It's hard telling just how many PaaS vendors there are out there. I found one list that includes 20, so that's a starting point. Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Service Elastic Beanstock, Google Apps, and Force.com PaaS from Salesforce.com are all, of course, prominent players.
Currently, when People think about PaaS, they associate it with the Web development community, but Lucas Carlson, founder and CEO of AppFog has a much grander view of PaaS and its role in the cloud. In his vision, PaaS provides the last mile to the cloud, and will expand the cloud's presence by bringing many more developers to it, while promoting SaaS and IaaS opportunities.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 01/06/20125 comments
I like keeping up on users, so when this case study from Avere Systems popped up, I was intrigued because it described a straight-forward solution to a vexing problem that more than one VDI system has encountered.
It all starts with the Belchertown School district in Massachusetts, which thought it was making all the right moves. Its IT team put together a system based on five Cisco UCS systems running VMware View connected to 10 data stores hosted on a NetApp FAS2020, and supporting one-terabyte volumes, with a 20 percent snapshot reserve. Most VMDK files are held to 40GB and are typically linked clones from one of a few golden master images.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 01/04/20123 comments
The Virtual Geek is an EMC blog written by a funny guy who is coincidentally known as the Virtual Geek.
His Official Unofficial VMware Storage Survey Results came out last week, and there are, as they say, some interesting data points here that dovetail with my "vSphere 5: Slow to Roll? blog, which also posted last week. In it, I asked the question, "Could it be that we are underestimating the rigors of implementing vSphere 5?"
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 12/20/20113 comments
Now that Veeam has announced that its Backup & Replication v6 product provides native support for Hyper-V, the company is looking to ingratiate itself with IT pros who have Microsoft certifications, and expand sales by offering them free software licenses for demo use in home labs. Veeam did the same thing last year for VMware-certified pros.
Overall, these free, not-for-resale, two-socket software licenses are now available to VMware vExperts, VMware Certified Professionals, VMware Certified Instructors, VMUG members, Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals, and Microsoft Certified Professionals.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 12/15/20114 comments
I realize that I recently blogged on the results of a survey from Nasuni about cloud-based data security, but I thought readers would be interested in the company's latest research findings, which are based on the results of an ongoing 26-month stress test of 16 major cloud storage providers (CSP).
According to Nasuni--which uses raw cloud storage from these companies--only six of the 16 CSPs passed the test, meaning they provided the "minimum level of performance, stability, availability and scalability that organizations need to take advantage of the cloud for primary storage, data protection and disaster recovery." The six with passing grades are Amazon S3, AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service (powered by EMC Atmos), Microsoft Windows Azure, Nirvanix, Peer 1 Hosting (also powered by EMC Atmos), and Rackspace Cloud.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 12/13/20114 comments
Could it be that we are underestimating the rigors of implementing vSphere 5? I ask that because during a briefing I had with vKernel this week, when I asked Product Marketing Manager Alex Rosemblat what he was hearing about vSphere 5 migrations, he replied, "We have very few customers who are using it extensively yet." This, from a guy whose company sells heavily into dedicated VMware environments.
I'm not implying that there are serious hidden problems here. After all, vSphere 5 officially hit the streets in late August, only some three months ago, but it just seems a little odd that Rosemblat hasn't felt a stronger product pulse for the latest and greatest iteration of VMware's primo virtualization environment. He did say that some users were doing pilots, so maybe IT organizations are making sure they've got vSphere 5 down pat via a proof-of-concept approach before they mount a serious migration.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 12/08/20114 comments
iWave Software offers an alternative to users who want to develop their own cloud-based storage services as opposed to hiring a service provider for the task. In addition to giving companies the comfort of knowing they have architected their own, on-demand, cloud storage solutions, iWave Storage Director 1.5 adheres to the immutable rule that states "Thou shalt not displace legacy storage infrastructures."
Storage Director 1.5 caters to budget-sensitive customers by automating the tasks associated with provisioning, reclamation and remediation for storage. In addition, it enables storage admins to push the self-service button, which enables them to automate storage services in private storage cloud environments that are available to storage consumers. In this way, admins are able to cost-efficiently leverage unified workflows across vendor products and within organizationally defined policies for regulatory compliance. Bottom line: Fewer admins are required, and those who remain can focus on other, more core-competency-related tasks.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 12/06/20112 comments
Gone are the days of DR tests being done every--say, three months, no make that every six months, no maybe once a year--but it costs so darned much and takes so long, let's just blow it off. Well, those days aren't gone for everybody. In fact, as far as we can tell, they are only gone for customers of VirtualSharp, which assessed the sorry state of DR testing and came up with a product--ReliableDR 3.0 in its latest incarnation--that handles the entire test process, end to end, automatically. No muss, no fuss.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 12/01/20110 comments
Cloud storage provider Nasuni is fighting the good fight when it comes to selling cloud storage. As everybody knows, a lot of users are still hesitating to move their data offsite and onto the cloud, but it does happen, or CloudSwitch would have not been acquired by Verizon.
In a recent study conducted by Nasuni of 451 IT decision makers at North American enterprises, respondents echoed the concerns that many companies have stressed, e.g. 81 percent of respondents are concerned about data security in the cloud, while 48 percent were concerned about the level of control over cloud-based data storage. Going on, the survey revealed that only 43 percent of respondents have plans to store their data in the cloud over the next year.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 11/29/20111 comments
This year at Thanksgiving, I am thankful for many things, professional and personal. Professionally, I am thankful for:
My job: I have a great job that is very interesting and satisfying. There are a lot of people living in this country who are unemployed and suffering. A job is a precious thing.
My boss: Doug Barney, our group VP, conceived of Virtualization Review during a series of lunch meetings and briefings. Then he hired me, told me what to do, and left me alone to do it. He's there if I need him, which is nice. A good boss is also a precious thing.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 11/17/20112 comments
SunGard Availability Services rolled out its Managed Recovery Plan designed to help large enterprises focus on primary production operations as opposed to optimizing application recovery. This Recovery-as-a-Service offering, which serves both physical and virtual environments, can be hosted from various locations and relies on a relationship between a remote SunGard recovery expert and the customer's IT operations.
The "recipe for recovery," as SunGard puts it, goes beyond support for x86 systems and cloud-based applications to also include mainframes, Solaris and other technologies. "With this service, SunGard experts manage the entire recovery lifecycle for organizations, helping lower the cost, burden and risk in the recovery process," the company said.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 11/15/20111 comments
NexGen Storage has come out of stealth mode with a mid-range SAN it built from the ground up to solve the shared storage mess and unleash the full power of virtualization. The NexGen n5 Storage System uses off-the-shelf hardware to achieve VM density resulting in what the new company claims to be up to 90 percent storage operating expense reduction.
The secret sauce, of course, is not in the hardware. "It's all about the software we load on it," says NexGen CEO and cofounder John Spiers. Spiers has been around the start-up block before, with fellow Lefthand Networks cofounder, and now NexGen cofounder and CTO Kelly Long. Together, they sold Lefthand to HP for a cool $360,000,000 in 2008. It may not be the $1.4 billion Dell dished out for Equalogic, but it's still a decent payday.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 11/08/20110 comments
It would seem that hypervisor users are a restless bunch if you believe Veeam's quarterly V-Index tracking system, which claims that that 38 percent of enterprises using server virtualization, and 34 percent of those using desktop virtualization, have indicated they will change their primary hypervisors in the next 12 months,
Veeam claims the main concerns driving this potential hypervisor infidelity are rising costs, increasingly complex licensing models, and the improved features and maturity that other hypervisors now offer.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 11/03/20112 comments
Enhanced I/O has become something of a Holy Grail among vendors who are attempting to sell products that optimize virtualization and cloud environments, and users, who are fuming over low sub-par network performance penalties. Enter Diskeeper, with its V-locity 3 Virtual Platform Disk Optimizer, and "invisible background optimization."
Diskeeper portrays itself as a "virtual doctor" that alleviates latency pains induced by constricted I/O bottlenecks, sluggish VMs, laggardly migration, resource conflicts, unfulfilled storage capacity, and woefully slow backup speeds.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 11/01/20115 comments
As the very cool infographic timeline details, application delivery controller company F5 Networks has exceeded $1 billion in revenue for its 2011 fiscal year. The company said it earned $314.6 million during Q4, which was a hike of eight percent over the $290.7 million* in the previous quarter, and 24 percent over the $254.3 reported during Q4 of fiscal year 2010. Overall for fiscal year 2011, revenue jumped to $1.15 billion, an increase of 31 percent from $882 million in fiscal year 2010.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/27/20110 comments