I have always maintained that the cloud will arrive in bits and pieces, not in a single large chunk. The shift to cloud computing will be slow and selective instead of a complete rip and replace where you migrate everything to the cloud as if you're building a brand new datacenter for your enterprise.
More
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 06/03/20140 comments
I have, on several occasions advocated that Citrix should buy Rackspace, most recently here in my InformationWeek blog and some time before that, I suggested that Cisco should buy both Citrix and Rackspace here in my Virtual Insider blog.
More
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 05/22/20140 comments
Last week at TechEd 2014, Microsoft released Azure RemoteApp. While speculation was floating for months whether Microsoft would venture into the desktop as a service space with what was internally known as "Project Mohoro," instead Microsoft dodged that bullet and released what is essentially a SaaSified version of its Remote Desktop Session Host platform.
More
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 05/19/20140 comments
Citrix proved at Synergy 2014 last week that mobility and end user computing is at its core DNA and that the company is still able to innovate and think outside the box. I was completely surprised when it announced Citrix Workspace Services. It is not even beta yet, but what Citrix previewed was really cool and very telling as far as where the company will take its flagship products and how it intends to compete in the future.
More
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 05/12/20140 comments
Next week will be an interesting week as I bounce between Citrix Synergy in Anaheim and EMC World in Las Vegas.
For those of you attending EMC World, without a doubt "Project liberty" without a doubt will steal the show. Projectd Liberty is EMC's first foray into software-defined storage. I am very excited about it and you'll find me hovering around "Area 52," the code name for the location where Project Liberty will be featured.
More
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 04/30/20140 comments
In a data-driven culture, the potential for maximizing business profitability by leveraging Big Data represents a great opportunity. But, it has been hyped and rumored that in order to manipulate this Big Data and be able to visualize it and drive the benefits from it, enterprises have to hire a new breed of specialists that scarcely exists today: data scientists.
More
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 04/21/20140 comments
One of my favorite comic book series is "The Adventures of Asterix." In it, the fearless Gauls who resisted Julius Caesar's Roman Empire had but one fear in life, that the sky would fall on their heads tomorrow.
Last week, Brian Madden's post, "Cloud platforms diminish Citrix XenDesktop/XenApp's value. *This* is the opportunity for VMware!" essentially implied that the sky was falling on Citrix's head tomorrow and that VMware is on the verge of achieving "Plato's Republic" in terms of tight integration among its current and acquired products, remarkable automation and orchestration, perfect agility and mobility between cloud and on premise cloud-like deployments, exemplary and complete feature set across the portfolio.
More
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 04/08/20140 comments
Hyper-V R3 has two advanced but somewhat overlooked networking features that can be handy and I'm sure administrators would appreciate them and put them to good use, so we'll cover them here.
You've worked in the enterprise long enough, so you've come across rogue DHCP servers and routers that show up on the network and could cause headaches. Many years ago before virtualization and even VMware, I had to deal with these types of problems, especially with physical developer workstations acting as DHCP servers (among other things) that our friendly developer colleagues innocently believed weren't a big deal. Back then tracking down these machines that were offering these services was not as easy or simple. Sure, there are ways of configuring the switches and routers to handle this issue, but this is only aspect of it -- we still need to get to them and turn them off. In later years, software was available to help track them down.
More
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 04/02/20140 comments
Mobile devices are infiltrating our lives and changing our every behavior and habit-- from the way we shop, to the way we learn and even the way we make decisions. So, IT professionals are expected to gravitate and welcome mobile applications that allow them to perform certain aspects of their jobs on the go.
More
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 03/31/20140 comments
I have yet to come across an enterprise that has used application monitoring in any proactive way. In most cases, admins use systems that use a red light or show an up/down symptom indicator, and look for before they take any kind of action. In essence, we acquired the software but only scratched the surface of most application monitoring software capabilities. More often than not, we never fully configured those tools.
More
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 03/26/20140 comments
Citrix Synergy 2014 is in Los Angeles in a few weeks, and Citrix has released the session catalog online. I took a good look inside and here are my recommended sessions, hand-picked to help you navigate the sea of information that typically are presented at these conferences.
More
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 03/12/20140 comments
The barrier to mass cloud adoption by enterprises is realistically two-fold. First, the amount of data that is stored on premise would take an exorbitant amount of time to move to the cloud and would in many cases not be financially beneficial. (we're not even mentioning security and privacy concerns about data and a whole slew of other things). The second thing is, even if we move all the data into the cloud, the communications link would dictate that the compute (VMs) be as close as possible to this data, because most enterprise applications and databases are latency-sensitive. This would suggest that you now need to move your compute and your storage to the same provider, and that leads to vendor lock-in.
More
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 03/10/20140 comments