Mark Templeton Covers Lots of Ground at Citrix Synergy

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."

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 05/26/20111 comments

Citrix Chief Talks About Kaviza

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.

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 05/24/20111 comments

Veeam Embraces Hyper-V

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 05/19/20112 comments

VMware's Horizon App Manager Makes the Cloud Seem Real

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 05/17/20111 comments

Unvarnished Opinions on the State of Desktop Virtualization

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.

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 05/12/20113 comments

Gluster's New Data Protection Tools

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 05/10/20111 comments

Chris Wolf on OpenStack, vCloud Director, Etc.

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.

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 05/05/20113 comments

Outtakes and Insights from Chris Wolf, Part 1

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 05/03/20110 comments

WAN Optimization Drives CloudSwitch, Riverbed Deal

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 04/21/20110 comments

Unidesk Makes the Grade at MIT

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 04/19/20110 comments

VDI "Science Experiments" Getting Help

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 04/14/20112 comments

Virsto VDI Targets High Storage Costs

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.

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 04/12/20112 comments

Storage Survey Has Negative Findings

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 04/05/20112 comments

System Center 'Concero' the Latest Management Blast

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 03/31/20111 comments

Cloud Printing Alliance Targets Smartphones

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 03/29/20111 comments