CEO of Cloud.com, he's a technology visionary who developed the Java Virtual Machine at Sun Microsystems, and a serial entrepreneur. Before Cloud.com he co-founded web application firewall vendor Teros Networks (also acquired by Citrix), and was a member of the senior management team at SEVEN Networks and Openwave Systems, which developed software products for over 100 wireless and wire-line service providers around the world.

Your API Requires What??

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 09:15:00 EDT

If you’ve ever developed for an enterprise IT department, and had to please the end user, you know very well that they don’t care about what your technical limitations are, they care about getting a tool that helps them do their job better. Oh some will commiserate with you about your challenges, and the best of the business side will compromise to get to a product that helps, even if it’s not perfect, but much like everyday consumers, they want what they want, and you either provide it or not. The thing is, in the enterprise, the pool of users is much smaller than for a commercial application, but the users are more focused on what they need, precisely because there are less of them. On thing that many vendors fail to comprehend is that this “I need what I need and you provide it or you do not” approach applies just as strongly to enterprise developers. While most business to business (B2B) vendors (both hardware and software) understand the need to provide a useful, generally easy to learn user interface or command line, often that understanding does not extend to APIs.

The State of SMB IT: Making the Case for Desktop Virtualization

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 10:00:00 EDT

Staying current with the latest and greatest in hardware and technology is challenging for organizations of any size, but especially so for small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs) who are often extra challenged with limited resources and personnel. It’s no surprise then that today’s SMBs are moving toward desktop virtualization, which offers a modern and cost-effective approach that’s a viable alternative to traditional PCs. Desktop virtualization delivers all the computer performance, manageability and security required for businesses to remain competitive in today’s market with significant cost savings compared to buying and maintaining PCs.

Most of the Time We Get It Wrong

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 08:45:00 EDT

A colleague relayed this story: At a recent toastmasters meeting, they did a survey. They were asked what does each of the following words mean, when represented as a percentage? Sometimes Frequently Rarely Often Usually For example, my friend interpreted “Frequently” to mean “about 60% of the time”….more than half for sure. I agreed. We thought that we “knew” how these were interpreted by other people, but when they reviewed the survey, they found that people interpreted these words in such different ways as to make them all interchangeably meaningless. The percentages are the range of what people ‘thought’ were the accurate occurrences.

New Era for Open Source Xen Begins

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 08:15:00 EDT

"By widening the scope of collaboration under The Linux Foundation, the Xen Project community can set the bar even higher for innovation," said Peder Ulander, VP of Open Source Solutions at Citrix, as Citrix and The Linux Foundation today announced that open source community development for the Xen virtualization platform will become a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. Leveraging its proven model of collaborative development for the new Xen Project initiative, The Linux Foundation will provide infrastructure, guidance and a collaborative network.

Is Object Storage Happening?

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 09:00:00 EDT

Here is an answer I wrote to my dear friend StorageBod’s latest piece on Object Storage. As my response turned out quite a bit longer than initially intended, I thought I’d post it here as well. Very nice blog post as usual. Let me sacrifice my first sunny afternoon of the year in Belgium to write down some of my thoughts (rather than copy/pasting a data sheet like Paul did). Oh and … NAB would have been so much better with you over there,. Disclaimer: I am still in charge of the object storage product line at DDN. The below thoughts are my own, however, not necessarily the company’s. “Yet, it isn’t really happening”. I expect to be punished for writing this, but Martin: you are WRONG! Object storage is happening very much. Just not necessarily out in the open. Implementing object storage is a lot more game-changing than buying a new filer from a supplier you haven’t worked with before. We would have hoped for a faster wide adoption of object storage, but if you look at other recent paradigm changes, we are on the curve: I gave my first cloud presentation back in 2007. It took about 5 years for cloud to be embraced by the enterprise market. You could say that object storage has been around for more than five years (Centera etcetera), but if you look at the recent generation of object storage and the more modern use cases, we are on schedule. I wish I could talk to you about a few of those double-digit petabyte projects I’ve been involved with in the past 2 years.

“Give It to Me Now”: The Age of Instant Technology Gratification

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 09:00:00 EDT

IT departments within companies are seeing the growth of a more complex IT environment fueled by growing user demands for more flexible and productive solutions. The growing desire of users to have instant access to their IT services from any device at any given time – combined with IT trends such as the consumerization of IT, cloud-based technologies and hybrid end-user computing – are challenging the way nearly every enterprise IT department operates. The rising demand for flexibility is forcing them to grapple with the increasingly blurred lines between personal and professional device usage and making it difficult to reconcile the security and compliance implications of granting users constant access to IT services. While IT departments struggle to fix and manage complicated IT infrastructures, the mobility and variation of today’s workers and their devices has led to the slow and steady disintermediation of the IT department. Historically, IT departments have dictated the corporate policies that manage access to company data and applications. This worked well enough when employees did their work in their offices during set business hours. Now, a more competitive economic landscape and new technologies are changing the way people work.

GreenBytes Gets Another $7 Million

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 10:00:00 EDT

GreenBytes, a transcontinental virtual desktop start-up with feet planted in both England and the US, has raised a $7 million C round from existing investors Generation Investment Management LLP and Battery Ventures. That makes $31.5 million altogether. The company says it will use the new money to push global sales, marketing and partner development as well as to develop further its patented IO Offload Engine hardware appliance and vIO virtual storage appliance. The company claims it’s seen explosive growth and intense interest from the rapidly expanding desktop virtualization market. Its CEO Steve O’Donnell says, “We have been gaining incredible momentum with customers, resellers and strategic OEM partners, and this additional funding enables us to step up sales and marketing programs as we expand our solution into additional global territories and experience deeper market penetration.”

Cloud Expo New York: Managing Legal Risks in Cloud Computing

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 05:00:00 EDT

Saas, IaaS, PaaS. Cloud computing is growing at a breathtaking speed and is the fastest-growing means by which technology companies offer their products today. Regardless of the industry, cloud computing is revolutionizing the way companies manage their applications and data processing, while simultaneously being one of the least understood. However, before companies go flying in the clouds, they need to be aware of the significant legal risks and implications associated with cloud computing. In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Dan Pepper, managing member of Pepper Law Group, examines how cloud computing can be adopted and the dangers avoided on a practical level.

Ray Lane Loses Chair at HP

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 10:00:00 EDT

Autonomy has sent another shudder through HP and its famously dysfunctional board, which is now going through still another surprise upheaval. Ray Lane, HP’s powerful chairman, has stepped down although he means to keep a board seat, and two other directors are off the board completely. All three were directly involved in HP’s monster $11 billion acquisition of the British software company, which wound up a year later as an $8.8 billion write-off amid accusations that Autonomy cooked the books. Shareholder advisors blamed their “flawed oversight” for the catastrophe – as well as for the pitiful state of HP’s share price – and recommended they not be re-elected to the board. And all three were only narrowly returned two weeks ago with less than 60% of the vote, an unusual showing of no confidence.

HP Loses Software Chief to Silver Lake

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 08:30:00 EDT

The head of HP’s software business Ajei Gopal has left for Silver Lake Partners, the private equity house teamed with Michael Dell to try to buy Dell. Gopal is reportedly going to be an operating partner, based in New York, and part of Silver Lake’s Value Creation team, working across the company’s portfolio to improve operations. It’s a swap. HP just hired an IBM guy out of Silver Lake named George Kadifa to run software.

Red Hat Hires Azure Guy to Run Virtualization

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 09:15:00 EDT

Red Hat has hired Radhesh Balakrishnan out of Microsoft’s Asia-Pac region where he was responsible for the Windows Azure cloud platform business, to lead its virtualization technologies and solutions worldwide, which includes Red Hat OpenStack and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Technologies and Solutions. The company said in a statement that “Virtualization is the cornerstone of cloud computing and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), which serves as the foundation for Red Hat's virtualization initiatives, is a predominant hypervisor in the cloud….Under Balakrishnan's leadership, Red Hat plans to expand its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization offerings as well as deliver enterprise-class Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions powered by OpenStack.”

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and HP Servers

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 09:15:00 EDT

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) is proving itself to be a major player in the virtualization marketplace. With each new release, the technology offers more robust features, greater control, increased flexibility and more. One of the key factors in how well Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization meets your organization’s needs is the physical platform on which it runs. HP’s line of ProLiant servers are particularly well-suited to running Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. Here are some facts you need to know as you make your decisions about whether to implement this open source virtualization solution and whether to choose HP servers to support it.

VMware Crosses the Rubicon Redux

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 10:00:00 EDT

VMware’s (VMW) recent hybrid cloud announcement was both expected and yet provocative. It falls into a pattern of successful moves made in virtualization security and networking as the company to grow its addressable market by virtualizing servers and delivering increased IT agility, efficiency and economy. Yet the bold move is not without risk. In 2009 I talked about how VMware, through acquisitions and engineering, entered the security space despite a robust virtualization security ecosystem (see VMware Crosses the Rubicon - March 2009). VMware was threatened then by the new security challenges being brought into the production data center by virtualization and the inability of its partners to move fast enough to address them.

Red Hat Drops on Earnings Miss, Weak Forecast

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 08:00:00 EDT

Red Hat, the largest Linux seller, came up shy of revenue expectations Wednesday when it posted its fiscal fourth quarter ended February 28. Its shares dropped roughly 14% after-hours then stabilized around minus 4% or $49.19. Before the Thursday open it was down 5.4%. In the quarter its revenues increased 17% to $347.9 million. The pundits were looking for $349.4 million. Earnings were up 23% to $43 million or 22 cents a share before charges. Non-GAAP they amounted to 36 cents a share. Wall Street only expected 30 cents. Q4 billings were $454 million, compared to estimates of $471 million. Q4 subscription revenue came to $303 million, up 19% year-over-year, which means its full fiscal-year subscription revenue topped a billion for the first time.