During his Wednesday keynote here at Citrix Synergy, president and CEO Mark Templeton made it clear that when it comes to virtualization and cloud computing, his company has the capabilities necessary for customers to optimize their experiences across unified personal, private and public clouds. He also announced new and upgraded products designed to fulfill his transformational vision of future computing.
After lauding Citrix's formal acquisition of Kaviza and praising his company's time-tested relationship with Microsoft, which is getting tighter as the two vendors align their technology stacks and go-to-market plan, he described two major pain points that the IT industry has to overcome in order to realize its full potential, followed by a call to arms. The first pain point is single-digit IT growth, while the second was the stifling of innovation by entrenched organizations that are "making it difficult to change."
On the upside, Templeton praised the consumerization of IT, and the liberating effects it provides for grass roots users who are taking control of their computing futures and moving toward the simplicity and self-choice that characterized the PC revolution of the early 80s.
"This is the most remarkably powerful force since the PC put the same kind of pressure on the mainframe," he said, adding that despite the massive proliferation of portable computing devices, "We don't think we're in the post-PC era at all. When it comes to consumerization, we're going to feature it, not fight it."
After announcing that TD Bank had won the Citrix Innovation Award, Templeton cited how personal clouds can be flashpoints for good and bad trends, and how the cost of ownership goes up if users dislike the features of their computing environments. As he put it, easy and simple produces a lower TCO.
"If I was the czar of computing, I would make one law: No more IT projects that require training," he asserted.
The CEO praised XenClient, saying there have been 100,000 downloads of the product during the past year. Then he announced XenClient 2, which is optimized for local, virtualized desktops, and XenClient XT, which is targeted at "severe" computing environments with "extreme" security requirements that need for very high performance.
Turning his attention to Citrix Receiver, he said that at last count, the device supported 149 smartphones, 37 tablets and 10 thin-client devices, along with thousands of PCs and Macs. He also announced Citrix Receiver for the Web, which works with any browser and is optimized for Google environments.
Other new products unveiled: NetScaler Cloud Gateway, which features single sign-on, user provisioning and strong SaaS compatibility, and NetScaler Cloud Bridge, created to enhance and secure the movement of data between private and public clouds. On the topic of public clouds, Templeton, who is not known for taking shots at VMware, said "By using server virtualization, you are not building a public cloud."
Citrix's relationship with Rackspace was highlighted when Templeton announced his company's participation in "Citrix Project Olympus," which will feature XenServer working with the rapidly growing OpenStack, developed by Rackspace. An early-access program for that project is currently open.
In the end, he promulgated something of a transformational manifesto that called for device and network independence, inclusional, as opposed to exclusionary security, and elastic services available at variable costs.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 05/26/2011 at 12:48 PM1 comments
It of course comes as no surprise that Citrix has acquired Kaviza, in which it has invested time, money and technology. Kaviza was a real catch, and Citrix chief Mark Templeton made it clear to me when I interviewed him for our April-May cover story that he was very enamored of the company.
In his words: "It always starts with a team, and I think there's a great core team there, and the second important thing is they have some really differentiating and innovative ideas.(AKA VDI-in-a-Box.)" He goes on to cite Kaviza's "unique perspective and approach" to the SMB market, which he called "additive" to what Citrix is doing in enterprise desktop virtualization.
"We felt what they were doing was quite complementary to our business, so when you meet some folks with great, differentiated, innovative ideas and they're doing something that's complementary to your business, then you have the basis for discussion of a relationship. So we forged a relationship with the Kaviza team," Templeton told me.
Let me add here that Kaviza COO Krishna Subramanian has become our latest CTO blogger, and we look forward to her "How-to" blogs going forward.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 05/24/2011 at 12:48 PM1 comments
Hyper-V is all grown up, and is now taken seriously as an alternative to ESXi and XenServer. Being embedded in Windows doesn"t hurt, of course, but the fact of the matter is that Microsoft has worked long and hard to legitimize Hyper-V in the eyes of the industry and its customers. Veeam, which has been riding to glory with its management tools for VMware, is now enhancing its links to Microsoft by bringing Windows Server Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server under the umbrella of Veeam Backup & Replication, a product Veeam says is in use by over 1.5 million VMs worldwide.
There are three primary elements of this package. The first is 2-in-1 backup and replication for Hyper-V, including host-based replication that Hyper-V previously lacked. 2-in-1 makes up for that deficit by providing near-continuous data protection (near-CDP), enabling optimum recovery time and recovery point objectives.
Secondly, changed block tracking for Hyper-V enables "fast, frequent and efficient backup and replication" to all VMs, including those running on Clustered Shared Volumes. Third, built-in deduplication and compression--which are added here gratis--reduce network bandwidth and backup storage consumption.
According to Veeam senior director of product strategy Doug Hazelman, these new capabilities are expected to be particularly attractive to the SMB market. "Hyper-V is gaining traction in the SMB space, which is a sweet spot for Veeam," he declares.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 05/19/2011 at 12:48 PM2 comments
With its new Horizon App Manager, VMware is bringing to life the initial rendition of its Project Horizon vision, which was created to securely extend enterprise identities into the cloud, while providing new methods for provisioning and managing applications and data based on the user, as opposed to the device or underlying operating system. Horizon App Manager embodies that philosophy.
In more practical terms, VMware's new offering gives the company the opportunity to come out from behind all the hard work it has dedicated to its all-or-nothing approach to the cloud, and make it seem tangible by showing users how they can now simply access their private and public cloud-based data via a single sign-on service.
Calling the occasion "a major milestone" for VMware's end-user computing future, Noah Wasmer, who has been the primary leader of the Horizon App Manager development project (he's also Director, Advanced Development, End-User Computing at VMware), repeated a mantra that has increasingly stressed the importance of transitioning beyond the traditional operating system-centric world of IT to new apps such as WebEx, Salesforce.com, Google Apps, BroadVision and Box.net, and devices such as iPads, Android tablets and smartphones.
Citing the forces behind the consumerization of IT, Wasmer declared "Enterprise IT pros, who once were able to say 'That device is not supported,' are facing an empowered workforce that wants to know why they can't have the same on-demand access to their work apps that they have with their personal apps."
What Horizon App Manager is all about is the creation of identity as a "service hub" that securely extends existing user identities in systems such as Microsoft Active Directory and a wide range of third-party public cloud applications. The big benefit of this approach is the simplification of managing multiple access credentials engendered by the runaway proliferation of cloud apps now residing in enterprises of all sizes.
The product's single sign-on access to cloud apps is gained through what VMware calls a "storefront-like application portal," which provides "a consistent user interface from which users can acess their work and personal applications across a broad range of devices. In addition, the user portal provides for the self-provisioning of apps."
Through a centralized application catalog, Horizon App Manager makes it simple for IT admins to maintain control over entitlement and access to "almost any cloud application." In addition, it does not require enterprises to expend their financial resources on new and complex hardware.
In his blog, Wasmer describes being told of a "cloud-first" policy whereby users check the cloud first for the applications they need before selecting something that must be installed. "In fact," Wasmer states, "we talked to a Fortune 100 company that stated they don't just have 10 or 20 SaaS applications; they have hundreds already in use by their workforce."
VMware Horizon App Manager costs $30 per user/per year.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 05/17/2011 at 12:48 PM1 comments
My recent Chris Wolf interview outtakes from our April-May Citrix cover story were so well received that I decided to do the same thing with Simon Bramfitt's comments, which are typically not made with diplomacy in mind. Simon is founder and principal analyst for Entelechy Associates LLC, and a former stablemate of Chris's at the Burton Group.
VR: The relationship between Citrix and Microsoft – is Microsoft serious about VDI and desktop virtualization or would they rather just hand off the big deals to Citrix?
Bramfitt: Now that's a very interesting question, and there's a lot of doubt in my mind that Microsoft really is doing any more with desktop virtualization than the barest minimum they need to do to get by. It really doesn't seem to me that Microsoft is comfortable with the idea of desktop virtualization at all. At the same time, they have to do something to support enterprise needs in that regard or they will just effectively wither away to irrelevant.
Microsoft's own desktop virtualization solution—VDI Suites—is excessively complex. It doesn't meet the needs of anything but the smallest percentage of Microsoft customers, and their unwillingness to support any level of innovation when it comes to service delivery is a little disappointment. You only have to look at their lack of any service provider licensing option for desktop as a service to see that they don't want people to be able to deliver services effectively through desktop virtualization. They were basically pushed into a corner with desktop virtualization through VMware's early initiative around VDI and have been spinning ever since.
At the risk of reflecting the common thinking, which is not always good, is XenDesktop too complex and expensive?
There are large enterprise customers that need the flexibility that it offers, but there are many organizations that can get by with less. I think it's best to express it in those terms. It can be too complex and it can be too expensive for certain customers, but at the same time, there are some organizations that absolutely need everything that it can deliver. Citrix does actually have a policy position in that regard in the way they are investing in other companies that offer less complex and significantly less expensive solutions.
That would include Kaviza, wouldn't it?
Precisely, yes. They've done a very...that's one of the cleverer things that they've done of late; they have both invested in the company and licensed elements of their own technology, the ICA/HDX protocol, to Kaviza. So, you can buy, effectively, a light version of XenDesktop through Kaviza, get a lot of Citrix's key IP for a lot less money and a fraction of the complexity. So they're able to now play at both ends of the market, but doing it through different companies. They're doing so without cannibalizing XenDesktop sales directly.
[Editor's note: Changes were made to paragraph above, based on clarification provided after this blog was posted.]
XenApp has been the long-time cash cow for the company. Is it still healthy for that to be the situation, to have one product bringing in such a high proportion of the revenue?
I don't think it's ever healthy for any company to be so dependent upon a single product, but at the same time, I don't see it materially changing for some time to come. It's not any direct reflection on Citrix's ability to deliver anything else, just on the reality of the situation that desktop virtualization, specifically server-hosted desktop virtualization, is a niche solution. The majority of application delivery needs can be better met through XenApp than they can through XenDesktop. So it's inevitable that as the shine dulls on desktop virtualization, we will see enterprises waking up to the idea that there is still a lot of life left in XenApp.
I think at the same time we'll see enterprises starting to understand that distributed desktop virtualization-- XenClient for Citrix, is going to deliver more value than XenDesktop does. So we'll see XenApp being the strongest leg of the stool for a few more years, and then XenClient taking the lead for Citrix thereafter with XenDesktop as a bridging solution today and a niche solution in the future, rather than it being the leader that a lot of people seem to think that it would be for Citrix.
What you're saying seems to explain why there's still so many MetaFrame and Presentation Server users out there, you know, on pretty old technology. They seem to be willing to stay with it.
Well, it's been a remarkably successful product for Citrix. It has not gotten the same level of coverage in the last few years because it's an old, trusted, unglamorous piece of technology, and we'd much rather be talking about the shiny, new stuff around VDI than we would this old, clunky XenApp stuff.
But the truth of the matter is, it's good, trusted, reliable technology, so why change it unless there's something radically better coming along? Whilst VDI solutions have their place, they're not the universal solvent that many people thought they were when they first came out, and that we're better off looking at distributed desktop virtualization as the next big paradigm shift rather than VDI. Citrix has not yet gotten XenClient to a point where it's a production-ready technology, but it does need to be moved to that point within the next 12, 18 months at the most. Until they can offer a unified desktop virtualization solution, rather than multiple, separate products that need to be thought of differently and licensed differently, they will struggle against more agile competitors who are capable of changing track more readily than Citrix has proven able to do so in recent times.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 05/12/2011 at 12:48 PM3 comments
Along with a slew of other vendors, Gluster is busy trying to reduce the deleterious impact of storage on physical and virtual infrastructures via its software-only storage solutions. Its two newest products, GlusterFS 3.2 and Gluster Storage Software Appliance, are carrying on that battle by enabling enterprises to treat physical storage as a virtualized, standardized and scale-on-demand pool.
The idea is to free users from the constraints of "proprietary, monolithic storage architectures" by allowing them to create "scalable, high-performance, and highly available storage either in the public cloud or on their choice of commodity software within the data center."
Moving storage to the cloud is becoming more popular as users slowly accept the reality that their data is just as safe in the cloud as it is in their data centers. That notion is bolstered by the advent of Gluster FS 3.2, which features continuous data replication for public and private clouds. V3.2 also features upgraded multi-tenant management for private and public clouds via usage quotas and monitoring tools for improved visibility into I/O operations profiles and performance stats.
The Gluster Storage Software Appliance reportedly extends the range of commercially supported configurations for Gluster in the private cloud and on-premise data centers. It combines Red Hat CentOS and GlusterFS and can be deployed on "any Red Hat Hardware Compatibility List certified host server and its certified storage."
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 05/10/2011 at 12:48 PM1 comments
I posted some pithy quotes gathered during a recent interview with Gartner research VP Chris Wolf on the topic of Citrix, and promised more of the same here. So, here goes:
VR: What is the Impact of OpenStack Compute supporting vSphere?
Wolf: You just can't look at support as a checkbox because that often times doesn't really carry a lot of meaning. For example, for I don't know, for seven or eight years, vendors like HP and IBM and CA have had heterogeneous virtualization management solutions that were supporting VMware. They were supporting Virtual Server 2005 as well as other products. But, if you look at customers, they were not using a CA tool or an HP tool to manage VMware. For the most part, they haven't used System Center Virtual Machine Manager either, and that's because VMware makes it so these vendors can integrate and do certain management tasks. But not everything is exposed through their APIs, which means that administrators still have to touch Virtual Center.
If you think about that, then at the end of the day, the admin says, "Well, if I already need to use Virtual Center for everything, except A, B, and C, then I might as well just use Virtual Center for everything. What's the point of having that separate console if Virtual Center can do those things too?" That's something that Citrix and others have to work around.
What's going on with vCloud Director?
VMware is being very smart with vCloud Director. As I see vCloud Director evolving, there's going to be certain elements of VMware management that will be exposed through vCloud Director and not necessarily through their APIs. The reason VMware would do something like that is because that strategy worked very well with vCenter as their management server, and I can see it taking a similar approach with vCloud Director.
VMware has done a very good job with the vCloud partner ecosystem. They're starting to enforce some standards and some benchmarks for partnership levels in the cloud. I think that has gone very well. The fact that you can get hypervisor parity between providers in between your internal infrastructure is something that's also important to customers, not necessarily because you can't convert (which you can), but if the customer's looking at a hybrid cloud where they're trying to take a lot of their management software with them, then that parity can become important to them because they're going to have to have some assurances about how workloads would behave both in a public cloud and in their own datacenter.
How ready for prime time are XenClient and BYOC?
I think that the BYOC is there, but it's more long term, and that's how most of our customers think about it. As the technology matures, as you start to see XenClient come out of the factory on different laptop or desktop models (and it's a very stable platform), that's when the folks will start to really think about it and how to integrate it as part of their strategy.
Today, it's more about technology that I might use in the lab and just gain some institutional knowledge around it, rather than a full-fledged bring-your-own-PC enabler. That is something that they need to work on. XenClient from a security play is the most pure technology out there in terms of isolation. You can relate it to, say, the hypervisor that Virtual Computer offers as well.
How would you evaluate Parallels?
They have their own hypervisor. They're mature and established on the client computing side. When you talk about bring-your-own PC, Mac often comes into the discussion. They have a very good history with supporting Apple Macintosh devices and running virtual workloads on them.
And also, you know, the other side of Parallels that still does well is the service provider space. Virtuoso Containers is used by a number of service providers out there. They've quietly been under the radar, but they've been a virtualization technology, if you want to say, in a cloud for a long time before we were even calling some of these infrastructure-as-a-service offerings "cloud."
There are a lot of competitive products in the market.
Sometimes having the best product is not enough to get customers to look your way.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 05/05/2011 at 12:48 PM3 comments
In the course of interviewing Gartner guru Chris Wolf about Citrix for 34 minutes and 52 seconds, I gathered a LOT of really good information--so much, unfortunately, that I was not able to include much of it in my April-May VR print magazine cover story. But all is not lost, because both of my blogs this week are dedicated to presenting an array of good Wolfian quotes that would otherwise languish on my hard drive.
VR: How much is VMware been moderating its product pricing?
Wolf: I think VMware's pretty careful with what they have done so far. Last year they made a very smart move on pricing when they offered their SMB SKUs, which gives you three server instances and the management server for--I believe--under $3,000, or somewhere in that neighborhood. That was very well received by customers in the SMB market. The free ESXi hypervisor has done pretty well too. However, they obviously don't give you as much as Citrix or Hyper-V with Microsoft, but they're trying to stay on that line between commoditizing too much of what they sell to customers versus staying competitive in the market.
The fact is, with Citrix and Microsoft pushing so hard, even VMware's own customers are getting better deals in terms of pricing because that's just the competitive nature of the market.
VR: How hot is personalization?
That's a feature that's very important to customers, especially when they look to either support user personal settings in the virtual desktop or to support user-installed applications. There's a lot of different technologies that can be used to address that. Citrix today, and VMware, eventually, will have some personalization offerings, but a lot of folks also look at third-party vendors like RES Software, AppSense and others such as RingCube and Unidesk.
The concern I've seen from customers, though, is that they're worried about market consolidation in the personalization space in 2011, so they're trying to hold off on placing the product bet because they don't want to buy a product and have that vendor get acquired by another vendor that they have no relationship with, and no plans to move forward with.
VR: Everyone's complaining about the cost and complexity of storage. What do you see going on to improve that situation?
There's a lot of work being done to do as much with storage locally as possible with virtual desktops, just because of performance reasons. That could include boosting a virtual desktop from a common image that's stored on a local disk on the server.
Now the issue you have is that a lot of hardware vendors are coming in with blade offerings for virtual desktops, and those offerings don't give you the option to run local storage. You could be paying a penalty there in terms of needing, say, additional Fibre Channel SAN ports to meet the storage requirements of the virtual desktop.
VR: Do you see any significant changes coming on the security landscape?
Traditional security models that use host-based scanning are pretty resource-intensive, and will ultimately degrade the consolidation densities you get in virtual desktop environments. So, the solution there is coming in terms of what vendors such as McAfee, Trend, and Symantec have been doing over the past 12 months, but customers see those solutions as more of 1.0 products, and they're waiting out a little bit further in terms of product maturity before making that type of technology bet.
VR: What is VMware doing to enhance View's connectivity with WAN acceleration devices?
Well, it's a tough challenge, right? You can't solve those challenges instantly. I do remember our conversation, I remember the VMware response to that, and I did not agree with it. Citrix has been building the ICA protocol over more than a decade and it's not something that VMware and Teradici can build overnight. However, VMware and Teradici have come a long way in a relatively short period of time, and I expect them to narrow the feature gap in 2011. I also think they have probably exceeded the expectations of Citrix, but the latency handling--being very fair in terms of bandwidth consumption, being able to support WAN acceleration devices--these are all really important things that VMware customers care about.
I think the other thing that VMware has learned through the process is, when they were initially rolling out PC-over-IP, it was tuned to be really optimal in LAN environments, and when they were getting piloted, those same tuning characteristics were being used to do evaluations over the WAN, and as a result, the protocol would not perform as well. So one thing they've learned through the process here is to be more open with customers about how to get PC-over-IP properly tuned for the WAN, and to do that as part of the pilot process.
Next time: Chris Wolf on VMware playing it cagey with vCenter and vCloud Director; the future of XenClient; and kudos for Parallels.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 05/03/2011 at 12:48 PM0 comments
Sometimes, it just makes sense for two companies to work together. In the case of CloudSwitch and Riverbed, they offer complementary technologies to common customers, who basically said, "CloudSwitch, you have a great, downloadable enterprise software appliance that enables us to treat the cloud as an extension of our datacenters, and Riverbed, your new Riverbed Cloud Steelhead appliance offers the kind of WAN optimization that we need to optimize our cloud connectivity."
Just like that--wedding bells.
The sell here for CloudSwitch--which installs in VMware and Xen environments--is strong security, and founder/VP of Products Ellen Rubin says the barriers to that are breaking down as users gain increasing confidence in cloud computing generally, and CloudSwitch specifically. The next challenge, however, is overcoming the relative paucity of network bandwidth required to streamlined cloud communications.
"Customers who think about cloud as remote data centers need better network performance," Rubin says.
That performance is now available via Riverbed Cloud Steelhead, which is compatible with ESX VMs. Riverbed says the appliance launches in the Amazon EC2 and Terremark clouds with "point-and-click simplicity," automatically integrating Cloud Steelhead with on-premise Riverbed infrastructure for optimized network performance, no matter what network architecture is in use.
"As part of the partnership, Riverbed solutions enable CloudSwitch customers to optimize their network performance for file access, data movement and application connectivity between cloud resources and internal data centers or private clouds," CloudSwitch said in a release. "In addition, customers can dramatically improve cost-effectiveness by reducing investments in network bandwidth required for cloud initiatives."
Rubin attributes some of the push behind this joint deal to two common CloudSwitch/Riverbed customers--a large financial services company and a big research firm--who urged their two suppliers to team up for the good of all parties.
On May 4, CloudSwitch and Riverbed are offering a live webinar entitled "Optimizing Your WAN Connectivity for Hybrid Cloud Deployments." It will include an architectural overview, customer use cases and a live product demo.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 04/21/2011 at 12:48 PM0 comments
It's a dog-eat-dog world out there in the increasingly intense VDI management space. The competition is so tough that it's enough to make you wonder how many of these young startups will eventually survive. Unidesk, which is known for combining point tools in one comprehensive solution that makes life way easier for VDI users, looks to be in the mix of companies that will establish themselves as serious players.
Not only is Unidesk surviving, but it is also thriving, if awards from MIT's Sloan CIO Symposium mean anything. In recognition of its technical elegance, Unidesk was named one of 10 finalists in the 8th annual MIT Sloan CIO Symposium Innovation Showcase, for demonstrating the highest potential to help CIOs drive top-line growth and bottom-line results. Several rounds of evaluation were done by Innovation Showcase judges in order to reach the top 10. Those judges are composed of MIT faculty, early-stage investors and entrepreneurs. All 10 companies will be highlighted at the symposium's Innovation Showcase May 18 at 6 p.m. in the Kresge courtyard tent on the MIT campus.
All 10 finalists had to meet three criteria: They were required to be selling enterprise IT solutions to CIO-level executives, they had to demonstrate both innovation and the potential to impact both top and bottom lines, and they had to be startups with under $10 million in 2010 revenues (the easy part).
The other nine finalists are Apperian (mobile application management), CloudBees (PaaS-based building, testing and deploying Java Web apps in the cloud), Hadapt (performs cloud-based complex analytics on structured and unstructured data), Modo Labs (mobile software), Opscode (cloud infrastructure automation), Performable (marketing software), Rypple (social interface software), Virtual Bridges, (combined online, offline and remote branch VDI solutions for virtual desktop access) and xPeerient (changing modes of buying and selling enterprise technology).
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 04/19/2011 at 12:48 PM0 comments
When David Bieneman and Tyler Rohrer got together and decided to form a company, they didn't go out searching for venture money because they didn't need to--they were flush from selling their former companies. In Bieneman's case, that company was Vizioncore, which he sold to Quest Software in 2007, while Rohrer was a partner at FOEDUS, a consulting firm purchased by VMware in 2008.
Thus, in 2009, was born Liquidware Labs, the self-styled leader in "desktop transformation solutions for next-generation physical and virtual desktops," a moving target if ever there was one. In order to stay on top of that rapid change and help push it forward, Liquidware got into the business of VDI assessment, planning and user experience monitoring. So far, so good, as Rohrer says the company expanded revenues from $400,000 in 2009 to a whopping $5 million in 2010.
The company's newly released Stratusphere 4.8 hits the streets claiming to offer a 1,000 percent increase in scalability per database hub, along with application IOPS reports, and expanded application virtualization reporting. In use by a variety of customers, ranging from end users to channel partners, OEM partners and platform vendors such as VMware, Citrix, Dell, EMC and Cisco, v4.8 can now scale to over 10,000 desktops with one Stratusphere Hub.
"More specifically," Liquidware says, "Stratusphere is now able to leverage a single database server to gather metrics for enterprise implementations. The advancement represents a tenfold increase in performance scaling and the number of desktops supported per hub covers 99% of known VDI implementations in the world today."
Tyler, who refers to many VDI implementations to date as "science experiments," says Liquidware, which currently has 619 customers, plays nicely with a lot of real and putative competitors such as Xangati, Akorri (now owned by NetApp), Netuitive and AppSense, which Tyler calls "the 800-pound gorilla," adding, "We win deals from AppSense weekly."
"We will help you assess and design, and we will help you get the right storage fabric," he says.
Liquidware is also jumping on the management bandwagon for physical and virtual Windows user virtualization environments such as VMware View, Citrix XenDesktop and Citrix XenApp with ProfileUnity 4.8. This product includes enhanced, simultaneous login support, profile provisioning support for Office 2010 and expanded Always On profile availability.
Rohrer says "The new features in ProfileUnity v4.8 ensure seamless user productivity and assist administrators with managing and provisioning new user settings for common tasks that can become a time suck for any IT department. They are also a big win for non-persistent VDI environments where personal and user productivity, regardless of network condition, needs to be insured."
Like a lot of VDI players, Rohrer hopes 2011 is the year of VDI. Given the number of competitors crammed into this market, he better hope it is not the year of "The Great VDI Shakeout."
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 04/14/2011 at 12:48 PM2 comments
Virsto Software wants to be part of the conversation about the many VDI shortcomings that we are hearing of on a regular basis these days. Public enemy number one is prohibitive costs for storage hardware, licensing, and network equipment. Then, of course, there is complexity, manageability and the debatable state of product maturity. All in all, it’s not a pretty picture, but one Virsto feels it can change.
Virsto, which got a slow start out of the box after it debuted its flagship product Virsto One on Feb. 15, 2010, has been hustling to make up ground since. It's counting on its fourth release, Virsto VDI, to establish the company as a major player in the virtualized storage market where it competes with its software-only solutions.
The company is claiming that some users will slash their storage expenses by 75 percent or more, while driving up performance by as much as four times. The goal is to significantly drive down the costs of VDI desktops to just below $500, which is where VDI vendors like Kaviza say they are.
"This is the year of VDI," declares Gregg Holzrichter, Virsto VP of marketing, noting the burgeoning popularity of products such as Windows 7, Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View. Such declarations have been applied to many technologies in the past that were on the cusp of widespread acceptance. Whether or not there is widespread acceptance of VDI in 2011, the market is definitely on the rise.
Virsto VDI, which supports XenDesktop and Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure running on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper V, is targeting user environments in which each VDI host supports 50-100 virtual desktop images.
"The more VMs per host, the more acute the I/O performance bottlenecks are," the company claims, adding "The number of VM images in VDI deployments is orders of magnitude greater, exacerbating the excessive cost from storage over-provisioning. Further, the requirements for frequent and rapid provisioning in VDI highlights the current lack of efficient and flexible provisioning options."
Succinctly, when it comes to benefits, Virsto VDI is out to change the economics of VDI by reducing storage costs, supporting lucrative enterprise-level VDI implementations and simplifying VDI management, which has drawn the attention of many other competitors, such as Unidesk.
Now available, Virsto VDI is priced at $2,800 per host, with 1TB of logical storage per license. Users may download a free, 30-day evaluation at www.virsto.com/buy.
[Editor's Note: Corrected year.]
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 04/12/2011 at 12:48 PM2 comments
It may seem hard to believe, but a recent survey from DataCore Software found that most medium and large enterprises overlook storage when they implement their virtual operating environments. In fact, 43 percent of survey respondents said they had not estimated how storage would impact their server and desktop virtualization costs, and had not begun a virtualization project because the storage costs seemed "too high."
This report comes out at a time when efforts to rein in storage costs have taken on the tenor of a crusade, as a wide variety of vendors are unveiling new storage products and techniques designed to reduce storage burdens.
Survey results were also bad for respondents who have implemented server virtualization, as 66 percent blamed a big hike in storage costs as their "biggest problem." Almost 40 percent reported that their storage infrastructures are bogging down application performance or hindering its availability, while another 20 percent said it has become harder to maintain business continuity.
"Nearly one in four (22 percent) of IT administrators admitted that they feel 'locked-in' to their storage hardware provider," DataCore said. "One third of these respondents underestimated the costs that server/desktop virtualization would have on their storage budgets. Accordingly, 41 percent of the overall respondents are saddled with two or more different storage systems from the same vendor, and more than 60 percent cannot manage their storage resources as a single pool."
Other findings:
- 73 percent of organizations have yet to begin taking advantage of cloud services for storage needs.
- In what looks like a multiplier effect, 95 percent said they are likely to implement server/desktop virtualization software from VMware, Microsoft or Citrix -- the vaunted Big Three -- in the coming year.
On a more optimistic note, 48 percent reported they are using storage virtualization software to overcome the storage-related obstacles "associated with their server and desktop virtualization initiatives."
[Editor's note: Corrected grammatical error in second bulleted item on 4/6.]
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 04/05/2011 at 12:48 PM2 comments
Virtualization and cloud management is hot. I get one press release after another from vendors in this area. Right now VMware and Microsoft are grabbing the headlines in an effort to carve out market share in this increasingly lucrative market.
Over the past few weeks, VMware made a couple of noteworthy announcements. The first was with vCenter XVP Manager and Converter, a plug-in that enables users to manage Hyper-V from a central console, and the second was vCenter Operations, a performance monitoring and capacity management tool.
I like the idea that I recently heard from Simon Bramfitt, founder and principal analyst of Entelechy Associates, who suggested it might be a good idea for VMware to drop its hypervisor prices and make up for the revenue by competing more strongly and earning more money in the management market, where in Simon's words, "the real value-add is."
Moving onto Redmond, Microsoft has just taken its latest shot by boosting System Center in the spate of introductions that took place at the recent Microsoft Management Summit. Highlights included System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 beta, System Center Configuration Manager 2012, and a "sneak peek" at System Center "Concero."
Concero is Latin for "connected."
Delivered as part of a common management toolset for private and public cloud applications and services aimed at bolstering IT as a service, the new System Center 2012 offerings were created to help customers create and manage their private and public clouds based on Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V and other virtualization platforms.
"Concero provides a web-based and simple experience for the application owner who will be consuming cloud capacity," blogs Microsoft's Wilfried Schadenboeck. "Concero will enable customers to deploy, manage and control applications and services on private clouds built using System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 and in the public cloud offering of Windows Azure. This provides a consistent and simple user experience for service management across these clouds."
The list of top-line Concero feature includes access to resources across Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) servers, the ability to register and consume capacity from multiple Windows Azure subscriptions, and the ability to copy service templates and optional resources from one VMM Server to another. Other Azure-related features enable multiple users to be authenticated through Active Directory to access a single Azure subscription, and make it possible to copy Azure configuration, package files and VHDs from on-premises and between Azure subscriptions.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 03/31/2011 at 12:48 PM1 comments
The newly formed Cloud Printing Alliance was created to further the movement toward anytime, anywhere computing by creating an industry standard for IP-based wireless printing, especially for the exponentially growing number of smartphones. The CPA has already begun working with multiple cloud service providers toward the goal of creating cloud compatibility.
The alliance, which is targeted at both printer and network solution providers, was announced by ThinPrint’s Cortado mobile division, which is contributing its Cortado Workplace technology. This technology is available gratis from app stores. Founding members include Brother, Dell, Funkwerk, Konica Minolta, Kyocera Mita and OKI. Conspicuously absent are the likes of HP, Canon, IKON and Toshiba. Cortado has drivers for around 10,000 printer models from 90 different manufacturers stored in its cloud-based printing technology.
According to Cortado, “Cortado Workplace enables documents to be printed directly from smartphones and tablets to any Wi-Fi or Bluetooth-enabled printer. It is the only cloud printing solution that works regardless of the device, printer or file type and is not PC-dependent.”
The company said that "Cortado supports Apple AirPrint where users would like to use it."
[Editor's note: This blog was updated April 4 with corrected information from Cortado.]
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 03/29/2011 at 12:48 PM1 comments