In an effort to stir the pot and gain a little attention, Symantec conducted a survey on the exhibit show floor of VMworld regarding the repercussions of various catastrophic events related to backup and data protection. More than 130 respondents were asked about the possible repercussions of these events in terms of who would get fired if they occur.
In terms of methodology, most of the respondents said they worked at mid-to-large-sized enterprises, with 37 percent involved with virtualization, 18 percent working in IT security, and another 26 percent working in general IT roles.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 08/29/20123 comments
One of the most interesting, if little-known companies here at VMworld is just emerging from stealth mode with a radical new take on virtual infrastructures. SimpliVity refers to itself as "a provider of simplified IT infrastructure solutions for virtualized environments," but that bland description doesn't begin to tell the real story.
The brand new company's initial product is OmniCube, which also comes with a complex description, i.e. "The world's first truly all-inclusive, assimilated IT infrastructure designed and optimized for the virtual machine environment." One more quote: "OmniCube is a low-cost, ultra-functional , high-performance, automated IT infrastructure platform that empowers a single administrator to manage the infrastructure, exclusively from VMware vCenter."
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 08/28/20120 comments
Maybe it was the uncertainty of long-time leader Paul Maritz leaving and being replaced by new guy Pat Gelsinger as CEO. Maybe it was everybody taking a deep breath and assessing the current state of their virtualization and cloud journeys. Maybe it was the daunting prospect of implementing VMware's vision of the Software Defined Datacenter when so many customers are still trying to virtualize their traditional datacenters.
After all, despite the company's singular focus on all things cloud, VMware has to date only implemented some 100 private clouds among its customer base. That's not a number to discount, but it's not one to celebrate either, and VMware officials recognize how far it still has to go before private and hybrid clouds become second nature to the vast IT community out there that is destined to deploy them.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 08/28/20125 comments
Amidst the all the virtualization and cloud hoopla, most evolving datacenters still support a wide variety virtual and physical machines, which includes a combination of mainframes, Windows servers, Linux/Unix systems and virtual machines. This can get tricky when you are trying to manage a recovery site and find out it is necessary to buy a very expensive new set of application software licenses for your secondary location.
This is the kind of situation that SunGard Availability Services likes to take on. They're used to working with very large customers, and good at finding solutions for them. In this case of recovering hybrid environments, the top three challenges they list are:
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 08/20/20120 comments
Based on my many briefings and interviews, it has come to my attention that we are experiencing some significant changes on the world of VDI -- and for the better if they are real.
As anyone who follows this industry can tell you, VDI growth has been stifled by the holy trinity of obstacles: Excessive complexity, high upfront costs and problems associated with shared storage. All three of these obstacles have held fairly steady for the past three years or so since VMware View and Citrix Xendesktop started competing head-to-head and grabbing bunches of headlines in the process.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 08/15/20125 comments
"I hate agents!"
This is the well used mantra of Shimon Hason, CEO of Intigua, whose company has just announced the GA of Intigua Systems Management Virtualization, which eliminates nefarious agent management challenges and costs plaguing IT, supplanting them with many of the finer cloud qualities like scalability, simplicity, and robust functionality.
To Hason, virtualization is the anti-agent, the low-touch solution, not the expensive, time-consuming, hands-on approach. Intigua virtualizes a wide range of third-party system management tools, such as monitoring, antivirus, configuration management and backup, while automating physical and virtual management tasks. Toward that end, the company provides a centralized dashboard to help users defined their system management policies. "Now you can virtualize your network and storage," he states.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 08/13/20120 comments
Sometimes interesting new product announcements fall through the cracks, and that is the fate that befell object storage software vendor Caringo in June when company CEO Mark Goros declared that traditional, file-based storage was not designed for the huge capacities and ubiquitous requirements endemic to so many current companies and organizations.
Goros went so far as to declare that when powered by Caringo's CAStor storage platform, the three new products his company was introducing -- Elastic Content Protection, CloudScaler and Index -- make Caringo "the only object storage vendor to deliver a complete cloud storage software solution."
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 08/07/20127 comments
CIOs are no strangers to high-pressure jobs. They are used to the pressure that comes from trying to keep up with the demands on their IT organizations. But now the pressure is ratcheting up even higher as they find themselves relentlessly challenged by the consumeration of IT and the proliferation of BYOD environments.
According to a new study of 150 North American enterprise CIOs done by Mezeo Software entitled "2012 CIO Enterprise Cloud Data Mobility & Security Survey," the new CIO bottom line is simple to describe and exceedingly difficult to remedy: "In a turbulent business environment, how can the CIO protect company data assets and ensure employees have the real-time infrastructure required to succeed?"
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 08/06/20121 comments
Warming up a live audience before Citrix VP Sumit Dhawan announced Citrix CloudGateway 2 and its MDX mobile experience technology, Simon Yates, Forrester VP and Research Director made it crystal clear CIOs are under siege by the runaway proliferation of mobile technology, and the demands it puts on them to support any device, application or work style across organizations with thousands of people.
"Mobility, frankly, is something CIOs just can't stop," Yates declared, adding that 50 percent of people who buy smart phones and use them at work do so without concern relating to whether or not the company's IT organization will support the devices. Focusing on tablets, he said that by 2016, 750 million tablets will be in use and some 350 million will be sold in that year alone. "Tablets are becoming business-ready devices," he stated.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 08/01/20120 comments
VMTurbo, which produces intelligent workload management software for cloud and virtualization environments, has joined OpenStack. According to VMTurbo VP of Marketing, Derek Slayton, as an OpenStack member, VMTurbo will work to add OpenStack support to its line of management products to ensure that they have the resources needed to serve complex, multi-tenant cloud environments.
OpenStack currently has 184 company members, and Slayton, who was formerly Senior Director of Product Marketing at Citrix, says that VMTurbo chose OpenStack over CloudStack because its customers supported the move, and as he puts it, "The OpenStack market has matured, and it is a natural fit for the cloud market. It was the right time to jump in."
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 07/30/20124 comments
VMware has a knack for keeping our attention. All along the journey to the cloud, there have been interesting stop points and compelling concepts. Perhaps the most interesting and compelling of them all to this point is the software-defined data center, in which pools of hardware resources -- compute, storage, and networking -- can be abstracted, pooled, and provisioned. In VMware's vision this will eliminate the need for specialized hardware, because it is based on a more agile, flexible, and simpler model that works off of software instructions.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 07/25/20127 comments
Just in case you missed it, a couple of weeks ago at its World Wide Partner conference, Microsoft helpfully explained to virtualization users the benefits of moving from VMware to Microsoft, and generously offered to help them migrate their entire VMware virtualized infrastructures over to Redmond. Please don't shower them with thanks -- they're not doing this because they have to, they're doing it because they want to. It's their way of saying they're sorry that Paul Maritz defected.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 07/23/20123 comments
When all the rumors about Paul Maritz's future started flying around in the wake of CRN's scoop on the situation, it seemed hard to believe that the VMware CEO would be leaving the company he was so closely and successfully associated with under any kind of a dark cloud. Basically, it would have been crazy to let such a uniquely talented executive walk away and be hired by a VMware competitor. The baseball analogy here is, you never trade a good player within your own division so he can't come back to haunt you.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 07/18/20128 comments
How can you not like a conference held at the Microsoft campus that allows you to sit down in a room on a casual basis and ask questions of Microsoft product managers? That's the deal at the upcoming TechMentor training conference, which kicks off on Monday, August 11 with pre-conference workshops, moves to Microsoft Technet content on Tuesday, and then dedicates itself to wall-to-wall Microsoft topics Wednesday through Friday.
The sit-down with the Microsoft product heads is at 4:45 on Tuesday, is particularly attractive, but there is much more good stuff as well in the category entitled "Becoming a Microsoft Virtualization Expert." Sessions in this category, which run for 75 minutes each, include "A Crash Course in Private Cloud: Getting Ready for the New Datacenter," "Understanding (and Appreciating) the Windows Azure Platform for IT Professionals," "Private Clouds and Your Organization: Excedrin for the IT Pro," and a half-day workshop, "Desktop Computing as a Service with RDS/VDI/App-V."
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 07/16/20122 comments
DataCore cofounder, president and CEO George S. Teixeira has been knocking around the storage world for a while, and has been running the show at DataCore since 1998. Four years ago, when he saw what VMware was doing for virtualization, he decided he wanted to do the same thing for storage, so he decided to rewrite his company's software to take advantage of highly available, fault-tolerant computing environments.
Along the way, he started referring to his flagship SANsymphony-V software package as a "storage hypervisor," and latched onto auto-tiering, which combined with SANsymphony-V enables enterprises to make sure their most critical data is stored in high-performing resources such as SSDs, while less important data is kept on less expensive disks.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 06/29/20122 comments