A few months ago Cisco announced that it acquired WhipTail, a flash array manufacturer. The announcement sent shockwaves across the flash industry, and it sent Cisco storage partners NetApp and EMC scrambling to explain the acquisition to their partners and customers. I read so many explanations and so many analyses trying to come to grips with it myself.
I have predicted for a long time now that Cisco would get into the storage business and that EMC will acquire a networking company. Cisco's acquisition of WhipTail looks to be just the start of other acquisitions to follow in the storage space. We'll get into that later, but first, let's look at the WhipTail buy.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 11/04/20131 comments
VMworld 2013 Barcelona was the End-user Computing conference "par excellence" given the quality of the announcements around EUC. VMware announced the acquisition of Desktone as well as new versions of Horizon View and new technologies added to the Horizon Suite.
Let's start with the latter. Most exciting for me is the addition of VMware vCenter Operations Manager (a.k.a. vCOps) to the Horizon Suite at no additional cost. vCOps enables customers to identify bottlenecks in VDI deployments. Customers that are rolling out VDI solutions are always look at monitoring and reporting tools to identify bottlenecks, but many don't always look to vCOps. That VMware added vCOps to the suite solidifies Horizon Suite's value. It's also smart for VMware, which allows it to have vCOps infiltrate the rest of the infrastructure that vCOPS would otherwise not be monitoring. The idea here is, once you start to use it for VDI and you see it's worth, you might be enticed to roll it out to the rest of the environment. I really applaud VMware on this. It's a fair give-and-take proposition.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 10/28/20132 comments
My first gut reaction to the VMware/Desktone acquisition last week was to write some elaborate article, but then I decided to follow some advice from Sir Winston Churchill and "smoke a cigar" before I wrote down my thoughts. I took the time last week to read what other analysts and bloggers said about the acquisition. Oddly enough, I arrived at the same conclusion as I did when I first read the announcement. So, I guess another saying is true--Your first reaction is usually the right one.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 10/21/20136 comments
The industry has been focused on how to develop a strategy for the enterprise that can manage the user experience across diverse devices. The thing is, the focus has been on how to deliver these resources regardless of the form factor that you are using. Citrix has been working on what's called Project Crystal Palace, which focuses on how to integrate the user experience across these devices.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 10/15/20132 comments
Microsoft Hyper-V users have come to appreciate the value of Hyper-V replicas. When configuring Hyper-V replicas you have two choices: Configure a centralized storage location where your VMs will be replicated, or configure a separate location for each primary server's VM replica.
In some instances, you might find it beneficial or even necessary to replicate certain VMs to a location other than the default location. To accomplish this task, you have two options. You can, of course, replicate the VM to the default location and then simply move that VM from one storage location to another. Doing so will consume a significant amount of time depending on your network connectivity and the size of the VM, but it's definitely a viable option.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 09/30/20130 comments
I am very fond of transparent technology, which offer significant value but are very much non-intrusive on the platform. PernixData fits this exclusive class of products. Actually, I have a tech crush on PernixData which is what prompted me to recommend them for the Best of Breed awards at VMworld 2013.
Pernix means "agile" and while it makes sense for what they are trying to do, I think they could have done better on the name.Once you get over its not very catchy name, the solution is truly awesome. What PernixData does in a nutshell is aggregate flash or SSD from local hosts and enables server-side caching from them, which can significantly enhance storage performance for all applications in general. It's especially useful for tier-1 applications like VDI, running Exchange or SQL Server, and so on.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 09/23/20132 comments
At VMworld 2013, Teradici announced that its flagship protocol PCoIP is now capable of adding priority tags into the UDP packets. What's important here is that we can now prioritize and classify the PCoIP traffic on the network, which improves the user experience. Up until this announcement the PCoIP protocol was an encrypted and compressed protocol, which made it impossible to optimize with any WAN acceleration products. Such a limitation has historically put PCoIP at a disadvantage, especially when organizations are looking at delivering different types of media over the WAN.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 09/16/20130 comments
In our continued coverage of VMworld 2013 and vSphere 5.5, let me highlight a feature that has not been in the limelight as much as we might think. That feature is application high availability. Ask any VMware administrator the first feature they'd configure I am willing to bet it would be HA. HA allows the vSphere platform to monitor virtual machines and in the event that a "heartbeat" is not detected by VMware Tools or if I/O activity is not detected, the platform deems the VM as a failed one and attempts to restart it on an alternative host.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 09/09/20132 comments
VMware's 10th annual VMworld conference last week lived up to the hype and anticipation -- a formidable show. While the announcements were great, what intrigued me more was the number of new companies that came out of stealth mode and the number of companies with newer and improved versions of their products. We will most definitely spend time in the coming weeks discussing the many announcements and also talking about new and emerging technologies and everything we learned at VMworld.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 09/04/20131 comments
While I understand starting this blog with a controversial title will draw more traffic to BrianMadden.com and that is essential to his business, what he's saying there is harmful for his brand and his credibility. Brian Madden accuses VMware of tricking customers into using Horizon View instead of RDSH.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 08/19/20131 comments
There is so much to cover that I am expecting this year's VMworld to have some juicy announcements. VMware is involved on so many fronts with announcements expected in force around the hybrid cloud, software-defined networking/storage/datacenter and end-user computing. Of course the show would not be complete this year without some kind of announcement on new versions of current products with vSphere.next being the front and center product that everyone is looking forward to hearing about.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 08/12/20132 comments
At VMworld 2013, the crowded exhibit floor will have vendors hawking their wares like carnival barkers. But where should you go? Who should you vist? There are so many vendors, there is so much going on that what I see most people doing is going from booth to booth collecting as many gadgets and t-shirts as they can get their hands on.
But, really, folks! You are there to learn, explore and uncover new technologies, but with all that clutter how do you identify and plan your attack on the Solutions Expo?
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 08/07/20133 comments