Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

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...

This is awesome. I have long been waiting for something like this. I just want to talk to the cloud. This is an ideation-application. Now we need that artificial cloudapp that has artificial hippocampus embedded on the tip of your skull so we can also get your thoughts or atleast what you hear back into the text. However amateurish it may seem in the beginning, it will soon overwhelm us all. More crunching coming up! Users of the free application, which Apple is expected to make available as soon as Friday through its iTunes store, can place the phone to their ear and ask virtually any question, like “Where’s the nearest Starbucks ?” or “How tall is Mount Everest?” The sound is converted to a digital file and sent to Google’s servers, which try to determine the words spoken and pass them along to the Google search engine. The search results, which may be displayed in just seconds on a fast wireless network, will at times include local information, taking advantage of iPhone features th...

“With Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0, we are focused on the core pillars of developer experience, support for the latest platforms spanning client, server, services and devices, targeted experiences for specific application types, and core architecture improvements,” said S. “Soma” Somasegar, senior vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft. “These pillars are designed specifically to meet the needs of developers, the teams that drive the application life cycle from idea to delivery, and the customers that demand the highest quality applications across multiple platforms. You can expect to hear a lot more about Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0 in the coming months.” Democratizing Application Life-Cycle Management Today, much of application development remains siloed throughout the enterprise, leading to decreased productivity and lengthy product development cycles. With VSTS 2010, Microsoft is taking the next step forward in giving individuals an...

SEATTLE, WA — October 2, 2008 — Xenocode, the leader in application virtualization technology, today introduced the industry’s first application virtualization products designed for software developers and publishers. Xenocode Virtual Application Studio ISV Edition allows developers to package their Windows, .NET and Java-based applications into self-contained virtual executables that run instantly on end-user desktops – without installation, setup, dependencies or conflicts. Xenocode Virtual Application Studio ISV Edition is available immediately at www.xenocode.com/Products/StudioIsv. Virtual Application Studio ISV Edition allows developers to package applications for delivery by capturing a “snapshot” of the application in a ready-to-run state. Xenocode then builds a lightweight, self-contained virtual executable that runs instantly on any Windows desktop, regardless of operating system version or privilege restrictions. Xenocode’s unique, high-performance virtualization techn...

New version of Lixto’s Online Market Intelligence solution utilises Internet Cloud Computing to support data collection and processing Lixto Software (www.lixto.com), the Web Intelligence company, today announced the release of Version 5 of its Web Data Extraction Software Suite comprising the Lixto Visual Developer and the Lixto Transformation Server. This latest version of the Lixto Online Market Intelligence (OMI) solution utilises the power of Internet Cloud Computing to improve the scalability and processing power of the company’s SaaS and on-premise web intelligence solution that will allow Lixto’s customers to extract even more data from the Internet for analysis in real-time. To achieve this virtual infinite scaling of its solution, Lixto has introduced a new software architecture into the latest Version 5 solution for its server-side products that supports a grid-based scaling (or Cloud Computing) approach. This allows for linear scaling in relation to the number of processing...

No great shakes as loads of open source stuff is there on the net, but still you might want to take a look at the SQL Server 2008 CloudApp. Test it yourself!

I spoke to Chris a few days back and we were able to set up an interview quickly. BlueStripe software caught my attention as I am a sucker for applications. My heart bleeds for a suffering app, maybe its because I come from the middleware world (one of the worlds of my several worlds). BlueStripe does an excellent job in identifying the application landscape and bottlenecks and complex dependencies. So very crucial and so painfully forgotten in the virtualization madness. We will be testing this product very soon in our projects! Please tell us a bit about yourself? The founders of BlueStripe Software, Chris Neal, Vic Nyman, John Bley and John Whittington, have had the pleasure of working together previously and sought to learn what critical challenge was facing application owners and IT leaders. We undertook a lengthy research project, interviewing 50 to 60 industry leaders and found a compelling need to deliver a better way to manage their applications. It’s intuitive -- if ...

"When it's streamed down to me I don't have to worry about installing it or anything. I always have the latest, greatest version of it," he says. "Not only does it start up quickly, but should anything go wrong with the application, I can just re-stream it." XenApp places applications on centralized servers, allowing users to connect to them from remote devices. To the user, it appears as if the application had been installed on the desktop. Essentially, the presentation layer or user interface is virtualized, says Barb Goldworm, founder and chief analyst for FOCUS Consulting. "Rather than run it on your own desktop, you're running it on a server, virtualizing the presentation layer and distributing it over the network," she says. Citrix has gone further than any other vendor in terms of virtualizing both desktops and applications, Goldworm says. Server virtualization giant VMware got into the application virtualization market this year by purc...

Microsoft, a longtime player with its ubiquitous Office suite and Outlook/Exchange messaging and collaboration platform, is starting to react to this trend, although its software is still primarily designed to be installed on customers' own servers. Currently, Google offers a free, ad-supported Apps version designed for individuals and very small businesses, and a fee-based version called Premier that is aimed at companies of all sizes and costs US$50 per user per year. That is considered an aggressive price versus the cost of comparable Microsoft software. Although the individual and business versions share the same core applications, such as Gmail, word processor, calendar, spreadsheet and presentation programs, Apps Premier has a variety of IT management tools as well as APIs (application programming interfaces) for integration with other software. "Our intention is to really put more value at that price point and offer some amazing proposition to companies," said Dave...

Justin Kitagawa, lead front-end developer for GoGrid noted, ''When we started the GoGrid project, we wanted to push the boundaries of both front end and backend technologies. We were heavily influenced by Google Maps, the new Yahoo! Mail client, and several other state of the art AJAX applications. We wanted to have a thick client feel in the browser but with the performance of a thin client. Thick clients tend to require a much larger download and overhead, yet provide a richer experience, while conversely thin clients are much faster but less engaging visually.'' GoGrid is being showcased on the GWT Featured Project Page. GoGrid's rich, interactive graphical user interface (GUI) is built using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), an open-source Java development framework which enables GoGrid to provide a quick, responsive and interactive user experience. GoGrid is nominated for Best Virtualization Solution for the LinuxWorld 2008's Product Excellence Awards. The Goog...

After beating expectations with its second-quarter results last month, Silicon Valley stalwart Intel is feeling positive about demand for its small chips in an increasingly mobile marketplace. Although the macroeconomic outlook does not look good for the average Western consumer, Intel (nasdaq: INTC - news - people ) believes that the vast potential of emerging markets is still out there and waiting to be tapped. That's why it is aiming smaller and smaller--it unveiled its smallest chip ever earlier this year--and why it hopes one day to produce the world's first $100 laptop. Intel also sees growth opportunities in the West for cheap, portable mobile devices--hence its recent collaboration with the Portuguese government for 50-euro ($77.88) laptop-style "netbooks." Source to the full interview

Here are a few audio snippets from a Q and A session with the president of Google’s Enterprise division, Dave Girouard. The session took place on August 5th at the Pacific Crest Technology Leadership Forum in Vail, Colorado. Girouard talks about Cloud Computing, Google’s new App Engine, the Google Apps productivity suite, competition versus partnerships, and how Google faces the challenges of protecting its users’ privacy and security. Source

Zscaler’s idea is to relieve companies of the tiresome and costly burden of managing Web filtering and security on their own servers. Instead, the cloud-based service, which is rented to companies by the month, acts like a Web proxy, intercepting all incoming and outbound HTTP traffic from employees and scrubbing it for malware and online activity that violates company policy. The company lets network managers create those policies with extremely granular controls over how their networks can be used. Detailed restrictions can be set over what kind of sites employees can visit and when they can visit them. For example, one company might say that marketing folks can only visit YouTube during lunch hour, and even then, they can only upload two megabytes to the site each day. Engineers might be blocked from visiting Facebook (since there is no telling what kind of anti-social trouble they will get into), but everyone else can. And everyone could be banned from visiting MySpace. NYTimes Po...

Check out my interview with StackSafe. Virtualization 4.0 is also out there, I will post soon about it and what I mean with it. For now check out this screenshot!

We did see Dell's name come up in the Group discussion earlier but Dell continues to attempt to get the TM on the Cloud Computing. Two giants of the computing industry have demonstrated their own commitment to ‘cloud computing’ a week after a joint research project from HP, Intel and Yahoo! was unveiled. IBM today revealed plans to spend $350m on two high-density cloud computing platforms in Tokyo and North Carolina. The facilities will be 50% more efficient than standard data centres, the company said, thanks to extensive server consolidation. Meanwhile, it emerged today that computer manufacturer Dell has filed an application in the US to trademark the phrase ‘cloud computing’. More here

This is an interesting, in fact very interesting from a strategic and tactical weakness perspective. Here’s my problem with VMware in this situation. Ninety percent of the VMware sales organization is made up of former Dell employees. In fact there are so many ex-Dell sales people at VMware that they have had a self-imposed moratorium on hiring from Dell. As we know until recent years Dell was a very successful company. In fact they never had a layoff until 2001. For the first 16 years they were layoff free. Now those same sales people are at VMware and they have never experienced a downturn in sales or if they have they have not proven their ability to successfully fight their way out of it. I know several experienced sales people who are former Dell employees, but they in the minority. Dell was the least expensive and that goes a long way to selling units in the PC world. When HP and others figured out a way to produce boxes as cheaply that’s when Dell started to lose. When you are...

With this acquisition, VMware will leverage the B-hive team and technology to enhance the VMware portfolio of application and infrastructure management products by offering proactive performance management and service level reporting for applications running within virtual machines. B-hive technology brings insight into the performance of applications and the ability to automate changes using VMware’s industry-leading datacenter virtualization and management suite, VMware Infrastructure, to reallocate resources as needed to ensure service level objectives. In addition, with this acquisition, B-hive’s R&D facility and team will form the core of VMware’s new development center in Israel. Press

SAN DIEGO – June 25, 2008 – Nirvanix, the premier “Cloud Storage” platform provider optimized for media and large files, today announced the beta of a groundbreaking new set of products that attaches the Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network to a local network as a Windows or Linux filer using standard industry networking protocols. Users can then work with the applications they are accustomed to, or simply drag and drop files from their desktops to Nirvanix’s award-winning storage service. “Nirvanix CloudNAS represents a significant advancement in cloud storage,” said Patrick Harr, CEO of Nirvanix. “Previously, enterprises could only access cloud storage by programming to an API. Now with CloudNAS, customers can immediately integrate Nirvanix’s cloud storage into their existing applications and processes, and forego new purchases of expensive NetApp, EMC, IBM or other NAS products in favor of Nirvanix’s storage-as-a-service offering.” Since CloudNAS is built on the Storage Delivery Net...

VMware is pleased to announce the RC revision of ThinApp. This release includes Application Link and Application Sync, as well as many additional improvements to the user interface and the core virtualization engine. We believe that ThinApp represents technology that, when released in final form at General Availability (GA), will provide customers a fundamentally better way to package applications. With ThinApp technology, IT innovators can prepare their company to better address key application challenges including operating system migrations (to Windows XP, Vista, and others) while reducing application conflicts, deployment costs, and empowering a mobile workforce. ThinApp creates portable applications that can be leveraged across a variety of operating systems (Windows NT, XP, Vista, 2000) and plug into a variety of deployment infrastructures (SMS, LANDesk, Citrix, BMC, and others). Key Features and Enhancements The following enhancements were added for RC (Build 3.396): ...

CHICAGO and LIVINGSTON, Scotland – June 24, 2008 – CohesiveFT, providers of the Elastic Server Platform, an on-demand service for dynamic assembly and deployment of virtual machines, and FlexiScale, a leading provider of true on-demand Cloud computing, today announced a technology partnership to enable deployment of CohesiveFT’s Elastic Servers to FlexiScale's Cloud. The integration of technologies from CohesiveFT and FlexiScale will enable true on-demand application stack assembly and deployment on a pay-as-you-go Cloud. This combination allows genuinely scaleable, high availability production environments that do not require in-house operations expertise to build and maintain such a facility. Beyond substantial manpower savings the combined solution significantly reduces capital and energy expenditures. This partnership will also allow ISVs, application developers and QA teams to dramatically increase their productivity throughout the development lif...