Acronis knows that no admin ever got fired for buying software that beefs up backup and recovery capabilities for vSphere, so the company unveiled Acronis vmProtect 7, which improves on v6 by offering new management options, VM replication and support for Exchange. V7 also integrates with vCenter, another wise move that gives admins the proverbial one pane of glass from which to conduct business.
Acronis vmProtect 7 -- which is a free upgrade for v6 users who bought the product with maintenance -- offers advanced replication capability with failover and failback, along with the ability to run a VM directly from its backup, significantly improving recovery times.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 03/06/20125 comments
Things just seem to keep getting better and better for Hyper-V, which is basking in the glow of the Windows 8 Beta release, while it continues to find support in more and more products. A good example of this growing acceptance is the recent announcement from Veeam that it is extending support for Windows Server Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server to include Veeam One, its SMB virtualization management offering.
Veeam One is targeted at IT pros in SMBs who are forced to deal with tight budgets and limited personnel resources. Veeam One with Hyper-V provides real-time monitoring, efficient resource allocation, virtual infrastructure documentation, and management reporting for performance, utilization and workload.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 03/05/20120 comments
Wyse is a savvy and increasingly ambitious technology company that is looking to continue growing by staying on top of the rapidly changing virtualization and cloud market via partnerships with leading vendors such as Citrix, Cisco and IBM, while offering a host of management-related products that position the company as a major player.
Wyse announced this week that it has upped its ante with a major commitment to the consumerization of IT by unveiling its entry into the SaaS market via Project Stratus, which is expected to debut during the middle part of this year. In a nutshell , Project Stratus -- which was in part empowered by Wyse's purchase of mobile device management vendor Trellia late in 2011 -- will reportedly enable IT to manage all of the devices within an enterprise, whether they were purchased by the company, by employees, or in any other fashion.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 02/29/20123 comments
Enterprises are increasingly leveraging innovations external to their traditional comfort zones, which is leading them to reduce their internal infrastructure investments, cut back on internal operations and slash their ownership of assets.
In fact, according to a survey by Forrester Research conducted for IronKey, lowering IT operations costs and increasing resources to drive business innovations are the top two enterprise IT initiatives for 2012. Forrester backs that up by claiming 72 percent of IT decision-makers are planning to lower their IT operations budgets in 2012, and 69 percent say they will increase IT capacity or resources to support business innovations.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 02/27/20121 comments
I have been following a Linkedin conversation based on the questions, "When choosing a cloud platform, is the virtualization platform a major decision point? Statistically, how many folks would love to be on the cloud with or without virtualization?" The responses to these questions help to clarify the relationship between virtualization and the cloud, which has been discussed a lot without any absolute conclusions. Following are some of the comments from members of the Linkedin Cloud Computing, SaaS and Virtualization Group:
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 02/22/20122 comments
As they always do, Chris Wolf's cutting-room-floor comments from our recent interview about VDI went over big with readers, so I am offering more of his views and opinions below.
Today's topic is Citrix, and he begins by responding to my question about the company being well placed with both their hosted server desktop and VDI strategies.
“Yes, I mean they're number one right now in terms of market share by our numbers. They're making all the right moves. I do think that when you look at features specifically like IntelliCache, they're really important to customers and IntelliCache has been one of the drivers behind their really big upswing in terms of XenServer getting in the data center behind XenDesktop workloads. So IntelliCache is one reason, and cost is the other. If you look at the vSphere 5 licensing, for example, it's a subscription license that's $60 per user per year for vSphere to sit behind XenDesktop.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 02/17/20122 comments
The day one general session keynote at VMware Partner Exchange 2012 started out sounding like a presentation to partners given by VMware senior VP of global channels and alliances Scott Aronson, but ended up sounding like the keynote at a VMworld show with heavy hitters CEO Paul Maritz and CTO Stephen Herrod laying down serious discussions of upcoming technology and strategy.
Aronson switched back and forth between praising his partner audience for their copious contributions to VMware's ever-expanding bottom line and ominously suggesting that they do more. Referring to the company's 2011 revenues of $3.77 billion, he said, "You guys are eighty-five percent of this revenue," adding "This is a great jumping off point for the future."
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 02/14/20122 comments
Invariably, when I interview Gartner guru Chris Wolf, as I did recently for my upcoming VDI cover story, I end up with reams of great material that ends up on the cutting room floor, as it were. Chris's comments are just too good not to be used, so I am going to periodically pull out passages from his comments and post them in this blog.
This first one below is about the management challenges facing VDI users and how some innovative companies are overcoming those challenges--while some large storage vendors are doing their best to stand in the way, to the detriment of users.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 02/08/20121 comments
VMware has made cloud service providers a mainstay of its cloud commitment since day one, and the introduction of VMware vCloud Integration Manager represents a further solidification of that target group by making it easier and less expensive for them to automate the delivery of private clouds based on VMware vCloud Director.
The company also said it has now nearly tripled to nearly 90 its base of global service provider partners that comply with the criteria that qualifies them as "VMware vCloud Powered." That program requires VMware Service Provider Program partners to offer services based on vSphere and vCloud Director while "exposing the vCloud API and supporting the Open Virtualization Format (OVF)."
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 02/03/20122 comments
Via its ILIO product, Atlantis Computing initially made a name for itself by slashing I/Ops ten-fold--dramatically decreasing the need for expensive SAN storage--reducing client boot times from an average of 126 seconds to 24 seconds, and de-duplicating storage, enabling the creation of persistent clients that used no more storage than their non-persistent counterparts.
Now, with the recent introduction of Atlantis ILIO Diskless VDI, the company seems within reach of the Holy Grail of VDI: the elimination of all storage-related CAPEX and OPEX, and a further decrease in desktop boot times to 12 seconds. The new product is also said to be the first solution to eliminate storage for Citrix and VMware virtual desktop images.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 02/01/20129 comments
According to the 2012-2011 Annual Salary Survey by Dice.com, on average, if you are skilled in Azure, you can make the big bucks--$102,510 per annum, to be exact. Given Microsoft's claims that there are tens of thousands of Azure installations around the world, and in light of recent rumblings about the increasingly powerful position of PaaS, this doesn't come as a huge surprise. What does come as a bit of a surprise is the Dice.com finding that Azure's reportedly red-hot cousin Hyper-V is at the bottom of the barrel, paying a paltry $81,701 to its technical practitioners.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 01/30/20121 comments
I've been wondering how things were going for cloud storage company Nasuni and its CEO Andres Rodriguez, so it was nice to see they had good financial fortune in 2011 even if they have joined Veeam among the dubious ranks of quasi-public companies that produce ersatz financial statements that substitute "bookings" for revenues.
For what it's worth, Nasuni says it increased bookings more than tenfold and doubled its number of enterprise customers. Beyond that, the company tripled the number of upgrades from existing customers and grew its international business tenfold--honest.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 01/25/20123 comments
Like most storage makers, Virsto denounces the pernicious effects of storage, which is sort of like the president of the United States saying he hates the Federal government. Of course, the demonizing part is cathartic because once the air is cleared on this matter, smart people like Virsto CEO Mark Davis can step up and offer their storage products that are designed to simplify and optimize virtual environments.
Virsto says it is the first storage software company to offer storage hypervisors, and what they have to say about them is very similar to what competitors like DataCore have to say, which is that storage hypervisors improve the utilization of hardware capacity and drive down the costs of application deployment while providing greater business agility.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 01/23/20122 comments
Unidesk CEO Don Bulens offers an interesting perspective on the roles of CIOs and IT pros such as DBAs and application developers, when it comes to who are the real IT movers and shakers.
His logical assessment is that because DBAs and application developers are in the day-to-day trenches, they are the power wielders. One of the things that frustrates Bulens is the focus on what CIOs say, because he believes the truth about what causes IT problems can often be found by talking to the operators of infrastructure and applications. It's why many technologies have their breakthroughs with the people who manage that particular function.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 01/18/20121 comments
There are a couple of mobile virtualization developments to report. First, LG is using CES 2012 as a soapbox to demonstrate VMware virtual Android machines running on a Verizon Revolution, thus creating a personal phone that individual users manage, plus a work phone that their employers control. The word from CES is that Verizon and Telefonica will be introducing this bifurcated mobile phone sometime in the “coming months,” but at this point it is still in proof of concept stage.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 01/10/20121 comments