"Twenty-two years ago, my boss told me tape was dead," recalls Darrell Riddle, senior director of product marketing for FalconStor. However, as we all know, tape is still alive and well.
Even though the demand for continuous backup has grown tremendously, tape still
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 04/30/20121 comments
After starting out in 2007 with software dedicated to Sun servers, GreenBytes wanted to sell their own turnkey appliances, so the company debuted a single-controller product that is still in use within tier two storage environments. Last October, the ambitious vendor unveiled its first dual controller product, the HA-3000, which use HDDs for capacity and the rapidly rising SSDs for performance.
Now, with the debut of GreenBytes Solidarity, the company has a dedicated, highly available SSD product for small and medium users that is aimed at virtualization and storage and offers benefits of SSD at magnetic capacities and prices.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 04/24/20123 comments
Sometimes, trying to keep up with the gusher of new product announcements is a hopeless pursuit. With that in mind, I offer capsule descriptions of some of the products that have recently graced my e-mail box:
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 04/20/20125 comments
When it came to managing virtual desktops, MokaFive is one of those companies that seemed to have an edge on competition right from the beginning. They remind me a bit of Parallels, which, like MokaFive, has driven the acceptance of Macs in the workplace. They also fit in with companies like Unidesk -- with its desktop layering technology -- and Wanova -- which offers a layered image foundation.
In its latest announcement, MokaFive says that its MokaFive for iOS software unifies work and personal computing in iPads and iPhones, while securing corporate data, no matter what untimely turn for the worse said data may have taken. Which leads us to the kind of Holy Grail quote we hear more and more often these days: "With this addition, MokaFive offers the only solution that enables companies to manage all of their devices -- from Macs to iPads and iPones -- from a single console."
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 04/17/20125 comments
In recognition of the fact that multi-hypervisor environments are becoming increasingly common, HotLink unveiled HotLink SuperVISOR for VMware 1.5, which provides advanced vCenter features, including live migration of cross-platform workloads via vMotion for Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This move provides users with vCenter capabilities across their virtual environments using their existing VMware management console.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 04/16/20125 comments
Karl Wirth was a man on a mission -- except it was the wrong mission.
Back in September 2010, the co-founder and CEO of Apptegic had a "good" idea for a systems and application-management product based on monitoring and configuring IT environments. That good idea seemed to get even better when Wirth and his co-founder/CTO Greg Hinkle got a couple of big-name companies to sign up as beta customers.
Before long, however, the good idea went bad when
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 04/11/20125 comments
X-IO has a reputation for producing state-of-the-art storage products, and the star of the bunch is its Intelligent Storage Elements (ISE) and architecture, which is a tightly integrated storage environment, purpose-built to maximize performance and reliability.
As X-IO CTO Steve Sicola told me a while back, "We get four times the I/0, we get 1,000 times the reliability over the same group of drives, and we get five nines reliability."
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 04/09/20121 comments
Invincea is a company with a simple idea that it likes to write about with dashing prose.
For example, in his blog, founder and CEO Anup Ghosh refers to 2011 as "the bloodiest year on record for Internet security," adding, "We've allowed ourselves to fall victim to a lost decade in innovation and have become mired in what we call the security insanity cycle."
Ghosh continues, defiant, to decry the utter ineptitude of the prevention security industry, before concluding the first paragraph of his blog with something of a call to arms, declaring in words redolent of the American revolution, "In other words, the white flag has been raised, the network has been ceded, and instead of keeping the intruder off your network -- you must lower the drawbridge, close your eyes, count to 10 and then try to figure out where they [the prevention security industry] have been hiding."
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 04/03/20124 comments
The ambiguous title of this user-friendly book by Larry Loucks is cleverly crafted to pull in the widest possible audience, but muckrakers will be disappointed if they think Critical VMware Mistakes You Should Avoid is about VMware making mistakes. As author and veteran virtualization pro Larry Loucks notes, "This book is all about identifying problem configuration situations on ESX server and helping you avoid common oversights and mistakes regarding ESX configuration."
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 04/02/20121 comments
VMware just released the results of a TechValidate survey of over 1,200 VMware beta customers and partners. The news, as you might expect, is good.
Good means 70 percent of respondents surveyed have downloaded and deployed vSphere 5 -- which has been available for nearly seven months -- and are taking advantage of its nearly 200 new and enhanced capabilities. Good means 82 percent of those respondents have deployed vSphere 5 to virtualize their business critical workloads and apps.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 03/27/20125 comments
It comes as no surprise that with AT&T, cloud services are all about the network. The company provides a wide range of cloud capabilities, including as-a-service offerings.
As VP, As-a-Service Solutions within AT&T Business Solutions, John P. Potter is charged with developing a cloud-based strategy to "pivot and integrate" AT&T capabilities to solutions that are delivered in an as-a-Service model. He is further responsible for building a partner plan that will attract companies and ISVs to develop on AT&T's platform and distribute in a SaaS model. Just in case he gets bored, he is also charged with transforming the operating model that serves as a basis for how AT&T "presents, transacts and delivers" solutions to a more automated, self-service version.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 03/26/20121 comments
Somehow, amidst all the sturm und drang of the cloud cacophony, the impact of cloud on the IT job market has not been a notable topic of discussion, but according to hyperbolic claims made by a new SAP America-sponsored study, cloud is not only a powerful catalyst for job creation, but also has greater potential for employment growth than the Internet did back in its salad days.
The study, entitled "Job Growth in the Forecast: How Cloud Computing is generating New Business Opportunities and Fueling Job Growth in the United States," cites "numerous trends and indicators" (I counted 27 references to market research firms, trade publications and think tanks) to support its claims, noting, for instance, that 11 cloud computing companies added some 80,000 jobs in the U.S. during 2010, and the employment growth rates at these organizations was nearly five times higher than that of the over-all high-tech sector.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 03/21/20124 comments
What is it about grandiose financial success that makes some high-tech entrepreneurs so seemingly well-grounded? You'd think that guys like Unidesk president and CEO Don Bulens and NexGen founder John Spiers, who were major players in companies that sold for ungodly amounts of money (Bulens: EqualLogic, $1.4 billion, Spiers: LeftHand Networks $350 million) would be self-absorbed narcissists with sociopathic leanings. Not the case; they are both nice, unpretentious guys with whom conversation comes easily.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 03/16/20121 comments
XenDesktop is a big and potent package that features hosted shared desktops, VDI desktops, streamed desktops, client virtualization, and application delivery all on one XenDesktop Platinum SKU for $350 per user or device. It's hard to overestimate the competitive and financial importance of this product, which brings in a huge percentage of Citrix's revenue, so the latest version, XenDesktop 5.6, certainly bears a brief examination. Highlights include integrated personalization from the 2011 Ringcube acquisition, and integration with the upcoming release of Microsoft System Center 2012. Another highlight: There is no price hike with v5.6.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 03/13/20122 comments
I get so many press releases describing interesting products that I become frustrated because I can't write about them all. With that in mind, I present -- in very condensed form -- three noteworthy new debuts that came my way in the past week.
Parallels Desktop 7 for Mac: Parallels is an interesting company with solid technology that seems to operate under the covers. Parallels Desktop 7 for Mac is an updated version designed to provide experimental support for Windows 8 Consumer Preview, including simple download and automatic installation of Windows 8 via the Parallels New Virtual Machine Wizard. The update also adds experimental support for OS X Mountain Lion Developer Preview as both a host and guest. Users can safely try Windows 8 Consumer Preview and OS X Mountain Lion in Parallel's Desktop 7 VMs to protect their Macs from potential mishaps or corruption of important files that can occur with previous versions of software.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 03/12/20126 comments