Omnivorous IBM

According to IBM, Cast Iron has completed "thousands" of cloud integrations globally for financial institutions, media and entertainment companies and retail organizations. With Cast Iron in its business process and integration portfolio, IBM is able to help businesses integrate their cloud-based apps and on-premise systems.

The company says the acquisition "also advances IBM's capabilities for a hybrid cloud model, which is attractive to enterprises because it allows them to blend data from on-premises applications with public and private cloud systems."

Cast Iron joins a cloud effort at IBM that also includes another appliance entry called Cloudburst, a private cloud solution based on the System x BladeCenter platform, that comes pre-installed with the cloud framework. Cloudburst does not utilize existing technology--a cardinal sin in the eyes of many cloud vendors--but rather creates a new infrastructure for deploying images and patterns.

Cloudburst includes an entire rack loaded up with everything necessary to get the cloud concept up and running. With its built-in ability to provision those apps on an as-needed basis, it integrates very well with WebSphere applications.

IBM predicts the worldwide cloud computing market will grow at a compounded annual rate of 28% from $47 billion in 2008 to $126 billion by 2012.

Question: Who would you choose for your private cloud vendor, Amazon or IBM?

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 05/04/2010 at 12:48 PM7 comments

RAWC: Partners Only

As posted by Yellow Bricks: "With RAWC 1.1, Solution Providers can better anticipate and plan for infrastructure requirements to support successful VMware deployments for Windows 7 migration.

"RAWC 1.1 now simulates user workloads in Windows 7 environments and can be used to validate VMware View designs to support Windows 7 migrations. RAWC 1.1 supports the following desktop applications in Windows 7 and Windows XP environments: Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, Java code compilation simulator, Adobe Acrobat, McAfee Virus Scan, and 7-Zip.

"RAWC 1.1 also includes bug fixes and several enhancements in test run configurations, usability and user interface. Please see RAWC 1.1 product documents for more details.

"VMware partners can download RAWC 1.1 software and the product documents from VMware Partner Central:Sales Tools > Services IP"

Feeling left out about not having access to RAWC, one disgruntled reader posted: "I understand why they did it--I just don't agree with it, I spent a metric ton worth of cash for licensing, hardware, and the like...testing tools would be a nice perk."

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 05/03/2010 at 12:48 PM4 comments

Pano System 3.0 Backs Win7, Empowers Users

On the Windows 7 side, Pano Logic is facilitating the move from Windows XP to Windows 7 by allowing users to choose at logon whichever environment they want to work in. The company now supports Windows 7 Enterprise, Professional and Ultimate editions with no price change. In support of its Windows 7 product, Pano quotes a happy user saying he realized "dramatic savings" out of the box with Pano, and he "looks forward to the day when I've finished swapping out all our company-wide PCs for Pano Logic virtual desktops."

Pano further announced a failover capability that allows customers to deploy more than one Pano Manager virtual appliance and provide active-passive failover clusters across them. According to VP of engineering, Parmeet Chaddha, "This capability starts to become more critical as customers deploy Pano broadly and they start looking for some semblance of high availability on the backend."

When it comes to giving admins and end users more control over their virtual desktops, Pano System 3.0 delivers workflow-like control via an intuitive interface that enables users, for example, to perform such actions as trashing and recreating their Windows VMs, which allows them to keep working and save the problem VMs for subsequent analysis. V 3.0 also makes it possible for users to maintain and click their way among multiple VMs.

"A lot of these actions have been put in the hands of users pretty much from the logon screen," Chaddha notes, adding that Pano System 3.0 also allows admins to allocate control of these actions. He also cites responding to "a very big request" from admins regarding production VMs, saying Pano Logic not only provides the state of any given VM--e.g. whether it's powered on or not--but also gives some visibility into the state of support tools, such as those offered by VMware, that may need to be updated, and allows admins to update them from the Pano Management interface.

Pano says 3.0's enhanced View integration with VMware View Manager bolsters the value of their zero client approach by easing the management of heterogeneous desktop environments. According to Pano, "IT administrators can now use a single, seamless and comprehensive console through VMware View for managing small to large-scale virtual desktop deployments of infrastructures comprising a mix of both Pano Logic virtual desktops and PCs or thin clients."

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 04/28/2010 at 12:48 PM2 comments

F5 Enabling Online App Services

Now, says Ken Salchow, manager of Technical Marketing for F5 Networks, customers are looking to break out of that old mold via the virtues of on-demand services--just click a button and there's your app, which puts an end to the inflexible mapping of users to physical machines.

"Customers want the control and capabilities from their traditional infrastructures, along with the simplicity and flexibility to outsource and make their applications totally virtual," Salchow declares, adding F5's solution to this dilemma is the dynamic services model, based on the company's newly introduced BIG-IP Version 10.2 software that helps extend enterprise data center architectures to the cloud, and enables on demand services.

F5 takes a holistic approach, which integrates multi-vendor solutions into a unified whole--and raises the specter of finger pointing in the cloud. Salchow, however, says not to worry, because no one vendor can do it all. As he puts it, "We can't solve all these problems alone, it's an ecosystem effort, and it's a matter of trying to tie all these things together. There's a lot of fear about what the cloud means."

This translates into F5's use of a virtual Application Delivery Controller (ADC) platform which "in combination with physical ADCs gives customers the unique ability to seamlessly extend their current operational model into multiple data centers, hosting providers, and cloud environments on demand, while utilizing the same trusted configuration, features, and control that they have developed over the years of application delivery deployment."

F5's new BIG IP Edge Gateway fits in by making it possible for enterprise users to simplify managing app services such as access, security and optimization within the company's new dynamic services model.

Salchow admits that there are still serious challenges to overcome, such as slower data rates between the cloud and the data center than users are accustomed to with their data center links. This means it takes longer to move images, which can become very large and unwieldy. He says that the smallest VM he ever built was 7 gigabits, "and that was just a workstation. You just can't move images fast enough." F5 aims to alleviate that pain by providing dynamic optimized tunnels that eliminate the manual processes involved in moving VMs from one location to another.

"Manual processes just don't cut it," he comments.

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 04/22/2010 at 12:48 PM2 comments

Enterprise-Ready? 10 Questions For Your Cloud Provider

F5 Networks is a pretty cool company. Anybody who offers a solution that maintains a user connection to a VM moved half way around the world would at least seem to have the mobility thing working for them, which puts them on top of the management stack, so to speak. I offer these 10 questions from their PowerPoint playbook designed to help you determine if your cloud provider is enterprise-ready.

1. How do they instrument and report to ensure end-user performance SLAs are met?
2. How do they enable access control and ensure it remains with the enterprise?
3. How do they enable network and application security, and demonstrate that enforcement?
4. What models do they provide for disaster recovery, elasticity, scale and high availability?
5. Can the enterprise easily mimic their existing architectures, still maintain control and easily move between cloud partners?
6. What applications and types are supported?
7. Are systems set up to simplify, secure and optimize virtual machine transfers between the enterprise and the cloud?
8. How do they automate or orchestrate management between the enterprise and cloud provider?
9. What attributes regarding the end user and application (device, location, role, performance, availability) are incorporated into making intelligent traffic management decisions?
10. For all of the questions above, if a provider has a solution, are they different or deficient compared to what the enterprise is already doing? Is the enterprise required to support a different model for each provider?

I'll be blogging more on their latest "vision announcement" tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 04/21/2010 at 12:48 PM6 comments

i/o Data Centers Offers Gigantic Data Centers

Despite the economic travails of the country, times are good for i/o Data Centers, which has more than 300 customers, is rapidly selling capacity at its 125,000 square-foot facility in Scottsdale, Ariz., and has built out 180,000 square feet of raised floor at its 538,000 square-foot facility in Phoenix, which opened last June, and is the largest commercially available data center in the U.S.

"We operate on an inverse path from the economy," says Jason Fererra, director of marketing. "We've really had a great few years."

i/o Data Centers, which has been in business since 2007, guarantees 100 percent uptime and is carrier-neutral. As a result, 12 telecom providers are currently linked into the company's two data centers, which are 30 miles apart and connected by a fiber ring. The company offers 20 megawatts of conditioned power, which it says is "clean power that i/o delivers to its collocation and outsourced data center customers."

In addition to its data center and collocation offerings, i/o Data Centers recently introduced an on-demand service that provides the ability to access enterprise-grade infrastructure processing, including virtualization, storage and bandwidth. "We allow our customers to take what they need when they need it," Ferrera notes.

Highlights of the on-demand service include:

• Access to VMware's vCenter controls
• Best-in-Class servers
• Unlimited SAN capacity
• Up to 32 GB RAM per server

Although i/o Data Centers has competition in the form of companies like Equinix, Digital Realty Trust and Dupont Fabros, Fererra says their competing data centers are more distributed, while i/o Data Centers prefers to concentrate its resources in larger, centralized facilities.

Question: Do you feel comfortable outsourcing your company's data?

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 04/20/2010 at 12:48 PM6 comments

XenDesktop Replaces View in ESX Shop

According to this anonymous reader -- I'll call him Joe -- about a year ago his company, which is a VMware shop, was considering two desktop virtualization pilots, one with View and one with XenDesktop. Rather than possibly ending up with a vendor finger-pointing match between VMware and Citrix, however, the company decided to stick with its VMware guns, and implemented View in their ESX environment.

It didn't turn out very well.

"View was fine until the user tried to get access to things across a WAN," Joe reports, adding, "It was also hard to go to Web sites. It turned out to be not a good user experience." Seeing how achieving a good user experience has been the central thrust of desktop virtualization to date, this outcome is obviously something of a black eye for VMware.

Joe also says that Citrix's ICA protocol, which is now part of its HDX high-definition technology, was better with color, which allows his company to provide 24-bit color. Intranet users also enjoy the ability to scroll up and down documents smoothly without the hesitations they had noticed with View. According to Joe, HDX was "hands-down better" in this scrolling process, which combined with its enhanced color capabilities created the kind of desktop performance users have come to expect.

Not that Citrix was problem-free. Noting the difficulty of dealing with user profiles in virtualized desktop environments, Joe says Citrix User Profile Manager made changes it didn't save, and then Citrix blamed VMware. As it turned out, the situation was a joint Citrix-Microsoft problem.

Going forward, Joe says his company is looking to virtualize its XenApp server farm. Toward that goal, they will consider using XenServer (which is optimized for XenApp), vSphere (which Joe says has reported improved performance with XenApp servers) and Hyper-V.

Bottom line: Joe prefers XenDesktop over View not just because of View's WAN woes, but because XenDesktop is "just easier to manage," e.g. updating disks is a lot easier.

He concludes: "From a user perspective, Citrix has been doing this for 20 years, providing virtualization through XenApp. They do a very good job of presenting to the end user and ultimately that's what we work for; we've got to keep the user happy."

Question: Would your company mix and match desktop virtualization technologies?

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 04/15/2010 at 12:48 PM8 comments

Provisioning VDI from the Cloud

"In general, acquiring a reasonably large number of servers to deliver desktops to your user base imposes additional resource requirements -- space, cooling, and capital outlays for the enterprise," Crosby declares, adding "that may be beyond what they want to do, so the notion of hosting virtual desktops in the cloud is very attractive."

This way, he suggests, it is possible to develop a cost-efficient proof-of-concept by simply going to a cloud provider, bringing up your data, renting a VM by the hour and turning it off at night after the users go home. "So I personally think that virtual desktop infrastructure will have a strong element in it which is related to the cloud," he says.

Even though he admits there are some "challenges" involved in this approach, Crosby assures us that Citrix is working hard to get cloud computing vendors equipped to deliver desktops as part of the "broader go-to-market."

For companies just getting started in desktop virtualization, Citrix is offering an Express Edition of XenDesktop 4 that includes 10 free licenses. It’s available here.

Question: Do you think it is widely feasible to provision VDI from the cloud at this point?

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 04/14/2010 at 12:48 PM1 comments

Chris Wolf Outtakes

In the course of interviewing sources for articles, journalists almost always gather more information than they can use in their stories. This is a shame because so much good info simply doesn't get used. That is why today I am dedicating this blog to outtakes from my recent interview with Burton Group Senior Analyst and virtualization guru Chris Wolf, whom I spoke to in the course of writing my imminent cover profile on Citrix.

"XenServer is one of only two hypervisors Burton Group has certified as enterprise-ready, so in the landscape of hypervisors, I'd say it's right up there at the top. Don't get me wrong. Feature for feature it's still not going to be an equal comparison to VMware vSphere…but in terms of delivering the essential features that you need for enterprise workloads, XenServer does make the cut in our opinion."

"VMware has been the no-brainer decision, and as a CIO, you're not going to get fired for implementing VMware on a large scale basis."

"There are some workloads that perform as well, and in some cases better on the Xen hypervisor than they do on the ESX hypervisor."

"Desktop management groups are very familiar with Citrix, they have worked with Citrix for years now, and they have a relative trust in their products. They're familiar with VMware as a solution for running virtual machines, but not necessarily for managing and delivering desktop applications, which is a different animal."

"I think feature for feature, comparing XenDesktop to View is not that far apart from comparing XenServer to vSphere. VMware had the technology lead in server virtualization, and Citrix has had the lead in terms of delivering applications to users. So that all being said, in terms of desktop virtualization, VMware had about a two-year head start on Citrix in terms of just pure desktop infrastructure, which is why if you look at adoption numbers, VMware still has a pretty sizeable lead over Citrix in terms of number of virtual desktop seats, although Citrix is closing that pretty rapidly."

"Our clients see cloud as not necessarily a replacement for internal infrastructure, but as a complement for say, development test and training, for workloads where I need to be able to use infrastructure temporarily, such as say I have a workload that is very high on Fridays and Saturdays, but the applications are barely used during the week. Being able to burst out to cloud makes a lot of sense, and it's an area where competitively, Citrix has to go there quickly because VMware sees that the market is heading in that direction, they've been extremely aggressive, and they've signed up more than 1,000 service providers to deliver cloud services on VMware infrastructure."

"In terms of virtualizing server applications, I think Citrix will take what they can get, but at the end of the day, XenServer is to them, in my opinion, strategic as a backend for desktop workloads. They don't need Microsoft to lose, or VMware to lose some of their marketshare to win."

"NetScaler is an important product. There are a lot of ISPs, a lot of enterprises that have NetScaler in production. As a front end for either hosting, or IT as a service, NetScaler is proven technology, and the fact that Citrix can leverage that and integrate NetScaler with both desktop application delivery, but also even with server workloads is important strategically, and certainly a key value-add that they bring to the table."

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 04/13/2010 at 12:48 PM1 comments

Study: Manufacturers Taking Strategic Virtualization Tack

A new Vizioncore Virtualization Review (VVR) study shows that manufacturers are keeping pace with other industries by acknowledging that virtualization has moved beyond server consolidation to become a strategic tool that allows them to compete more effectively, lower costs and increase margins.

Of those surveyed, 44 percent were process manufacturers and 28 percent were discrete manufacturers. The study surveyed global manufacturers across multiple industries, and survey participants were asked to select the outcome of the top near-term priority for their virtualization initiative. In response, 41 percent listed preventing application downtime and data loss as their primary priorities, while 39 percent said their primary concerns were achieving efficiencies and reducing costs at their corporate headquarters.

These two top priorities were followed by achieving efficiencies/reducing costs at plant operations (12 percent), improving quality of products and ability to compete (6 percent), other (2 percent) and extend plant automation (1 percent).

Asked to list which area they have virtualized, an overwhelming 82 percent cited production, followed by other at 12 percent, R&D at 3 percent, customer service/help desk at 2 percent and labs/prototyping at 1 percent.

Not surprisingly, when respondents reported on their virtualization platform companies of choice, VMware was the runaway winner with a 99 percent response rate. Citrix XenServer was next (10 percent), followed by Microsoft Hyper-V Server (4 percent), other (2 percent), Oracle Virtual Iron and Linux KVM, which both registered 1 percent response rates.

Vizioncore summed up the survey results by saying, "The VVR results clearly indicate that virtualization technology has reached maturity within the manufacturing industry. Manufacturers are moving beyond the basic benefits of adoption by now seeking to prevent downtime, gain efficiencies and reduce costs at the corporate level. Posing these questions just a couple of years ago would not yield the same results. Virtualization is now a solid investment for production and has matured along with the market--helping to cut costs and improve operations across many areas of business. The opportunities for 2010, as it seems now, abound."

Question: How long can VMware maintain its dominance in the manufacturing market?

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 04/07/2010 at 12:48 PM1 comments

vProfile Bolsters Reflex Systems Management Suite

As part of the vendor's flagship Reflex Virtualization Management Center (VMC) family, vProfile competes with the steadily increasing number of graphics-oriented virtualization management packages entering the market by offering what it calls "heat maps" that depict geographical disparities in virtual infrastructure environments.

In addition to vProfile, other VMC modules include vTrust and vWatch Monitoring. All these modules are connected via a common VMC management console that Reflex Systems says "abstracts and stores information about the virtual infrastructure in a virtual CMDB and presents it in an easy-to-use graphical interface."

"It is a huge value that these modules are not point solutions but are all integrated," says Mike Wronski, VP of Product Management.

Reflex VMC reportedly tracks thousands of properties associated with hosts, VMs and virtual management servers such as VMware vCenter. vProfile uses storage, networking and virtual management servers and operational configuration types for hosts running hypervisors such as vSphere and ESXi. According to Wronski, the company is also considering adding compatibility management with Hyper-V and Xen hypervisors, although he says there is not currently sufficient demand to do so.

At first glance, VMC's sophisticated graphics seem similar to those offered by Xangati, another management vendor which recently debuted its latest virtualization management package for vCenter environments. Asked to compare the two, Wronski said that Xangati stresses performance monitoring while VMC is more oriented toward operations and configuration management.

Reflex says vProfile configuration management plots VM configuration changes according to a "heatmap interface that uses a color schema to signify disparities--the more configuration differences there are, the 'hotter' a particular area of the map shows the differences. In addition, users can leverage customized pivot tables to cross-tabulate and summarize configuration information to matrix different combinations of properties. Wronski says "There is a huge array of metrics to choose from."

He goes on to state that while Reflex and VMware have been development partners since 2006, the two companies are in "coopetition," especially with VMware's Host Profiles product. "We still work closely with VMware," he says, "and there are some gaps they leave open for us."

Pricing for each module, including VMC platform functionality, is $795 per socket, which the company says is "very similar" to the VMware pricing model.

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 04/06/2010 at 12:48 PM1 comments

Capacity Management for VMware, Hyper-V

You'd think that with a name like VKernel, a company would be targeting virtualization players like Red Hat and Citrix, but the firms being targeted by this vendor are VMware and Microsoft (Hyper-V).

VKernel, which provides capacity management tools for virtualized data centers, is introducing Capacity Analyzer 4.3, which it claims is the first capacity management package for VMware and Hyper-V. Capacity Analyzer 4.3 enables users to manage both VMware and Hyper-V environments from a single console, which is pretty much de riguer for any product in this class.

More specifically, the product enables Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager and Virtual Machine Manager users to receive alerts on performance issues in their VMware vCenter and ESX environments.

According to VKernel, Capacity Analyzer "automatically collects performance and capacity data , profiles each virtualized application and builds an accurate model of available capacity across servers and storage at every layer of the user's virtualized infrastructure. Capacity Analyzer's extensive analyses then identify capacity bottlenecks that are impacting performance, predict where future problems will arrive, give specific instructions on how to resolve these issues and tells users where to place new virtual machines to avoid capacity issues."

Capacity Analyzer 4.3 costs $299 per socket.

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 04/01/2010 at 12:48 PM2 comments

RingCube's vDesk 3.0 Takes On Desktop Virtualization Heavies

When RingCube's vDesk 2.0 came out last September, our reviewer Chris Wolf of the Burton Group called it a "massive improvement" over 1.0. He lauded the workspace virtualization product for its Active Directory integration, its ability to join vDesks to a domain, and its "straightforward, policy-based management" capabilities.

Eager to move to the next level, RingCube has now unveiled vDesk 3.0, which the company says "simplifies the creation, access and management of Windows desktops" by introducing management functionality that delivers global scalability, adds faster MobileSync to the equation and provides Windows 7 support. The company also says that as a result of its collaboration with Intel, it is offering hardware-assisted isolation control with Intel vPro technology.

RingCube is taking on the Citrix XenDesktops and VMware Views of the desktop virtualization world via its ability to deliver virtual workspaces to large enterprises, delegate IT management and efficiently distribute storage. In order to nail down that claim, the company quotes Mike Prepelica, director of information technology, Revere Electric Supply Company, who praises vDesk 3.0 by saying that after he looked at solutions from "large VDI vendors" he favored the product's simple, cost-efficient deployment of vDesk to remote employees.

According to Doug Dooley, RingCube VP of marketing and product development, "We virtualize on top of Windows, there's no second OS and it runs extremely fast--99.8 percent of what the host can deliver. It's centrally managed and stored, and locally executed." He goes on to say that vDesk 3.0 employs a hybrid approach, wherein virtual desktops are stored on file servers and streamed across the network to local endpoints.

The hardware-assisted isolation control in 3.0 provides increased workspace security when running on PCs with vPro virtualization technology. Of the collaboration with Intel, Dooley declares, "Intel gave us full access to their engineering department." 

vDesk 3.0 is available immediately from RingCube, and pricing starts at $200 USD per user for the Standard edition and $300 per user for the Enterprise edition.

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 03/31/2010 at 12:48 PM2 comments

Virtualized Fax Servers? Why not?

According to FaxBack, Inc., every day, users fax mission-critical business information, including contracts, legal documents, sales quotes, purchase orders, order confirmations, event announcements, membership applications and
much more. For Fortune 500 companies fax is a core communications tool. It is estimated by Peter Davidson, IDC Fax analyst, that over 85 percent of SOHO's (Small Business/Home Office) rely on fax.

Given its seemingly global popularity, it should come as no surprise that fax servers are being virtualized similarly to so many of their corporate counterparts. Enter Biscom, which maintains that virtualizing fax servers leads to better fax server resource management, while making it possible to run workstations and servers with different OSes concurrently on the same fax server or servers. The result: Virtual servers make it possible for users to comply with the mantra of doing more with less.

Here's the Biscom elevator pitch: "All Biscom fax server solutions are designed to achieve a common goal: streamline business processes and improve the bottom line. Whether the need is to fax-enable e-mail, integrate fax with a VoIP network, automate unattended high-volume fax deliveries, or implement fax processing workflows, Biscom works closely with its customers to ensure a quick ROI and savings of both time and money."

For more in-depth information, check out The Essential Guide to Fax Server Software, which is published by Windows ITPro.

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 03/30/2010 at 12:48 PM3 comments

Virtual Lab Management On the Rise

No more, says analyst firm voke, inc., which has released its second study on the topic in the form of a "Market Snapshot Report on Virtual Lab Management (VLM)," which assesses VLM technology traits as ROI, market readiness, use and awareness. It also covers the increasing demand and utilization of the technology.

The study was done between August 2009 and February 2010, and was based on input from an independent survey of 100 organizations using VLM technology.

According to Theresa Lanowitz, lead analyst for voke, inc., "Virtual lab management continues to prove itself as a rare, real, breakthrough use of technology revolutionizing the computing industry and the enterprise. Virtualization remains the defining computing technology of the 21st century."

The study includes both key findings and ROI results. Among the key findings, 100 percent of participants who evaluated commercial solutions ultimately adopted them, and VLM is viewed as a way to change the dynamics of IT organizations. On the ROI side, "48 percent of participants reported direct head count savings and productivity improvements," and "On average, 57 servers per organization were eliminated."

Question: Would your organization benefit from a stronger focus on virtual lab management?

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 03/29/2010 at 12:48 PM4 comments