Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

I watch Silicon.com and monitor the outsourcing market (thanks to my good friend at Morgan Chambers, who's CEO too comments in the article) rather closely. With outsourcing stalling, its is refreshing to see Infosys emerge as a Global Player. Phil Morris, CEO of consultancy Morgan Chambers, said: "I think Capgemini is a great target. The whole of the industry has been waiting for a play like this. "I think it's going to change the game completely. Something from the east buying a European player is a quite a turn about." But Morris added integration issues could prove a potential barrier to any deal. I think TCS, Satyam etc too will attempt to go for some meaty acquisition pretty soon. Read the rest...

Not like we haven't heard this before. Ok so I'm not going to waste my time (neither yours) speculating (feel free to read the article if you will). I am interested in data. Yep, data , before I shut down my laptop and go for my beer and cigar ;-) After all, he said it's a market that's seen only four percent penetration to date. However, he expects 90 percent of the Fortune 1000 to be virtualizing x86 machines by the end of 2007. By 2009, more than four million virtual machines will be installed on x86 servers, which is about 20 percent of the total potential market. "We're talking billions of dollars of revenue potential." If this is true, then we don't see any other competitor taking these deployments away from VMware. And by the end of 2009 , we will enter the Desktop Virtualization arena. My prediction is that next year we will be testing the "Thick Business Desktops" with ESX lite, ESX standard and ESX Xtreme versions. And by 2009 we wi...

But now that Novell and Red Hat have both been shipping Xen in their commercial Linux distributions for some months, things have grown eerily quiet. Sure, there is still product news coming out of the Xen vendors, and we'll get to that in a moment. But what I'd really like to know is - who's actually using this stuff in production? And I mean actual end-user organizations, not ISPs or hosters. Based on the absence of Xen-related chatter, my guess is that production users of Xen are still few and far between. Xen has a long way to go and Microsoft has a much longer way to go. Much much longer. Original post . PS: Kris Buytaert responds to the Xen issue... This is where you go wrong.. you don't know what they are using it for. They might be using Xen in a production environment at a huge bank or telco, not telling you because they are perfectly happy with the way it is running. Nobody will ever see a dime (apart from the guys paycheck) for having implemented 200 CentOS ba...

"The name change from uXcomm to Virtugo Software is a reflection of the traction we've experienced in the marketplace for virtualization technologies especially when combined with the XManage products suite," said Chris Dickson, VP of marketing for Virtugo Software. "The success of Virtugo's popular products and its rapid adoption by customers like AMTRAK and QUALCOMM as well as leading resellers is a strong testament to the company's technology vision to date. Over the next few years, we will take advantage of Ashmeet's experience and technology vision and expand our product offerings and their presence in the market." Mr. Sidana is a partner at Foundation Capital, a venture capital firm committed to early stage company building within the enterprise software market place. Before joining Foundation Capital, Mr. Sidana was at VMware where he was responsible for multiple products including Virtual SMP, P2V and their flagship product: VMware's ESX ...

I hate to write off this article in its totality. I do believe that most of the folks on that upstart boat are creative and very inventive. A simple question : Does any of these solutions even smell the Data Centers. Answer = no! Only VMware does and XenSource is beginning to taste the production environments. The very innovative and commoditization will create too mahy hypervisors to clear all the doubt in a customers head when (s)he goes out shopping for a Virtualization product. Most of them go for VMware. (And don't make me repeat myself as to why...) Anyways this article is an ode to the startups and that the way we should just keep it!

ITIL, change management, CMDB are all interconnected. A lot of IT shops start experimenting with VMware and are not really keeping the Change Managers informed about how things are being done it tackle incidents and RFCs. Of course it is for the better. It helps streamline and manage the changes in a controlled lab and then eventually pushing it into the production. But nevertheless the management ought to understand how the new evolving (physical and virtual) infrastructure affects the change management. Learn how to: * Optimize the planning, control, execution and validation of initial provisioning and subsequent changes in your operating systems and applications, both on physical and virtual machines * Enable all of your machines, both physical and virtual, to stay in their desired state according to your policies * Achieve real business benefits from virtualization today It is sponsored by HP .

You have technology on one side -- like VMware VirtualCenter and Virtual Infrastructure, Xen or Microsoft -- and on the other side you have business processes that need to tie to this virtualized environment, and that's the software we deliver," Paychère said The VS-O virtual appliance, based on a VMware virtual machine, comes with a Linux operating system, a database, a directory service and a pre-installed library of processes and connectors. IT administrators can download it from a Web site and install it in a few clicks. When it's up and running, it can help customers curb the time and cost of installing a separate operating system and applications. Dunes and original article here .

Sounds promising this... "Initiatives are underway. They're just not ready for disclosure," said Patrick Lin, VMware's senior director of product management, at the end of a panel sponsored by chipmaker AMD at the Westin San Francisco. The panel followed daylong briefings by analysts at IDC's Virtualization 2.0 Forum at the Miyako Hotel a mile away. AMD took advantage of the event to put the different vendors in front of microphones to elicit a pledge of cooperation and videotape the results. Read on...

The company has launched a program to bring virtualization to its data center, which reduces power, provides speed time to recovery for its clients, offers a robust disaster recovery service, tests DR without the time consuming methods required with physical servers, supports additional memory and provides extra processing capacity. By using blade servers in this plan, Barack now has the ability to increase its processor density, especially in ultra-dense deployments. The Web host can also run multiple system images on a single machine. Check out Barak Webhosting and see VMware's site if you are a Webhosting provider . Original news article here . Go Virtualize!

For Monster, managing this challenge required multiple tools, a situation that's not uncommon. Monster uses Akorri's BalancePoint to augment the capabilities of VMware's two main management products, VMotion (which increases hardware utilization by migrating VMs on failing or underperforming servers to another machine) and Distributed Resource Scheduler (which couples with VMotion to allocate resources to high-priority VMs based on preestablished rules you set). A key point: DRS and VMotion show where to balance workload, but they aren't analytical and don't see contention with other apps outside of VMware, King says. Since BalancePoint isn't tied to the OS, it can see if VMware performance is impacted by other apps residing on the same SAN resources, he says. "DRS just sees what it sees for performance through the host (CPU, memory and storage), but it can't see what the database server that's on the same side as the SAN is doing," says King. ...

So my prediction finally comes true! (I guess they had to announce it given that Hitachi was also on its way to deliver Virtage) Cutting ESX down to fit into firmware is not an insignificant task, a source said. As it stands, a default installation of ESX 3.0.1, VMware's shipping product, consumes about 8 GB of space on a system, across several file systems. But VMware's plans call for ESX Lite to consume orders of magnitude less space – as little as a of couple of megabytes, one source said. "It's all about minimizing the footprint and moving it off the disk altogether," the source said, speaking anonymously. Benefits of a streamlined ESX hypervisor would include better reliability, since it no longer resides on failure-prone spinning hard disk drives, better security and better performance and efficiency. More like the Playstation thing. Virtualization is not new. Virtualization will be a default option soon. This integration is VMware's way of getting clos...

Well why not! Google was a mastermind of two students. They were little kids and now they buy Billion dollar companies. VMware was the playground of a smart scientist, now it is da king in the datacenters across the whole planet. Evergrid now, as my dear friends of El Rego report: But, rather than wasting away in the batch kingdom, NKTOB Evergrid has decided that it would like to go ahead and manage your entire data center. And when they say "entire," they mean it. The first step in this direction comes via the new Cluster Availability Management Suite package rolled out this week by Evergrid. Those of you fond of acronyms will like to know that CAMS plugs into AvS. With CAMS, customers receive a package than can handle all the cluster basics, stretching from turning systems on and off to distributing applications and load balancing. Then, of course, you get the AvS check pointing features as well to make sure your application runs smoothly on a cluster despite periodic failu...

This one is an interesting read. Here the columnist analyzes the IPO strategy of EMC. It is working well for them for now. But still investors need to get more than just excited. Read on... Everyone agrees the VMWare business is worth a lot of money, but it's hard to get investors to fully recognize that value by plugging it into the stock price of EMC. This is not a unique problem; it happens at big companies with small but fast-growing subsidiaries. A partial spinoff, like the VMWare IPO, is the textbook response to that problem. Analysts who examine VMWare's independent stock prospects place a value on the enterprise. Dollars to doughnuts, they will conclude the company is worth more than its old, presumed value as a wholly owned subsidiary. Hopefully, that richer value is plugged into Wall Street models that assess the parent's stock and -- voila! -- those shares climb. That's what the textbook says, anyway. Read ahead.

This was an interview with a Datacore Exec on their strategy on Storage Virtualiation and VMware's role in it. TW: What do think about VMware directly interacting with a storage resource to automate storage provisioning for virtual servers? PR: We are having a lot of success with VMware pull-down and thin provisioning. VMware can already use Microsoft's Virtual Disk services (VDS) in Windows to do some of this. Also SMI-S has a generic storage API. It was supposed to be open but suppliers like EMC and HDS have extended it with proprietary extensions so it is no longer absolutely standard. VDS hasn't taken off for a couple of reasons. Microsoft added complexity which wasn't needed. They came out with VDS and left it to lie. They didn't push it. No-one uses it. There isn't a usable GUI. The end user isn't interested in typing command lines. We are talking to VMware (about an API-type protocol for storage provisioning). It's a rather complex relationship. T...

And Macquarie was one of them. "Macquarie Hosting's managed server virtualization offering gives customers with high-availability, mission critical online applications the same level of proactive management, security and performance they expect from traditional hosted server environments," says Aidan Tudehope, managing director hosting at Macquarie Telecom. "However, virtualization offers a range of additional benefits including superior levels of agility, scalability and business continuity. Backed by VMware's infrastructure, Macquarie Hosting's virtual server offering means we can now help organizations significantly reduce their hardware costs while ensuring they remain available and responsive to customers." Macquarie's site and original article .

The big news was the addition of application streaming to create a new version, SVS Professional, using AppStream's technology. Where SVS had installed layers locally on desktop machines before, now they can be streamed down on demand, with a high degree of control over what happens to them. On office desktops, for example, a set of applications may be represented as icons, and a layer acquired on demand may represent only a temporary instance of the app, and when it's closed it goes back into a managed pool on the server. If the user's computer is a laptop, on the other hand, the user probably wants the layer installed permanently so it can be used offline. There's lots of room for creative customization of services here. Honestly I am banking on thin light weight Virtual Appliance Desktop Infrastructure. Think of it this way. You have an ESX Desktop version on a quad-core PC. You have some very totally different needs. We segregate the needs and provide you with sever...

Guess Symantec took VMware in the loop as well... NetBackup 6.5 also includes links to EMC Corp.'s VMware Consolidated Backup to offload backups from the primary VMware server onto a secondary backup server. The upgraded product enables single-image-level backups to provide either full-image or granular file-level recovery, said Symantec officials. However, for smaller VMware environments, end users must use Symantec's PureDisk offering in a virtual machine and replace the NetBackup client. Rest is here...

VMware said that its Fusion software for Macintosh computers can be pre-ordered beginning Tuesday for US$39.99, and $79.99 when it becomes generally available near the end of August. Parallels Inc. priced its Parallels Desktop version 3.0 at $79.99 when it became generally available Thursday, and $39.99 for users upgrading from a previous version of Parallels. Both make it possible for Mac users to run the Windows OS from Microsoft Corp. alongside the Apple Inc. Mac OS X operating system. It is for people who use a Mac but also want to use software applications written only for Windows. Read ahead...

I mused about it quite sometime back (in one of my strategy articles). And given that all SPs are runnning only Linux it might be pretty easy to adopt the VI3. Under typical hosting service agreements, a customer has to pick a number of servers for a three-year agreement and pay for them, whether they are used or not, said Bogomil Balkansky, senior director of product marketing at VMware. With VMware's Service Provider Program, hosted service suppliers will be able to offer virtual servers to customers. The arrangement will allow hosted service providers to take a step toward utility computing, where their customers pay for only the resources needed at the moment, not the maximum number of servers that might be needed to meet a peak load. Hosted service providers will be better able to make use of their own resources, renting capacity on the same server to different customers. Each virtual machine is isolated from the data and applications of the others. One may crash and the other...

I am very passionate about VMware and the talented folks who hang out there. (Who wouldn't be part of that group!?!). Anyways Google's cool acquisition of PeakStream means that they will soon be into this market. What baffles everyone is that speculations and other stuff just doesn't touch them. These guys are having real fun. So is VMware actually! And now Google buys pricey software tools that seem like they might be handy. Were Google so flush with cash five years ago VMware might have turned into a helpful Goobuntu partitioning add-on rather than an industry standard piece of software driving data center spending. In another year, Google may well purchase Sun just to add some Java talent or gobble Red Hat because it needs more Linux support staff. It's easy to make too much of the PeakStream buy, trust us, but the reality is that we're left with just one real player in the single-threaded-to-multi-threaded code market - RapidMind. OK so this really doesn't s...

These new management features for HP's VSE (Virtual Server Environment), which the company is slated to announce June 6, are designed to give IT administrators better access and oversight of the virtual environments created by HP's HP-UX 11i operating system, said Ute Albert, HP's virtualization marketing manager. Besides better management tools, HP, in Palo Alto, Calif., is also looking to offer customers a reason to switch to its Integrity systems, which use Intel's Itanium processors. In 2006, HP pledged to invest $1 billion annually into its Integrity systems and Unix operating system to gain a greater share of the high-end portion of the server market. Read on...

This is good news. They said the database would feature improvements in high availability, performance, scalability, manageability and what the vendor dubbed "diagnosability." In addition, the executives referred to new compression technology that could potentially reduce customers' storage demands by two-thirds and the ability for 11g to store unstructured data faster than traditional file systems. The new database is also expected to include a variety of partitioning capabilities Read further...