Veeam is back with its third-quarter report that falls just short of actually being one because the company -- which appears to be doing just fine -- does not disclose its revenues in it. What it does report is that total Q3 bookings revenue grew 43 percent over the same period last year, and that new license bookings increased 30 percent during that period.
There is more good growth news. "We are very happy to have reached the milestone of 50,000 customers just six years after our founding," said Veeam major domo Ratmir Timashev, "as this represents strong validation of the quality and innovation of our products. It's great to see the success our customers and partners are having, especially with our Backup & Replication product, the industry leader for VMware and Hyper-V backup and data protection."
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/24/20124 comments
Citrix is getting good use of its Synergy bully pulpit in Barcelona by making extensive announcements to fortify its cloud and consumerization initiatives. Major cloud-related thrusts include protecting its lucrative Windows applications and desktop business with a focus on two new releases of Project Avalon. On the consumerization side, Citrix has focused on its lynchpin Citrix Receiver product, while unveiling a new version of XenClient and addressing unsecure consumer cloud services via Citrix ShareFile with StorageZones.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/18/20122 comments
At a time when high upfront costs, complex architectures, and shared storage bottlenecks have been dogging mainstream VDI products such as XenDesktop and View, Desktone offers a tempting alternative built on its cloud-based desktop-as-a-service platform. Currently designed for enterprise and services providers, the DaaS offering prides itself on its economical, no-muss, no-fuss approach to VDI, which has been poised for a popularity liftoff that has yet to occur.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/16/20120 comments
The newly introduced HyTrust Appliance Version 3.0 is reminiscent of the 1964 movie, "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb." In that Cold War classic, a demented Air Force colonel, Jack D. Ripper (played by Sterling Hayden), sends a wing of B-52s to bomb a Russian ICBM complex, and refuses to share the recall code with his executive officer, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (one of three roles played by Peter Sellers). Skipping ahead, even though the recall code call is eventually ferreted out, the world is annihilated in a nuclear holocaust triggered by a "Dooms Day Device." Believe it or not, this is a very funny movie.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/15/20122 comments
XenServer keeps on truckin'. Citrix claims the free edition has been downloaded somewhere in the neighborhood of a million times, and that XenServer manages workloads in over 50 percent of Fortune 500 companies. In addition, Gartner included it in the leaders' quadrant of its 2012 Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure. Not bad for a product that was pretty much written off as dead a few years ago.
Overall, Citrix says XenServer 6.1 "strengthens its server virtualization feature set for datacenter consolidation and simplifies the path to cloud computing with advanced virtual machine migration, enhanced networking and security, increased vendor compatibility and automated virtual machine conversion tools."
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/10/20120 comments
VMware is on course to assemble an impervious management infrastructure that will complement its software-defined datacenter plans and solidify its leadership position as a purveyor of private and hybrid clouds. Building on its recently announced VMware vCloud Suite, the company is now focusing on customer service provisioning, cloud operation management and cloud business management.
Four new Enhancements to vCloud Suite include vCloud Automation Center 5.1, vFabric Application Director 5.0, vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.6, and vCloud Connector 2.0.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/09/20120 comments
Greenbytes was a data storage vendor for some five years, and during that time the company was butting heads with competitors like EMC and HDS that were many times larger and wealthier than them. Then, Greenbytes made an abrupt about face, turned competitors into compatriots, and put a "laser focus" on VDI vendors by offering them an appliance to help them with their IOPs problems.
Specifically, the company is complementing its former foes via its new IO Offload Engine, a small footprint plug-and-play device which was designed to accelerate conventional disk storage systems. Greenbytes, which now bills itself as "a developer of cloud-scale IO-offload solutions that enable organizations to meet VDI performance requirements using their existing architectures," created this new network infrastructure product to drain off transient IO associated with VM booting, rapid provisioning and disk swap.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/03/20120 comments
CipherCloud, which is looking to change the conversation about cloud security via its cloud encryption gateway technology, expanded its product portfolio. CipherCloud Database Gateway encrypts data at rest for cloud-based database systems -- including IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS products -- in a straightforward way without costly, complex, application, schema or database infrastructure changes.
This is good news for the likes of Amazon RDS, Microsoft SQL Azure, Oracle Database Cloud Service, and database.com, in addition to what CipherCloud calls "millions of existing private cloud and behind-the-firewall database installations of Oracle Database, Microsoft, SQL Server, and MySQL."
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/01/20120 comments
In order to separate itself from the rest of the pack (notably HP, NetApp, IBM and EMC), and set a precedent, Hitachi Data Systems has created a net-new SME storage system for companies with between 500 and 1,000 employees that is neither a trumped up low-end version or a dumbed down high-end offering. The result is the Hitachi Unified Storage VM (HUS VM), which HDS says is the industry's first unified storage product that provides enterprise-class virtualization for all data types -- block, file and object -- while offering the lowest operating cost in its class by up to 40 percent.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 09/26/20122 comments
The worm continues to turn with VDI. Back in our Feb-March issue of this year, I wrote a piece entitled "Is VDI Still Viable," in which the technology was scrutinized by vendors and analysts. The four topics that kept coming up were intimidating upfront costs, prohibitively expensive operating environments, shared storage bottlenecks and questionable security capabilities. In the end, my conclusion was that VDI remained viable.
Fast forward to the recent VMworld show in San Francisco. In the course of interviewing Enterprise Strategy Group senior analyst/guru Mark Bowker for my Microsoft Windows Server 2012 cover story, the topic turned to VDI, and Bowker came down hard on it, saying "I think VDI's pretty short-lived. I think that there's certain use cases, and we're starting to see some of those use cases fill up and that work makes sense. People will spend because it's such a big problem, but now I think that you're seeing people say, ‘OK, you know what, I've gotten to that point where there's other ways I can be addressing this problem.'"
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 09/21/20122 comments
After much ado over the past year, Bromium announced the GA of its first product, vSentry, which CEO Gaurav Banga says will ease "the great pain" felt by users as they are tasked with providing security for an array of competing technologies, including consumerization, social networks, and cloud applications, to name a few.
At this early point, financial pain is not a problem for Bromium, which in June said it had received $26.5 million in Series B funding from a group led by Highland Capital Partners.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 09/19/20120 comments
Users commonly complain that their application performance delivery is too slow, and virtualization, cloud computing, and finger-pointing among admins representing competing vendors only makes the problem worse. In order to come up with a solution to this dilemma, eG Innovations has made it clear that its goal with eGEnterprise 5.6 is to take the user's perspective and provide deeper, end-to-end visibility into physical and virtual infrastructures.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 09/14/20124 comments
Private cloud connectivity has not emerged as a high-profile market, but it should come as no surprise that AT&T is the early leader in this nascent area. According to market researcher Frost & Sullivan, the slimmed down behemoth of days past is the "most popular private cloud networking provider" through its use of virtual private networks (VPNs).
Specifically, in the course of surveying 308 U.S. IT decision-makers, Frost & Sullivan found that 48 percent use AT&T to connect their private clouds.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 09/13/20122 comments
The winners of the First Annual Virtualization Review VMworld Best of Breed Awards were announced at VMworld, and our Oct-Nov print magazine issue will include an article on the winners. Between now and then, however, I wanted to let everybody know who those winners are, and how we selected them. First, the eight categories, along with triumphant companies and products:
Best Cloud Application
Company: HotLink
Product: HotLink Hybrid Express
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 09/10/20122 comments
Some smart people in the know are saying that Embotics created something of a VMworld buzz with its latest version of Embotics V-Commander, which delivers IT-as-a-Service using both private and public clouds. The idea behind this new product is to change the management environment from presiding over individual VMs to having control of a wider range of IT services.
The chief beneficiaries of this largesse are the ever-growing numbers end users who are joining the ranks of the empowered by being able to request the provisioning of IT services "consisting of logical aggregates of virtual and physical assets from within a single, self-service catalog, streamlining the cloud management process to provide IT organizations with increased control, speed and agility."
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 08/30/20120 comments