Enterprise IT undergoes an evolutionary phase every 20 years or so. IT research firm IDC labels these evolutionary phases as platforms. IDC identifies the first platform as the mainframe, the second as client/server and the third as the cloud. While every evolution diminishes the importance and reliance on its predecessor, no platform has yet to completely replace another. To this day, IBM makes significant money with its AS/400 mainframe.
More
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 02/24/20140 comments
Cloning a virtual machine while it is running is a very handy feature that I have personally used on numerous occasions, especially to test upgrade versions of a production virtual machine.
Sure, there are other ways of testing software, but in my meticulous approach, I always like to test against as close to the real thing as possible. There are other use cases for cloning a virtual machine without powering it off; I just gave you one that I have used in the past.
More
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 02/18/20140 comments
I don't think there is a more appropriate title to describe Citrix's announcement of the re-introduction of XenApp, just a few months after it was abolished. I could have used a phrase from the great Toni Stark: "Never has a greater phoenix metaphor been personified in human history." That's a bit much for a piece of software, no matter how much I like it.
More
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 02/03/20140 comments
Let's face it, the hypervisor wars are over. VMware clearly dominates the market and Microsoft is closing the gap with every release of Hyper-V, but the focus right now is no longer on the hypervisor.
We have reached a point where no single hypervisor will reign supreme in any organization. Furthermore, I believe that VMware will come under increased pressure from Citrix, Red Hat and other contenders. What we are beginning to witness in the enterprise is the compartmentalization or classification of hypervisors based on a workload perspective.
More
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 01/22/20140 comments
I'm a fan of VMware, but I must confess that I have been frustrated with their End-User Computing strategy and execution. The only moves I see VMware making in this space are either the wrong ones or "not enough" ones. VMware has hired away a ton of Citrix employees and executives to tighten up the EUC offerings. Having the right team is crucial, but it is far from being enough and far from being drastically effective if the technology they will be in charge of is limited.
More
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 01/13/20140 comments
Service packs are usually a collection of hot fixes, and we typically don't see a lot of user interface changes with them. That's not the case with Microsoft's latest App-V 5 SP2.
When you install the client you will find that the UI has totally disappeared. Even the icon that traditionally showed up on the System Tray is gone, and there's nothing on the Start menu. The idea behind this UI change is to make App-V very transparent, and centrally configured and managed using group policy. In my book that is a very welcome step--technology should be as transparent as possible.
More
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 01/07/20140 comments
So, last time, we talked about security. I had some great feedback from you. This time, let's talk about some of my other predictions at length: flash storage, DaaS, desktop virtualization, big data, and how the role of IT will start to make significant changes.
Flash Arrays
The storage industry will wrestle with all flash arrays in 2014 with new players like Cisco entering the market and existing players introducing or improving their all-flash arrays. There is room for consolidation here, so I expect to see HP in particular make an acquisition. When the dust settles, hybrid arrays will be the winners but all-flash technologies will dominate the storage world.
More
Posted on 12/17/20130 comments
"Everything is achievable through technology: better living, robust health, and for the first time in human history, the possibility of world peace." That's a quote from Howard Stark, the father of IronMan, in the movie. The quote came to mind as I was writing this column, and except for the world peace part, what he says is relevant to technology and to what I see coming in 2014: big data analytics, mobile, cloud, social, and, of course, security.
More
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 12/16/20130 comments
As we wind down 2013, I began thinking about the 2014 predictions that I usually make sometime in December. But Virtualization Review asked me to write a predictions column for the printed edition, which accelerated the process this year. While my predictions in the print edition are a subset of what I will be blogging about online, one prediction stands out from the rest for 2014 and I am betting it will dominate--and in fact, lead--the IT conversation.
More
Posted on 12/02/20130 comments
Our industry will latch on to something and use marketing tactics to try and establish a trend, gain mind share and ultimately sell products that the consumer does not always need as badly as advertised. It's not a bad thing, it's how the market works. After all, companies are in the business to make a profit. That's where analysts like me come in, to dissect some of this hype and present you with the facts.
So, the only word I could find to properly describe the craziness that is surrounding all-flash arrays and the amount of hype around it is "epidemic."
More
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 11/20/20130 comments
A little over three years ago, I made an insane prediction. I said that enterprise IT will be out of the business of owning and operating physical infrastructure and out of the data center business in five to ten years. I was ridiculed for being unrealistic and not in tune with the market. I made these predictions when cloud was just a buzz word with no real definition or application.
Fast forward to today and you find that anywhere from 15 to 25 percent of workloads are in the cloud already, whether that is e-mail, unified communications, CRM, ERP. The list of workloads that are already there is long and distinguished. It took three years to get this far, and I think in the next two years we'll see much faster adoption with rapid cloud deployments, especially as we start to address business topics that were a hassle in the past, such as disaster recovery.
More
Posted on 11/13/20131 comments