SunGard Availability Service provides disaster recovery services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services and business continuity management software to more than 10,000 customers in North America and Europe. As the offspring of SunGard, they maintain five million square feet of datacenter and operations space, and help IT organizations across a wide spectrum of industries deal with their DR needs.
We're talking about a bedrock company here, so when it announces an expansion of its enterprise-grade cloud computing platform to deliver application availability "and ultimately recovery in the cloud," prospective cloud customers would be wise to take note.
According to Satish Hemachandran, director, product management, SunGard Availability Services, his cloud customers have a lot to gain from going with this enhanced enterprise-grade cloud offering, not the least being access to the VBlock Infrastructure Package, born of the Virtual Computing Environment coalition composed of Cisco, EMC and VMware.
"We have a very close partnership with these vendors," Hemachandran says.
According to the company's press release, the Vblock Infrastructure Package is a "preconfigured, pretested solution that combines best-in-class technology, including Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS), Nexus 100v and Multilayer Director Switches (MDS), EMC CLARiiON storage (secured by RSA), and VMware's vSphere platform. This technology choice...will provide customers with a path to pervasive virtualization and cloud IT infrastructure, while helping reduce total cost of ownership and meeting today's most demanding use cases."
That's a lot of powerful technology, and SunGard Availability Services has a lot of experience working on that level. As Hemachandran puts it, "We basically see enterprise cloud computing as a logical extension of what we've been doing.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 03/25/2010 at 12:48 PM5 comments
SureBackup from Veeam Software is not just another product--in fact, it's not a product at all, it's a set of features to help the reliability of your backups, and it is embedded in version 5.0 of Veeam Backup & Replication, which is slated to debut this summer.
Here's another non-traditional thing about SureBackup, according to Doug Hazelman, Veeam's director, Global Systems Engineering Group: "Customers don't know they want it." And why is that, we inquired? "They didn't think it was possible, but virtualization has pioneered the capability of image-level backups," he replies. It is, Hazelman adds with a conspiratorial pause, "a dirty little secret."
Until now, that is.
As he goes on to explain, even though virtualization and the advent of image-level backups have brought many changes, one problem remains: Just because a backup job completes successfully does not mean the machine can be recovered and booted. Even if the integrity of the backup file is verified, there is no assurance that the OS and apps will start without errors, or that data will be intact.
The problem is, Veeam maintains, there are many possible issues, both procedural and configuration-related, that can interfere. The only way to be completely certain is to test and verify the recoverability of every backup, which, until now, was too expensive and time-consuming to be feasible.
Enter Veeam SureBackup, which eliminates these long-standing barriers while bringing certainty to image-level backups.
Not only has Veeam found the seemingly unfindable formula for sure backups, but it has also found one that is said to make it possible to verify the recoverability of every backup in a matter of minutes. As a result, says Veeam, while organizations are able to "embrace image-level backups to improve recovery time and recovery objectives, they are also able to comply more fully with 'reasonable measures,' as required by internal and external regulations, such as HIPAA and SOX."
The secret to this solution is technology that allows VMs to run directly from compressed backups. By publishing the content of backup files directly to WMware ESX hosts, Veeam says, the need to extract backup files and the time and storage consumed by them, is eliminated.
It all sounds good, and Veeam got some pretty good analysts to provide supportive quotes, so it would seem that the only remaining challenge is getting the word out ASAP.
As Hazelman puts it, "This is going to take some time for the market to absorb because it is so different."
Question: Do you think Veeam is on to something here?
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 03/24/2010 at 12:48 PM2 comments
Saying "Seeing is understanding," Xangati recently introduced virtual appliances designed to shine a light on all communications across both virtual and physical worlds. These products are designed to make it easier for IT organizations to move from the physical to the virtual world without losing the ability to monitor traffic across both environments.
Xangati for ESX and the Xangati Management Dashboard were specifically created to eliminate "blind spots" that have plagued hybrid IT shops that must maintain a mix of physical and virtual technologies. By viewing virtual communications within a physical hypervisor, users will be able to see problems coming and eliminate them before they can do any damage.
According to Xangati, users can now track 5,000 "identities" in virtual or physical eco-systems, adding, "We can provide a lot of visibility at a price point that virtualization teams have a budget for." The product is specifically designed to complement VMware's vCenter by adding what Xangati calls "360-degree communication visibility into all of the critical elements that it manages."
Xangati says the results of a pilot program it conducted prove that virtual infrastructures are not the cause of "emerging performance issues," and that better physical-to-virtual communications "foster better relationships between virtualization teams and the owners of the servers that they have created."
The new suite of virtual appliances is available now. Xangati for ESX can be downloaded here for a free 14-day trial, or at an immediate cost of $299. The Xangati Management Dashboard Standard edition is available for $4,999, and the Enterprise edition costs $9,999. The company is also offering a Starter Kit available at the discounted rate of $9,999 -- including Xangati for ESX for up to 20 hosts and the Xangati Management Dashboard for Enterprise edition.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 03/23/2010 at 12:48 PM3 comments
According to IBM, which announced plans to go online with its commercial cloud service for software development and testing, its new open cloud environment also includes support for SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell.
Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud will be available in the second quarter of 2010 in the U.S. and Canada, and it will roll out globally throughout 2010.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 03/23/2010 at 12:48 PM3 comments
Red Hat knows the drill: Citrix commands most of the commercial, Xen-based buzz while Red Hat is viewed by many observers as a marginal, me-too player.
Not so much now that Red Hat announced that it has struck a deal with IBM to supply Big Blue with the open source, KVM virtualization technology that will power IBM's new cloud. Red Hat brass was reportedly crowing about the deal, which they claim is their third big-time virtualization coup of the still-young year, and one which puts them in the thick of the rapidly emerging cloud market.
Commenting to InternetNews.com, Scott Crenshaw, VP and GM in charge of Red Hat's cloud business unit, declared, "IBM could have chosen anything -- they could have gone with VMware, Microsoft's Hyper-V, or something from kernel.org, but instead they chose Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. We think the evidence is clear that KVM is the virtualization technology of the future, and that RHEV is our way of delivering that with an enterprise-class product."
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 03/23/2010 at 12:48 PM7 comments
Microsoft's announcement today describing new agreements with Citrix designed to bolster their 20-year relationship at the expense of VMware was a huge win for Citrix, which is finally freed from all the unsubstantiated speculation and irresponsible claims that it will somehow be forsaken and devoured by Microsoft.
When you closely evaluate the situation, it simply doesn't make sense for Microsoft to back out of a relationship with Citrix. Hey, don't take my word for it -- ask Brad Anderson, a Microsoft corporate vice president in charge of the company's Management Service Division, who told me, "When I think about the best way to work for us, I use Citrix as the example."
A healthy Microsoft-Citrix relationship only nurtures Microsoft's key markets by providing them with jointly developed solutions that customers can depend on. At the same time, Citrix feeds unabated at the profits trough as it sells its wares to customer after happy customer with Microsoft's blessing.
From the Citrix perspective, what's almost as good as having Microsoft's blessing is VMware's not only not having it, but having to endure insult to injury while Microsoft and Citrix launch two promotional schemes, "Rescue for VMware VDI" and "VDI Kickstart." The former has the effrontery to suggest that disaffected Microsoft customers running VMware View are looking to bail out of their failing implementations, while the latter provides a safe landing pad for said Benedict Arnolds by offering them up to 500 XenDesktop VDI Edition (annual) device licenses, and up to 500 VDI Standard Suite device licenses in exchange for their tawdry View licenses.
Ouch.
What's also sweet for Citrix is the fact that it is bringing a solid contribution to the table with its HDX technology, which has given XenDesktop a leg up on View, and is now being jointly developed by the two companies to "leverage and enhance" Microsoft RemoteFX. Microsoft defines RemoteFX as "a set of RDP technologies that are being added to Windows Server 2008 R2, SP1 that will allow users to work remotely in a Windows Aero desktop environment, watch full-motion video, enjoy Silverlight animations and run 3-D apps -- all with the fidelity of a local-like performance when connecting with the LAN." This is clearly a technology with legs that adds value to Microsoft's desktop virtualization efforts.
And before we get too far away from the topic of not making sense, it's time for everybody to agree that XenServer, which has been flogged repeatedly for not making a bigger dent in the server virtualization market, is not going anywhere, least of all, down the toilet. Why would Citrix drop XenServer, which is: 1) currently being refreshed with a new version, and 2) the virtualization engine behind its past and upcoming stars, XenApp, and XenDesktop, respectively? (Add Netscaler to the upcoming bracket). XenServer might not be a star, but it has a future.
The battle for the virtualized desktop may only be starting, but Microsoft and Citrix have already shown they are in fighting trim.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 03/18/2010 at 12:48 PM1 comments
Cashing in on the continuing popularity of Windows 7, and the need to deploy it across enterprise IT infrastructures, VMware took the wraps off ThinApp 4.5, saying it ensures compatibility for legacy and custom apps across Windows desktop OS environments.
According to VMware, "ThinApp 4.5 enables enterprises to quickly migrate existing applications to new operating systems such as Microsoft Windows 7, eliminating conflicts between environments, and extending the life of application investments."
Not surprisingly, VMware was able to come up with research from Enterprise Strategy Group asserting that more than 75 percent of all enterprises refreshing their desktops (and that is a lot, considering the long refresh times forced on users by the flameout of Vista) will migrate to Windows 7 in the next 24 months.
On the reduced costs front, VMware says users deploying ThinApp 4.5 for application virtualization can slash migration costs by up to 60 percent, and migrate their systems up to 27 percent faster by "accelerating the application compatibility, testing and deployment processes required for application migration."
ThinApp 4.5 is available immediately, and pricing for the VMware ThinApp suite is $5,500. ThinApp is also available as part of View Premier for $250 per concurrent user.
Have you heard any interesting Windows 7 migration stories? If so, please share them with me at [email protected].
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 03/17/2010 at 12:48 PM2 comments
As a run-up to its Gartner Security Summits conferences, Gartner is setting off alarms by claiming that 60 percent of virtualized servers will be less secure than the physical servers they supplant. But fear not, they add, because that gory figure will drop to 30 percent by year-end 2015. Between now and then, however, there will be an assortment of problems because "many virtualization deployment projects are being undertaken without involving the information security team in the initial architecture and planning stages."
More good news: Gartner VP Neil McDonald says "Virtualization is not inherently insecure." More bad news: The people in charge of deploying virtualized workloads are doing it insecurely because they lack the mature tools and processes, as well as the experienced personnel -- staff, resellers, consultants -- required to get the job done right.
The bottom line: The virtualization proliferation and workloads of different trust levels combined with more mobile workloads all add up to more and more demanding challenges for implementers.
It all looks pretty grim, so you may want to save the day for your company by attending the Gartner Security Summits June 21-23 in Washington D.C., and Sept. 22-23 in London.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 03/16/2010 at 12:48 PM5 comments
It's not all that often that the fresh rev of a true cash cow hits the market, so Citrix's unveiling of XenApp 6 definitely packs new product punch. The former Citrix MetaFrame Server and Citrix Presentation Server has come a long way from its days as an application hosting solution, and is now a well-honed engine that drives application centralization in the data center, and serves those apps up to both physical and virtual desktops.
Just how big a cash cow is XenApp for Citrix? In order to get a more meaningful perspective, first understand the fact that Citrix made a profitable $1.16 billion in 2009. Then consider the quote that president and CEO Mark Templeton gave me recently when I interviewed him for a Citrix profile to appear in the upcoming April-May issue of Virtualization Review: "We can tell you that of the one-point-six billion, about one-point-one billion was XenApp-related, which means licenses, license updates, and technical services that are associated with it, so it's a huge product line."
Now that's a cash cow.
In addition to offering seamless integration with Microsoft technologies such as App-V and Windows Server 2008 R2, XenApp6 also shares technology with, and is available as part of, a suite with XenDesktop 4, Citrix's up-and-coming virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) product. For example, the two products share the company's enhanced HDX adaptive technology, which includes the Citrix ICA protocol, and drives real time media applications such as voice and CD-quality audio.
Citrix is so eager to offer the combined clout of XenDesktop and XenApp in the increasingly lucrative desktop virtualization market that it is running a promotion wherein XenApp customers can trade up their existing licenses for twice the number of XenDesktop 4 user licenses. It looks like the plan is to go head-hunting for VMware's VDI competitor, View 4, in a big way.
Other new XenApp 6 capabilities include AppCenter, a new management console designed to make it easy for IT to centrally manage all applications enterprise-wide from a single source, and enhanced enterprise scalability, which Citrix says "has been verified to scale up to more than 100,000 concurrent users in a single farm, giving customers unprecedented levels of cost savings and data center efficiency."
XenApp 6 will be available for download March 24 as a free upgrade to all XenApp customers with current Subscription Advantage agreements. Pricing for new XenApp 6 licenses starts at $350 per concurrent user. Pricing for XenDesktop 4, which now includes XenApp 6, is $225 per user, or per device.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 03/16/2010 at 12:48 PM0 comments
I've received a couple of e-mails lately in response to my "
Bogus Claims?" post asking for follow-up information on the Project VRC phase 2 test analyzing Terminal Services workloads running VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1, Citrix XenServer 5.5 and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V 2.0 on HP ProLiant DL380G6 servers with Intel Nehalem processors.
The good news is that everything you need to know can now be found on the new VRC Web site (it's the one with the surprisingly sultry young lady at the top of the home page), which is located at www.virtualrealitycheck.net.
In addition to the VRC phase 2 white paper, the VRC site also has an Excel-based overview of the phase two results. Bon appetit!
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 03/11/2010 at 12:48 PM5 comments
LineSider Technologies, which debuted its network services virtualization (NSV) platform last October, has jumped on the busting-out cloud bandwagon, taking the wraps off its private cloud automation package, OverDrive Virtual Cloud Orchestration Manager (vCom).
According to LineSider, vCom allows IT organizations using OverDrive to "rapidly build, deploy and manage private cloud infrastructures that can be tailored specifically to the unique needs of individual end users and delivered on-demand with complete automation, security and control using an easy-to-use GUI."
The privately funded LineSider says that OverDrive is the first NSV platform for both enterprises and cloud service providers that "integrates and automates the network services necessary to build and deploy cloud services. The OverDrive NSV platform transitions traditionally static network and computing infrastructures into dynamic, fluid and secure delivery infrastructures that respond automatically to demand-driven cloud activities."
LineSider has offices in Massachusetts, New York and London.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 03/10/2010 at 12:48 PM1 comments
In a move that combines generosity with business savvy, Starwind Software -- which focuses on storage virtualization and iSCSI storage for SMBs -- has announced it will give its Starwind 5.0 High Availability SAN software free to any VMware vExpert, VCB or VCI for non-production use, including course training, development and testing, and various demo purposes. The normal cost of the software is $6,000.
According to Starwind, VMware certified pros will receive a "scalable storage platform for VMware vSphere environments with advanced features at absolutely no cost." The company goes on to say that the iSCSI SAN's "true active-active high availability storage architecture" offers continuous, non-disruptive access to storage in the event of failure by synchronously mirroring data between two active storage appliances in real time with automatic failover and failback. To get a copy of the key, send an e-mail to [email protected].
Question to readers: What are the biggest problems you face in the area of storage security, and how are you dealing with them? Comment here or send me an e-mail.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 03/09/2010 at 12:48 PM3 comments
Have you ever wondered why vendors are so quick to set up trendy business units, whether they be for virtualization, client/server computing, Linux or some other happening-now technology?
Dan Kusnetzky of Virtually Speaking was taking note of Red Hat's new cloud business unit. It got him thinking and he came up with four good reasons for this latest outbreak of me-too-itis:
Some of these firms do it for appearances. They want the world to think they are staying on the cutting edge, being very innovative, etc. "In truth," Kusnetzky, opines, "many are really just renaming something to use the current catch phrase or buzzword."
Other vendors just want to bring together a bunch of smart people with advanced technical knowledge in a single area in the hope that they will do good stuff, like devising better products, services and go-to-market strategies. Kusnetzky says of this clustering approach, "There are cases, however, in which this appears to be merely an attempt to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic rather than truly innovative thinking."
Then there are those lightweight suppliers that simply want to be seen as part of the scene. Kusnetzky says this see-through strategy "allows them to say 'me too!' and be believed for a time."
Concluding, he proffers the following description of his final category, saying of their reason for creating a new business unit: "It gives them an attachment point or pressure-equalizing docking bay so that when they purchase smaller suppliers the employees don't jump ship due to vast cultural differences that may exist between the acquired company or companies and the 'mothership.'"
You have no doubt run across more than one company that fits one of these four descriptions. My question is, why do they bother? Let me know by sending me an e-mail.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 03/08/2010 at 12:48 PM2 comments
A Microsoft employee asked me for more information on the recent Virtual Reality Check performance analysis comparing VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1, Citrix XenServer 5.5 and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V running against the new workload simulator, Virtual Session Indexer. VSI is provided by Ruben Spruijt and Jeroen van de Kamp, who originated VRC a year ago.
The comparison was designed to measure how the three hypervisors performed when running Windows XP and Vista virtual machines for Terminal Services and VDI environments.
I filled in the Microsoft employee on the news that performance almost doubled on both XenServer and vSphere, while it went up 154 percent for Hyper-V. Then I asked him if those results were in line with what he expected, and he said that they were, adding that VMware had been telling some of his customers "something completely different," and he just wanted to have his facts straight.
When I asked him if he would anonymously tell me what VMware was telling his customers, he said that they were claiming that Hyper-V does not scale as well as VMware, so users will need many more physical servers to do the same workload. If this is true, the Microsoft employee said, it is a valid point since doubling the number of servers increases acquisition costs, physical/environment costs -- meaning, space -- and power cooling costs. However, he said, VMware's claims did not appear to be true based on any objective benchmarks/data he had seen.
Closing with, "I am not sure if this is a loose cannon" or "company-wide FUD," he said he just wanted to be sure that he was being accurate.
These are the kinds of claims that are swapped back and forth by competitors all the time, so they come as no surprise. What would be interesting to know is, if any of you readers have heard the same claims. So, have you? Comment here or send me e-mail.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 03/05/2010 at 12:48 PM2 comments
Parallels, a company that has done well by thinking out of the box, is further embracing Apple with what it calls the world's first bare-metal hypervisor for Apple Xserve: Parallels Server for Mac Bare Metal Edition. The words "standardize" and "cloud services providers" stand out here.
"Standardize" means enabling businesses to standardize on the Apple platform, which is good for Apple virtualization users who will now be able to run Windows and Linux apps on the Apple system they want. As Parallels CEO Serguei Beloussov puts it, the new product "provides a high performance solution that enables IT professionals and developers to capitalize on the power of Mac OS X Server while having the flexibility to run Windows and Linux workloads both on-premise and through the cloud."
"Cloud Services providers" are viewed as a prime target for many would-be cloud suppliers, and Parallels now has even a better shot with them. Just to keep things under control, the company is also unveiling Parallels Virtual Automation, which provides customers with the management tools they need to monitor and maintain their virtual environments.
What do you think of the bare-metal solution offered by Parallels here? Do you think it will make the difference for companies that have been on the fence about switching to Mac? Let me know at [email protected].
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 03/02/2010 at 12:48 PM2 comments