Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

I'll be talking to the CEO soon. And we may publish an interview if we feel that the talk was fun ;-)

As virtualization matures and gets commoditized, most of the firms will look at more open and flexible ways of virtualization. Open Source may be the answer to the ones who do not want to get stuck in the rut of who to buy. Our membership is growing everyday and the members keep coming. Click here to join the crowd and start engaging with the community!

Yes we are growing! Join us now!

TENAFLY, NEW JERSEY, 27 March 2008 – BitWine continues to expand its global presence via its partnership with International Data Group’s TecChannel ( www.tecchannel.de ). IDG TecChannel is a site for IT professionals, with highly interactive forums. BitWine enhances the value that online communities give to their members while monetizing their loyalty. BitWine offers latest VOIP technology to allow forum participants to have immediate, online voice interaction. Participants or affiliates wishing to share their expertise on a paid basis can immediately connect to potential customers or they can interact as peers. “This technology allows site publishers to enhance their community offerings by using VOIP to leverage the relationships people develop online,” says Elad Baron, BitWine’s CEO and co-founder. “Experts can help other community members in a direct, one-on-one, natural manner over the phone or using a computer video chat; meanwhile, site publishers receive a percentage f...

Soon I'll be working with some good friends in the industry and the minute we've achieved the "escape figure", we'll do something for sure ;-) For the meantime, join us here!

This is phenomenal! We are totally excited! Join now!

This is going fast! We are totally excited here and really happy to have you guys in the group. Do you want to join as well? Then go here and join us today! For joining Avastu Research Group , you will be required to forward you CV to info[at]avastu.com as well.

We've just reached our first milestone and have 100 members! I plan to do something with our members, obviously events that we held in Belgium is one of the things, but given the fact that many Xen members too are in the group, I am planning to organize a think-tank initiative. Like I said in the past, innovation in virtualization (and the whole IT domain as a whole) is just about getting started. The Transitional phase where we are going oh-so ga-ga over virtualization vendors, is the platform to start using the building blocks for the next Transformational age of Business! So shortly: You'll be part of a group where all members think conceptual, work in practical worlds and plan for a future that has dynamic data centers. You'll be part of a revolution, you just won't be a "number" in yet another LinkedIn group We don't care about numbers either. Action is what we want to focus on! Participation and Community driven innovation is our strategy, and thus y...

So who is Kevin Lawton? Kevin has been involved in the x86 virtualization field since 1994, when he left MIT to create the "bochs" Open Source project, which was used to bootstrap many virtualization projects such as VMware, Xen, and QEMU. He is a founding member of a number of companies, including both hardware and software startups that target the enterprise datacenter. Kevin is on the board of advisors for Start-Up Phase Forum, and sometimes vets investment theses in the virtualization space for the venture community. He has chosen to pursue an executive MBA starting 2008. And where can you find Bochs project? Quoting Boch's site: Bochs is a highly portable open source IA-32 (x86) PC emulator written in C++, that runs on most popular platforms. It includes emulation of the Intel x86 CPU, common I/O devices, and a custom BIOS. Currently, Bochs can be compiled to emulate a 386, 486, Pentium/PentiumII/PentiumIII/Pentium4 or x86-64 CPU including optional MMX...

I was reading Alex's post and this caught my attention. I am sure the ecstatic user who suddenly is exposed to the Christmas feeling and wants to share all the stuff he did with the Stage Manager with us all. But the question is : It only works with VI3! Do we really want another proprietary tool that works just for that vendor? I was talking to a start-up called StackSafe , who do exactly the same and the only difference is that they do it for all environments: Microsoft, VMware and Xen. They have built their product with the Xen technology and thursday I'll get a walk-through. So I'll get more details out there: What I need from my Universal Stage Manager, is: Cross-domain compatibility Cross-VMM portability (Export the prod VMware VMs to test Xen VMs to Hyper-V development) Security across machines Scripted installation toolkit: I saw something like that in VMLogix, its pity that we don't hear anything anymore from these folks . Ravi Gururaj at VMlogix was quick t...

NY times carried the article: A frail partnership between Intel and the One Laptop Per Child educational computing group was undone last month in part by an Intel saleswoman: She tried to persuade a Peruvian official to drop the country’s commitment to buy a quarter-million of the organization’s laptops in favor of Intel PCs. Intel and the group had a rocky relationship from the start in their short-lived effort to get inexpensive laptops into the hands of the world’s poorest children. But the saleswoman’s tactic was the final straw for Nicholas Negroponte , the former Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer researcher and founder of the nonprofit effort. He demanded that Intel stop what he saw as efforts to undermine the group’s sales, which meant ceasing to sell the rival computer. Intel chose instead to withdraw its support from One Laptop this week. So let me get this straight, Intel sat on the board and then back stabbed the OLPC? NY times story and this is bein...

We just reopened this discussion. Matt , our good friend, and openQRM Project Manager, wrote about it in NetworkWorld , quoting him : To my mind it is because of two reasons : 1) Different virtualization technologies are available today. There is "full-virtualization" (e.g. Qemu/KVM), "para-virtualization" (e.g. Xen) and "light-virtualization" which is in most cases based on a process-isolation (e.g. Linux-VServer, Solaris Zones). Each technology has its advantages but also its "limitations". Now, in a common data-center we normally find lots of different applications with custom needs e.g. a web hosting company may have hundreds of "idle" customer web-servers plus a couple of in-house oracle data-base servers. For the web-servers it would make the most sense to choose one of the "light-virtualization" or "para-virtualization" technologies to limit the virtualization overhead to a minimum. Using "light- or par...

January 2008: virtualisation Subject Activities Speakers Location News Sponsors Day 1: 22 january 2008: strategy day Time Title Speaker 09:00 Registration and coffee 09:30 Welcome 09:45 Current state and evolution of the virtualisation market John Abbott 11:00 Virtualization: Shift happens Tarry Singh 12:00 lunch break 13:00 networking and discussion time 13:30 case study Kris Buytaert 14:30 Closed and open source solution: an open discussion. should talk about security panel 15:30 Coffee break 16:00 The impact of virtualization on the enterprise infrastructure Duncan Hardie 17:00 The future is in the management tools Niko Nelissen 18:00 End Day 2: 23 january 2008: technical day Time Title Speaker 09:30 Integrating virtualization in the OS Frank Kohler 11:00 Coffee break 11:15 Conform deployment of virtu...

I've created our Avastu's Research Group in LinkedIn. Join us in the "Community Driven Market Research and Analysis" initiative. We are certain that swarm intelligence and swarm research will eventually be the path to successful and high-performance societies. So you want to contribute and research collaboratively in: Greener and Alternative Fuels Research Biotechnology Research (Malaria eradication etc) Genome Research Pharma Then you would like to join us. We will ensure that you get projects. You could be anywhere in the world and still be part of this community driven model. Why? Because learning does not happen behind closed doors, its open now. Join us!!!

Got this from the FaceBook fellas: SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nirvanix today announced that FreeDrive has selected, implemented and now officially launched its service using Nirvanix’s Storage Delivery Network, a global online storage platform optimized for media applications. FreeDrive is a personal online storage and file sharing application that works across social networks. With today’s announcement, FreeDrive is now available first as a Facebook application enabling its registered users to host and share photos, videos, music and documents among their existing Facebook friends and groups. FreeDrive has exited its beta period with over 100,000 users and is expected to register another one million users conservatively over the next six months. FreeDrive offers customers 1 GB of free storage that serves as an Internet hard drive while providing online access to files that can then be linked and posted to Facebook. Prior to partnering with Nirvanix, FreeDrive hosted, stored and deliv...

Some of the company's coming innovations will be shown next month at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, while others won't show up until later next year or for up to three years. Cisco will be announcing many products at CES, said Luis Avila, vice president of strategy for Cisco's Scientific Atlanta division, in a brief interview at C-Scape 2007, Cisco's annual analyst conference this week in San Jose. However, the only product Avila will discuss in advance is a new version of its set-top box, familiar to many consumers as the hardware they rent from their cable and Internet providers to receive TV signals. The newer device will operate on the MPEG 4 standard, moving an HD-quality standard picture with about one-fourth the bandwidth of the current MPEG 2 device. CW is carrying the article.

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Check out my blog at ITtoolbox. Here I talk a bit about What our next generation data center will be like. I also talk about some myths that people have about open source And how thanks to Virtualization it really won't matter what you run! An excerpt: Myth #2: Its free, I'd rather pay for what I buy No it ain't. It may be cheaper but it definitely is not free. You download the software, ou modify it and you do all sorts of things with it, BUT it remains a product that you need to get support. Just like Windows or Oracle database. In fact, Oracle is a better example, its an open source, right? The Linux versions such as Oracle VM or Enterprise Linux. You can test them and there is a long EULA which we all agree and click blindly. But you don't need the license code or anything, you can put it in your data center and nobody would notice right? WRONG! People won't notice but you'd have a huge application running on it in no time and you'd be stuck to that ...

Commoditization of HPC is just about beginning. This is the next wave that is going to come at us. when I said, in a previous post where I commented over "overwhelming innovation", I meant this as well. HPC is on its way to reach out to consumers. We look today, for advice and counseling, to big firms like Gartners, Forrsters etc. But the tomorrow, which is today, is in all of our hands. HPC just happens to be that for us. Think of genome research, power issues, geographic and tectonic researches, meteorology, mining, oceanography, etc will happen in homes tomorrow. Look at this news by RapidMind , where they are moving aggressively towards the regular x86 boxes. News from Rapidmind: Over a thousand developers of high-performance computing (HPC) and enterprise software are using RapidMind to realize the performance benefits of new multi-core processors. The RapidMind platform is being successfully leveraged in developing applications for database transactions, image/video ma...

I was reading this post of Eric and instead of talking about how hot tech industry has suddenly become, I want to focus on a more serious issue where suddenly as bloggers, who may also be working in the same industry, which sometimes is the case, you have to be cautious to say something "negative". Really, you ought to read the comments I got on my post last week complaining about the problems I was having connecting to the MLB.com audio service for a couple of baseball playoff games. The service uses the content-delivery network operated by Akamai (AKAM). I expressed irritation that I was getting booted off the service every few minutes for no apparent reason. It wasn't a stock call; I was simply venting. Well, within 24 hours, I had more than 70 comments, most of them dripping with venom; I was under attack from Akamai's Army. (Friday, an Akamai spokesman said the company believes the problem involved security software running on our servers.) And it isn't just...