Today, we have a success story to report. Verizon, which previously bought global services provider Terremark for $1.4 billion, acquired CloudSwitch, a venture-backed start-up that enables companies to securely move applications or workloads between company datacenters and the cloud without changing the application or the infrastructure layer.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, so CloudSwitch co-founder and VP of Products Ellen Rubin wouldn't tell me how much she was making, other to say with an enigmatic smile, "I'm happy."
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 08/31/20110 comments
I'm running around at VMware with a meeting calendar for which I can only blame myself for the overbookings. In my haste, here are a few notes on what has gone down here at VMworld on the first day:
* VMware CEO Paul Maritz in his Tuesday keynote cited an IDC report that saw virtualized servers outnumber physical ones. It's research that seems a bit to obvious, since virtual server installations have topped physical deployments as of IDC's 2010 research on the matter.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 08/30/20115 comments
By combining new and existing products in a package designed to facilitate customers using 5,600 VMware service providers in 62 countries, VMware is emphasizing its drive to the enterprise hybrid cloud. In so doing, The company is offering its vCloud customers a myriad of cloud services based on VMware cloud infrastructures that are compatible with any virtualized VMware data center.
The first component of the new package is Global Connect, which provides a single global cloud built on VMware vCloud Datacenter Services introduced in August 2010. vCloud Datacenter Services are enterprise-class public clouds based on VMware cloud infrastructure, including vSphere, vShield and vCloud Director. VMware says a network of service providers is slated to span 25 datacenters in 13 countries by year-end 2011. Bluelock, Colt, SingTel and Softbank have been announced as the first partners to offer Global Connect services.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 08/29/20112 comments
The suspense, such as it was, is over. VMware announced GA of vSphere 5.
VMware was also kind enough to modestly remind us that vSphere 5 offers some 200 new and improved capabilities to help customers "transform IT by driving greater efficiency from existing investments and improving operational ability."
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 08/26/20111 comments
A year after claiming that its "integrated and expansive virtualization portfolio is far superior to the 'point' solution offered by VMware," Oracle teed up the market leader for another shot, saying that its newly introduced Oracle VM 3.0 delivers four times better scalability that VMware "at a fraction of the cost." Oracle 3.0 is the latest release of the company's server virtualization and management product.
Oracle claims to provide full stack support for virtualization from application to disk, and for cloud computing needs.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 08/25/20113 comments
In my "Automation as Manna" blog post in June, I criticized the "scare tactics" used in a survey sponsored by automation software vendor UC4, which claimed in so many words that unless IT shops automate their operations, they will not be able to initiate their cloud plans.
Now CA Technologies has sponsored another pro IT automation survey casting aspersions on virtualization and cloud computing for their failure to meet user expectations due to their lack of automation. The survey, conducted among 460 mid- and senior-level IT decision-makers by UBM TechWeb, reports that "although most organizations have implemented virtualization and are prepping for cloud computing, many of them have yet to realize the benefits that drew them to the technologies in the first place."
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 08/23/20114 comments
VMware is understandably anxious to prove that cloud users actually exist and are not, as VMware Senior Director of Cloud Services Mathew Lodge blogs, “a figment of a fevered imagination.” Toward that end, Lodge has posted the details on six VMworld Cloud Infrastructure and Management sessions where the reclusive and elusive cloud user can be found and observed.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 08/18/20111 comments
At a time when Microsoft and VMware are in the early stages of providing cross-platform manageability, the newly debuted HotLink, via its SuperVISOR technology is enabling vCenter to natively manage Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The secret sauce for HotLink is its ability to "decouple management consoles from the underlying virtual infrastructure and enable native interoperability of hypervisors."
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 08/16/20117 comments
In keeping with this week's theme of posting interview outtakes that would have otherwise ended up on the proverbial cutting room floor, I offer the following quotes from Mark Bowker, senior analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group:
"There's no doubt that VMware's making significant efforts to help customers move beyond cost and containment investment."
"In the long run, it shouldn't matter whether a service provider is running VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, KVM, XenServer or some other Xen product. An IT organization is essentially paying for an SLA. They just want to know that their application's running there, is available at this point and has this type of security around it. What hypervisor it's running in the long term shouldn't matter."
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 08/11/20116 comments
In the course of researching and writing my upcoming Aug-Sept. VMware cover story for our print magazine, I ran into the usual problem of not being able to use all of the good information I gathered. That being the case, today I am focusing on comments made to me by Raghu Raghuram, VMware vice president and general manager of Virtualization and Cloud Platforms.
The thing I like about Raghuram is that he is willing, however occasionally, to admit that VMware could have done better in certain situations. For instance, when I asked him what kind of requests, complaints and feedback the company has received from its large ecosystem of third-party technology and channel partners, he starts by citing three areas where VM had not done its best work with technology partners.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 08/09/20117 comments
Saying "Our primary objective is to do right by our customers," VMware announced three major changes to its controversial new vSphere 5 pricing scheme, which was based on the amount of vRAM configured to VMs.
In his blog, Bogomil Balkansky, VP of Product Marketing for Virtualization and Cloud Platforms, recounted how the initial licensing changes were created in order to "align costs with the benefits of virtualization rather than with the physical attributes of each individual customer," adding that the changes generated a great deal of conversation in the blogosphere, and led to a "ton of feedback."
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 08/04/20112 comments
Simon Bramfitt, founder and principal analyst for Entelechy Associates LLC, has a restless mind, so he spent a few months talking to engineers and architects from some 194 different companies--in 16 countries, no less--who are responsible for a grand total of 1.4 million endpoints. Wisely, before he forgets any of the high points, he is gathering up all that data with the goal of putting it into a report he expects to release in August.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 08/02/20111 comments
Datacore wants to save you money and make your life less complex, and they want to do it with auto-tiering, which, when added to Datacore's SANsymphony-V storage virtualization software, allows enterprises to make sure their most critical data is stored in high-performing resources such as SSDs, while less important data is kept on less expensive disks.
The money-saving part comes into play when users go shopping for vendors and systems, because even if disparate systems don't support auto-tiering, and even if their data hasn't been stored previously, they can be integrated into intelligent storage infrastructures, eliminating vendor lockin.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 07/28/20112 comments
The ever-helpful Veeam loves a good survey and it recently took the wraps off V-Index, which will consist of quarterly reports on the virtualization penetration rate in the U.K., France, Germany and the U.S. The first V-Index offering reports that the current average V-Index Penetration Rate is 39.4 percent, which means that 39.4 percent of all servers within the 544 large enterprises surveyed were virtual. Of the 544 companies, 500--91.9 percent--were using virtualization.
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 07/26/20116 comments
OpenStack turns one today, and some 350 supporters from all over Europe--including Hungary, Norway, France, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, and more--recently celebrated the occasion at EMEA OpenStack Day in London.
According to Lauren Sell, who runs PR for OpenStack, the meeting was something of a voyage of discovery. "Since it's an open source project, we never know who exactly is deploying the code, unless they are also Rackspace customers, or have been vocal in the community," she says. "At the event, we were able to meet organizations like Eduserv, a non-profit that is using OpenStack to deliver cloud infrastructure to universities in the UK."
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Posted by Bruce Hoard on 07/19/20111 comments