Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO ANYTHING. WITHIN 2 SECONDS YOU WILL BE REDIRECTED TO THE NEW HOME OF AVASTU BLOG. PLEASE DO UPDATE AVASTU BLOG'S URL to : http://www.ideationcloud.com on your website. I will send out emails personally to those who are using my link(s) on their sites. Thanks much for your co-operation and hope you enjoy the new site and its cool new features :-) Not like the site is unlive or something..on the contrary, its beginning to get a lot of attention already. Well most of the work is done, you don't have to worry about anything though: What won't change Links/Referrals: I will be redirecting the links (all links which you may have cross-posted) to IdeationCloud.com - so you don't have to do anything in all your posts and links . Although, I would urge however that you do change the permalinks, especially on your blogs etc yourself This blog is not going away anywhere but within a few months, I will consider discontinuing its usage. I won't obviou...

My upcoming article, part - 3 data center predictions for 2009, has a slideshot talking about the transition from the current age to the cloud computing age to eventually the ideation age- the age where you will have clouds that will emote but they will have no internal employees. Biggest management disasters occur because internal folks are making a mess of the playground. Om's blog is carrying an article about Cloud security and it is rather direct but also makes a lot of sense: I don’t believe that clouds themselves will cause the security breaches and data theft they anticipate; in many ways, clouds will result in better security. Here’s why: Fewer humans – Most computer breaches are the result of human error ; only 20-40 percent stem from technical malfunctions. Cloud operators that want to be profitable take humans out of the loop whenever possible. Better tools – Clouds can afford high-end data protection and security monitoring tools, as well as the experts to run them...

Virtuozzo's main differentiators versus hypervisors center on overhead, virtualization flexibility, administration and cost. Virtuozzo requires significantly less overhead than hypervisor solutions, generally in the range of 1% to 5% compared with 7% to 25% for most hypervisors, leaving more of the system available to run user workloads. Customers can also virtualize a wider range of applications using Virtuozzo, including transactional databases, which often suffer from performance problems when used with hypervisors. On the administration side, customers need to manage, maintain and secure just a single OS instance, while the hypervisor model requires customers to manage many OS instances. Of course, the hypervisor vendors have worked hard to automate much of this process, but it still requires more effort to manage and maintain multiple operating systems than a single instance. Finally, OS virtualization with Virtuozzo has a lower list price than the leading hypervisor for comme...

Boston , December 16, 2008 – Seanodes, the creator and leading developer of Shared Internal Storage solutions, today announced that cloud services provider Aenigma has developed a new multi-tiered storage infrastructure backed by Exanodes™ software to increase the reliability and performance of its High Availability Application Hosting Platform for as little as one-twentieth the cost of a similarly configured Fibre Channel SAN. Delivering Software as a Service Aenigma provides an alternative to on-premise software deployment offering all the benefits and advantages of high availability and enterprise-grade business tools such as Microsoft Project Server, Office Sharepoint Server and Exchange Server on demand, at a competitive price. As a member of the VMware Service Provider Program Aenigma provides companies with on-demand Virtual Infrastructure, which can support any operating system, Windows or Linux and any compatible software stack they need. This “pay as you go” model r...

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EWeek's labs picked up some neat collection of VMware's virtual appliances. Although I don't seem to read anywhere what the criteria might have been, it is important to note that these appliances are a security/application centric collection, I haven't been visiting the marketplace for some time so do go there and check out some stuff there. They have a huge collection out there. Here's EWeek's top 5

Search my older post and you'll find that I had already suggested VMware and other vendors to go for several versions of hypervisors. VMware has taken the stride towards mobile devices, which is definitely a good thing but that market is a flooded market. Desktop PCs are in need for some rationalization. I have, some times, hard time convincing customers why they should move towards VDI- while many are lately wondering if Cloud Apps, hosted via their internal, on-premise Cloud Infrastructure or Off Premise Clouds - a typical hosted scenario. Either ways they just don't care anymore, so is the case of the Clouds. Clouds don't care either. That makes it a perfect match, especially the new beast we all want to comprehend, the beast which only the likes of Microsoft has understood rather well, the SMB market. SMB's are typically the "I don't care, you fix it and fix it now" kind of folks. Taming that market segment is a real pain. They are sometimes hard to un...

Ed has some good tips. Last time I spoke to Ed, I got to understand that he's on to a lot more things such as writing a book and some toolkit. Mike Hoesing has beaten him to it there since his book on Virtualization Security is already up there on Amazon. I am looking forward to Ed's book as well though. Anyways, like I said, last when I spoke to Ed was about pushing the virtualization security initiative here in the EMEA. I have spoken to several little and bigger players, including our own large team ("our" as in my employer ) of some 500+ security experts,who are doing lots RA's for firms across the globe. Anyways here's Haletky's article: The roles and permissions within the VI Client do not necessarily map to users and groups within the service console or management appliance. Roles and permissions are quite a bit different actually and do not always map one to one. When you directly connect the VI Client to a VMware ESX or VMware ESXi host you will ...

New features of VRM include: Extensions that support key virtual desktop components included in Citrix XenDesktop™ and VMware’s virtual desktop infrastructure. Microsoft’s Hyper-V support. The VRM Infrastructure Organizer, for fast, efficient mapping of an organization’s virtual assets into its existing shared infrastructure. VRM automates the management of virtual servers and desktops, from the time they’re created until they’re decommissioned. Innovations such as VRM’s desktop extensions help IT organizations deliver high value and competitive advantages to their customers. "Desktop virtualization is taking off, and large scale deployments see high rates of change. These deployments need management tools to be efficient and economical," said Rachel Chalmers, research director, infrastructure, the 451 Group. "DynamicOps' VRM can let desktop groups choose best-of-breed point products while retaining overall control of their environment." VRM desktop extensions...

It's Saturdays and I'm sure Stephen won't be upset at me for that title :-) good luck at Tripwire, Stephen! "Stephen is the perfect fit for Tripwire as we continue to extend our leadership in the virtualization market, seeking new and different ways to address the growing customer needs in the market," said Dan Schoenbaum, COO of Products for Tripwire. "We are excited to have Stephen on board to help us further expand and execute on our corporate strategy to address our clients' growing virtualization needs." Stephen is co-author of two books on virtualization, "Essential VMware ESX Server" and "Scripting VMware Power Tools: Automating Virtual Infrastructure Administration." In addition, he is Technical Editor of "VMware ESX Server: Advanced Technical Design Guide" and a contributing author to "How to cheat at configuring VMware ESX Server." A respected expert on virtualization technology, Stephen is a frequen...

As a first step in the companies' expanded relationship, VMware would work with HP to integrate HP BTO software with VMware vCenter Lab Manager, which provides self-service access to a library of pre-configured virtualized application environments, allowing teams of users to check out systems on-demand while IT maintains administrative control. With Lab Manager, organizations can reduce hardware costs, automate manual provisioning tasks, and accelerate application development and test cycles. In addition, VMware and HP would jointly develop and bring to market enhanced virtualization management offerings for VMware vCenter and HP BTO customers based on the HP BTO application and infrastructure discovery technologies (HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping) to better manage their VDC-OS environments. A VDC-OS enables businesses to efficiently pool all types of hardware resources (including servers, storage and network) into an "internal enterprise cloud" that acts like a sin...

STORServer introduced an upgrade to its STORServer Agent for VMware Consolidated Backup, designed to increase usability and performance. Highlights of these upgrades include a new license server and online help system. Introduced in September 2007, the STORServer Agent for VMware Consolidated Backup integrates IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager and VMware Consolidated Backup. To address the challenges of protecting VMware environments, the Agent improves the usability of Consolidated Backup by providing centralized management, reporting and scheduling of virtual machine backups and eliminates cumbersome pre- and post-processing integration scripts. The Agent includes an easy to use graphical user interface for the management and reporting of virtual machine backups; a scheduler; and a database containing client configurations, logs and scheduling information. Source

“VMware is pleased to see Symantec deliver solutions like VCS for high availability that integrate with and complement the value of VMware virtualization for customers and reinforce the importance of a strong partner ecosystem that helps differentiate VMware virtualization,” said Shekar Ayyar, vice president of infrastructure alliances at VMware. “We look forward to continued collaboration with Symantec to enable support for VCS for VMware users and improve the experience for joint customers through initiatives such as the TSANet-based cooperative support agreement announced today.” The collaborative support initiative between Symantec and VMware through TSANet delivers highly trained support expertise to solve customers’ high availability needs. Already a global member of TSANet, Symantec has now joined a cooperative support community for virtualization established by VMware earlier this year to promote collaboration to deliver mission-critical support for joint enterprise customers....

NetWrix has some cool things going with their Change reporter for both VMware and Microsoft's SCVMM. VMware was launched recently. Change auditing is an important process for controlling the management of your virtual environment, to limit unauthorized changes and errors in VI3 inventory. Erroneous and unauthorized changes usually occur every day in organizations in which many IT professionals manage different aspects of virtual infrastructure. Such changes can cause failures and outages in your virtual infrastructure and significantly contribute to virtual machine sprawl. NetWrix Change Reporter for VMware Infrastructure 3 audits all changes and enforces controlled change management processes across your virtual environment. This freeware tool sends a daily report pointing to every change made to your ESX servers, folders, clusters, resource pools, virtual machines, and their hardware (*), including previous and current ("before" and "after") configuration valu...

HP today announced the expansion of its virtualized browsing solution across select business desktop products and its plans to introduce Linux as an operating system choice for business desktop customers. The offerings are designed to help small businesses enhance their productivity and ease their management of technology. The first-of-its-kind Mozilla Firefox for HP Virtual Solution was developed with Symantec and Mozilla for HP customers. The solution uses the standard release of Mozilla Firefox with a Symantec Software Virtualization Solution layer that allows customers to use the Internet productively while keeping business PCs stable and easier to support. As customers surf the web, changes made to the PC are contained in a “virtual layer,” separate from the operating system, and do not permanently alter the machine. Customers can therefore reset the browser as needed, instantly returning the PC to its last-known good state. Previously offered on the HP Compaq dc7900 Bus...

Today, the FSF let Cisco Systems know in no uncertain terms that line had been crossed . The complaint centers on the Linksys brand routers, and the firmware used on those products. Brett Smith, the licensing compliance engineer at the FSF said that in 2003, the FSF was notified that the Linksys WRT54G used GPL/LGPL licensed code in its firmware, but customers weren't getting the source code that these licenses required Cisco supply . He said that initially, Cisco seemed willing to work with the FSF to put procedures in place so that its products -- at the time, and in the future -- would comply with the license terms the firmware used. Over the course of five years, a compliance plan never materialized. As the FSF investigated the Linksys WRT54G complaint, it was receiving license violation reports regarding other Cisco products. Smith says that new issues were being brought up before the older ones could be addressed, resulting in "...a five-years-running game of Whack-A-...

I am assuming that it was not just the experimental excel sheet that John put up on his blog that prompted Amazon to get him over to their shop. Amazon, with its clear strategy to go to the EU are sure to be racing ahead. Motto: The time to hire smart and hard-working folks is...NOW! The word on the street is that James Hamilton - one of the chief nerds that has helped Microsoft plan its containerized data center strategy for its forthcoming Azure compute cloud - is leaving to take a job at Amazon. And perhaps not coincidentally, this is happening at the same time as the local papers in Oregon are reporting that Amazon is looking to build a new data center near the cheap electricity generated by hydroelectric dams along the fast-moving Columbia River. Hamilton, who has one of the smarter blogs dealing with data center issues, has spent a decade at Microsoft Research and a decade at IBM before that. Back in 2006, Hamilton was one of the earlier proponents for modularized data centers, t...

Nortel Networks Corp.'s contemplation of a bankruptcy filing comes after years of strategic missteps, accounting scandals and failed restructurings that have reduced the company, once one of Canada's flagships, to a shadow of its former self. Nortel once boasted a stratospheric market value of $250 billion, when speculators overestimated demand for fiber-optic networks to carry Internet and video traffic around the world. That bubble burst in 2000, and Nortel has spent the better part of a decade trying, unsuccessfully, to get back on its feet. WSJ I really, really hate my typos :-|