vFoglight 6.5, from Quest, hits three different and highly competitive sweet spots in the burgeoning virtualization market: performance management, monitoring and capacity planning. It also brings both Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX Server into the fold, providing a lot more bang for the product buck. (This process reflects a deviation from the normal process of starting out with ESX and subsequently adding Hyper-V). Throw in application infrastructure management for Microsoft Active Directory and Exchange, and you’ve got a package that hits a lot of high notes.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 11/30/20104 comments
Data center intelligence software maker CiRBA is getting on the cloud bandwagon with CiRBA 6.0, which the company calls "an enterprise solution for efficiency management that meets the evolving demands of managing cloud and virtualized infrastructure." v6.0 combines cross-platform analytics with customizable role-based dashboards that increase visibility and control over the efficiency and risk of systems.
The company's new v6.0 dashboards deliver role-based views of efficiency and risks that offer "accurate, actionable answers." In this automated environment, the likelihood of human error is minimized and the decision-making process is enhanced.
Looking at it from 30,000 feet, the idea behind v6.0 is to enable faster decision-making in dynamic environments based on analytics computations that include cross-correlating data housed in corporate data center s. For example, based on analytics output, CiRBA can tell you how many IT resources you will need over the next 90 days to satisfy policy, HA and DR requirements.
As CTO and co-founder Andrew Hillier told me over a recent lunch, "Without analytics, it's a tangled mess and a waste of peoples' time. You can't do a good job of managing when you get different answers each time. Companies relying on manual approaches and spreadsheets simply cannot aggregate the required data, analyze it accurately, and provide answers with any level of reliability."
Pricing runs between $25,000 and $1 million based on company size.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 11/18/20106 comments
In my
Sept. 28 blog
, I wrote about "several depressing facts" associated with the then upcoming VMware Data Protection Report 2010, which was commissioned and written by Veeam, and responded to by 500 CIOs. (VMware played no role in the report.) Among those depressing facts:
- 63 percent of enterprises experience problems every month when attempting to recover a server.
- Recovery of a backed up VM takes nearly five hours.
- Failed recoveries cost the average enterprise more than $400,000 per year.
Now that Veeam has released the full survey, there are more revealing results, i.e. 44 percent of respondents reported that issues related to backup and recovery prevented them from virtualizing some mission-critical workloads. In fact, the survey found that on average, only 68 percent of production-level virtual estates are currently backed up, and only 29 percent of enterprises back up their entire virtual estates. Veeam qualifies those numbers by noting, "This may not be an immediate cause for concern, as even in the physical IT environment, not all data is backed up. Naturally, the research highlighted how businesses applied stronger processes to backing up critical servers over non-critical (both virtual and physical)."
Veeam goes on to note that given the cost and resource efficiency of VMs in areas such as hardware and storage, it's important to protect all data whether it's mission-critical or not.
The report is filled with a lot of interesting data protection information pertaining to subjects such as the use of a single product for backing up both physical and virtual assets, complicated restore methods, meeting the need for data protection in tight budgetary situations, the shortage of backup testing, and long recovery times. You can sign up for a free copy at veeam.com.
Of course, at the end of the report, Veeam takes the opportunity to extol the virtues of its vPower technology, which is the force behind Veeam Backup and Replication 5.0.
All in all, the VMware Data Protection Report 2010 a slick, well-executed marketing package for Veeam--how can you argue against protecting data?--and a worthwhile educational opportunity for organizations, who can ingest a lot of interesting information and consider its worth to them, knowing that it is presented in a format that is dedicated, however subtly, to promoting the greater commercial success of Veeam.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 11/16/20100 comments
If you click
this link
, it will take you to a really great piece of research conducted by the Taneja Group on the hypervisor market. Entitled "The Hypervisor Shootout," this study takes an extremely detailed look at the VM density of leading products under consistent application workloads. Vendors represented include Red Hat, VMware, Microsoft and Citrix.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 11/08/20104 comments
Speaking at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference recently, Bob Muglia, President, Server & Tools Business clearly delineated his vision of how he sees Windows Azure evolving as both operating system and platform as a service (PaaS).
Hyperbolic rhetoric aside, Muglia touts Azure as a highly integrated and comprehensive platform of services with which users can write applications. As an example, he said that Azure includes a caching service that will speed up applications and get web applications and pages out faster—all by writing just a couple of lines of code.
He also pointed out how technologies like .NET, established tools such as Visual Studio, and new management tools like System Center have been designed to work together, and are now being reengineered for the cloud. However, he added, these products are not just being moved into Azure to run on a virtual machine.
In his words, "We are saying to ourselves, what does the cloud require of the underlying platform? What does it have to deliver? Well, it needs to deliver a fully available, globally scaled, shared, multi-tenant service. And that's how we're redesigning these underlying services as a part of Windows Azure."
In order to make his point, Muglia compared SQL Server to SQL Azure, saying SQL Server was designed to run on a single server or a cluster of servers. The big difference between the two? Even though SQL Azure is the same database environment users have known for years, it runs on, and replicates data across thousands of computers in six global data centers without any user intervention.
"You don't think about it," Muglia said. "You don't think about how you're allocating files and how you're building up underlying physical infrastructure. SQL Azure handles that because that's what a real path database system should do. When we talk about Windows Azure and services we're making available to Windows Azure developers, those services will be available also within private cloud data centers that run Azure, so if your organization wants that kind of environment, these same set of services will be made available to you."
Winding down his pitch, Muglia said Microsoft is providing services to Azure so users can clear the decks and concentrate on the things that really matter to them, namely writing their applications as quickly as possible, and ultimately solving their business problems.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 11/08/20100 comments
Happy birthday, Win 7!
It's been a good first year for you--a very good first year. According to your mama, Microsoft, there have been some 240 million of your licenses sold, and there is no let-up in sight. That's selling like a big boy! And mama says you have been the most successful release of Windows ever into the market place. The best-ever OS? Oh yes!
Recession, reschmession--mama says your PC market is strong, with 1.2 billion PCs in the worldwide ecosystem, and all the credit goes to you. She is breathing a big sigh of relief, knowing that you can make up for the big drop-offs in sales of her Parcheesi and Chinese Checkers games. It's all good.
IDC backs mama's optimistic numbers to the hilt, saying there was a 4.15 percent global growth of PC units in 2009, and that number will increase to almost 17 percent in 2010, with sustained growth continuing at a rate of nearly 13 percent in 2011. Win 7, you need to hypervise yourself in order to meet all that demand! Any naysayers who call you a mama's boy will eat their words after they see the way you handle big uglies such as the Dell Latitude Z, Dell Vostro 3400, and the Lenovo Thinkpad x201 and Thinkpad. (Who's afraid of anybody named "Vostro," anyway?)
You're also racking up points with your winning personality. How else to explain the way IT managers have taken such a shine to you? In fact, Forrester says the number of IT managers deploying you on new PCs will jump to 83 percent during your second year--and you'll barely be out of diapers. No caca on you, Win 7!
It seems like everybody loves you, except some of those big babies at VMware who say you are just one more unwanted connection to the physical past your awful mama has forced down everybody's throats for so long. Those mean, jealous VM buggers think you will fall on your cute little face when it comes time for desktop virtualization. What a bunch of dumb, old propeller heads!
There's even more good news, you meaty, beaty, big and bouncy bundle of love. Mama talked to LifeHacker, which helps people do all kinds of fun things with you, and they reported a 94 percent customer satisfaction rating with you. What, only 94 percent? The other 6 percent is probably in jail, or something, and they can't use you right.
On top of everything else, Win 7, you appreciate the value of a buck. Mama says you are making customers very happy by reducing their total cost of operations to the point where all they need in monopoly money to keep things humming along at top speed. She is very insistent on this point, saying "The average savings is $140 per PC per year and the average ROI is 131% in just over 12 months." (You can tell she was really shouting when she said that!)
We could go on and on patting you on the back, but the big old computer market is doing that for us each and every day. Now go blow out those candles on your virtual birthday cake 'cause today is your day!
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 11/03/20106 comments
After carving out a big swath of the mobile software management market, Red Bend Software is now putting mobile virtualization in its sights via the purchase of VirtualLogix, which was created in 2002 to target the embedded virtualization market. VirtualLogix customers have included OEMs, original design manufacturers (ODMs), service providers, systems integrators and semiconductor manufacturers. The company's flagship VLX product features a Type one bare metal hypervisor.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 11/02/20102 comments
Just in case you missed it, Cisco, VMware and EMC have banded together with telecom giant Orange Business Services to form The Flexible 4 Business alliance, whose aim is to encourage enterprise migration to the cloud via private cloud technologies. The alliance is a logical extension of the Virtual Computing Environment Coalition, which was formed by Cisco, VMware and EMC a year ago to drive the transition to private cloud infrastructures via greater IT infrastructure flexibility and lower IT, energy and real estate costs offered by ubiquitous data center virtualization.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/28/20105 comments
The Big Dogs of Virtualization are raking it in.
Q3 results for VMware and Citrix paint a picture of two well-managed companies that are steadily improving their financial results quarter by quarter as they continue to solidify their rock-solid business and technology foundations.
Starting with VMware, the company reports that third quarter revenues were $714 million, representing a sizeable increase of 46% over the same period a year ago. For its part, Citrix checked in with $472 million in Q3 revenues, compared to $472 million for the same period a year ago, which represented an 18% increase.
VMware's GAAP net income for the third quarter was $85 million, or $.20 per diluted share compared to $38 million, or $0.9 per diluted share during Q3 2009. Citrix's GAAP net income for the reporting period was $88 million, or $.46 per diluted share, compared to $53 million, or $.29 per diluted share during Q3 2009.
VMware's non-GAAP net income for the third quarter was $165 million, or $0.39 per diluted share, compared to $95 million, or $0.24 per diluted share for Q3 2009. Citrix's non-GAAP net income for Q3 was $118 million, or $0.62 per diluted share, compared to $80 million, or $0.43 per diluted share a year ago.
GAAP--Generally Accepted Accounting Principles--GAAP is the common set of accounting principles, standards and procedures that companies use to compile financial statements. However, it is only a set of standards, and it can be abused by unscrupulous accountants to distort figures.
Non-GAAP financial measures disclosed by management are provided as additional information to investors to provide them with an alternative method for assessing financial conditions and operating results. These measures are not in accordance with, or a substitute for GAAP, and may be different from non-GAAP measures used by other companies.
GAAP-schmaap...no matter how you cut the mustard, these guys are on a roll in the middle of our worst economy since the Great Depression. That pretty much says it all.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/25/20107 comments
Gartner VP Thomas Bittman--who ought to know based on his countless conversations with clients--is saying at the Symposium ITxpo this week that Hyper-V is underperforming compared to Gartner's expectations.
Quoting Bittman, Alessandro Perilli at virtualization.info writes: "Maybe my expectations were too high, but Hyper-V has not grabbed as much market share as I was predicting. I especially thought that Microsoft would be the big beneficiary of midmarket virtualization. Surveys show otherwise--VMware is doing pretty well there.
Here's a theory. Clients repeatedly told us that live migration was a big hole in Microsoft's offering--even for midmarket customers (to reduce planned downtime managing the parent OS). Microsoft's Hyper-V R2 (with live migration) came out August 2009. Was that too late? Did the economy put pressure on midsized companies to virtualize early, before Hyper-V R2 was proven in the market? Or did VMware just have too much mindshare?"
I find it a little hard to believe that despite its weighty influence, Microsoft was able to convince these midsized companies to take the virtualization leap before they were really comfortable doing so, because even now, many organizations are only getting started, for instance, on VDI.
At any rate, in a similar vein, I was recently interviewing Dave Bartoletti, senior analyst, The Taneja Group, for my profile on Microsoft, and during our conversation, he said he believes that despite advances with Hyper-V, VMware still has at least a "five-year, pure-technology lead on both Xen Server and Hyper-V." According to Bartoletti, the recent releases of both those products are just beginning to catch up with VMware in terms of raw performance, raw scalability, and raw power in the data center.
"That's why I think we see so much more discussion from Microsoft about the desktop, and a much tighter integration with Citrix, who in many cases owns the desktop and owns application delivery to the desktop," he told me.
I'm not exactly sure how a five-year, pure technology lead translates into market share or competitive advantage, but it certainly sounds ominous for Redmond.
By the way, if you want to read some really great research on the hypervisor market, I urge you to look up Taneja Group's "Hypervisor Shootout," which is available gratis at www.tanejagroup.com.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/20/20107 comments
It's actually a good thing that VDI is coming under the scrutinizing eyes of an ever-growing audience, because the sooner people develop a better understanding of this widely discussed and highly touted technology, the better it will be for all parties.
VDI goes against the grain of most new technologies by not initially presenting itself as a big-time money saver that guarantees overnight ROIs and drastically reduced total costs of operations. What's turning off a lot of potential users as they begin investigating VDI possibilities is the notion that internal performance will suffer so much that they will have to do forklift upgrades in their data centers to accommodate VDI infrastructures.
They are turned off by I/OPS "boot storms" they fear will rage through their infrastructures when workers log on to their VDI desktops in the morning, return from lunch, and shut down for the day. These highly disruptive occurrences can last up to two hours, during which time users are subject to significantly degraded system performance as I/OPs demands soar by up to 10 times their normal levels.
Clearly, this is not your father's server virtualization that was so easy to understand and so satisfyingly cost-effective.
Not surprisingly, virtualization and storage vendors are keen to address these negative perceptions, and that's what led me to Fadi Albatal, VP of marketing for FalconStor. This company has morphed from its early days as an iSCSI SAN alternative into a prominent disk-based data protection vendor that emphasizes its remote office protection and disaster recovery capabilities. Albatal is quick to note the efficiency that solid state disks provide in VDI environments, saying SSDs offer a performance ratio of 30-1 over competing technologies. "Thats a huge gain in I/OPS," he states.
He also points out the management benefits of VDI, which allow desktops to be managed, backed up, and recovered centrally, and goes on to note the significant savings that come from utilizing thin clients instead of the traditional PC- and workstation-based desktops. He further cites the remote access advantages of VDI that allow, for example, multi-national law firms to access legal data that cannot be allowed to physically leave some countries or certain regulated environments. Turning to operations, Albatal says remote access includes the ability to service various remote desktops, and even replace their data if they are lost or stolen.
However, even with all these attractive benefits, many tight-fisted top managers have held out against VDI--until the iPad burst on the scene, and then suddenly, these high-level execs were able to access all their favorite apps on their new favorite access device. "That's what turned on the lights in CIOs' heads," Albatal says.
Question: How does top technical management in your company view VDI?
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/18/20102 comments
Everybody is looking for a way to minimize the performance degradation associated with storage in virtualized environments. I thought that in its new release of XenServer 5.6 Feature Pack 1, Citrix thought up a pretty good idea with its VDI IntelliCache. This capability is designed to alleviate pain caused by high amounts of disk activity bogging down performance, which in turn brings more network storage into play. As Citrix noted, approximately 80 percent of those writes to disk in shared image desktop environments consist of temporary or non-persistent data that does not belong in SANs or NAS. The answer: IntelliCache identifies this traffic and caches it in local, server-side disks, increasing performance and reducing VDI costs.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/13/20102 comments
Sungard is a familiar name to most of us, and based on its track record with large customers, we know they got their technical chops down a long time ago. SunGard Availability Services is an offshoot of the mother ship that offers a range of DR services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services and business continuity management software to some 10,000 customers in North America and Europe.
What we may not know is that SunGard Availability Services is a customer-friendly company that is interested in being a business partner at the same time it is a service provider. Jim Dunlap, president of Cycle30--a subsidiary of GCI, Alaska's largest telecommunications and cable provider--found that out on his way to selecting the SunGard Availability Services enterprise-grade cloud platform to implement Cycle30's billing services for its cable, telecom, and utility customers across North America. According to Dunlap, "If you look at their financial picture, it tends to give you a lot of confidence, but it really had much more to do with the people we met."
And by the way, Dunlap says, "We have saved millions of dollars using their cloud computing services."
These savings came about because in launching its new billing services, Cycle30 adopted a successful go-to-market strategy based on getting up, running, and highly competitively ASAP. Toward that end, they implemented a blended solution that combined cloud computing with managed hosting and recovery services. That resulted in the ability to scale on short notice and add new clients rapidly.
SunGard Availability Services treated Cycle30 right, and Dunlap is passing that customer-centric approach on to his customers, saying his company will provide them with SLAs aimed at "making life easier for the person who pays the bills for telecom or utility services."
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/12/20100 comments
Using its Berlin Synergy conference as a bully pulpit, Citrix unveiled new versions of XenDesktop and
XenServer
to underscore its unwavering commitments to desktop virtualization and cloud computing. While XenDesktop 5 includes new features aimed at making it easier for new customers to get up and running with desktop virtualization, it also relies heavily on enhancements to existing capabilities.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/08/20102 comments
Noting the high upfront storage costs associated with VDI, Citrix introduced VDI IntelliCache as part of the latest XenServer rev. Citrix says dynamically provisioned virtual desktops in datacenters generate a high amount of disk activity, which bogs down performance and expands the use of costly network storage. However, some 80 percent of these writes to disk in the case of shared image desktops involve temporary or non-persistent data that should not be saved in SAN or NAS environments. IntelliCache identifies this traffic and caches it in local, server-side disks, which increases performance while decreasing VDI costs. This capability is sure to be welcomed by the growing ranks of VDI users.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/08/20102 comments