Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

I have opened a question on C limate Change in LinkedIn and got this reply from a Programmer @ Fedex who also gave a link to this site. Quoting the NewScientist.com: Our planet's climate is anything but simple. All kinds of factors influence it, from massive events on the Sun to the growth of microscopic creatures in the oceans, and there are subtle interactions between many of these factors. Yet despite all the complexities, a firm and ever-growing body of evidence points to a clear picture: the world is warming, this warming is due to human activity increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and if emissions continue unabated the warming will too, with increasingly serious consequences. Yes, there are still big uncertainties in some predictions, but these swing both ways. For example, the response of clouds could slow the warming or speed it up....

I strongly think that VMware should! Not for the clients, as most of the IT shops, if they are blue chips, do run VMware, but in order to get into the Middleware business, especially when I know* that that is where they are gradually moving, an announcement next week may disclose their gradual transition towards the application focus. Anyways this post and that email from the Forrester Analyst does insist that Oracle should not ignore BEA and competition that will try to offer some resistance. Well he ruled out VMware, I still think that it too should be considered as a strong contender. Link

I just had a pleasant chat with the CEO, Mike Maciag and the VP Software Development and talked extensively about the product "Electric Commander". This is an excellent product and can offer a lot in terms of product development and automation. So what can it do for you? ElectricCommander™ is an enterprise-class solution for software build management and build automation. It helps teams to make software build, package, test, and deployment tasks more repeatable, more visible, and more efficient. At its core, ElectricCommander is a Web-based system for automating and managing the build and release process. It provides a scalable solution to some of the biggest challenges of managing these "back end" software development tasks, including: Multiple, disconnected build and test systems across locations Home-built systems that are brittle, error-prone, and don't scale Slow overall build and release cycles ElectricCommander tackles these problems wit...

And I called it myself, GDM (Global Delivery Model). Search my blog from it ;) Anyways... The report, Alternative Delivery Models: A Sea of New Opportunities and Threats, says that IT leaders must explore these models or risk having business units implement the solutions without their knowledge and support. Alternative delivery models require IT functions to acquire, package and deliver IT in new ways, the report said. “These alternative delivery models start from externals. Software-as-a-service is not something you buy and install in-house, it’s something you get from outside as available functionality, and you adapt to it,” said Claudio Da Rold, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. So this article really doesn't say much, but I can tell you a few things, where you should pay attention to and start adapting to: "Pay-as-you-go" models : That is the foundation of the SaaS, VaaS or even DaaS (data center as a service), where you copy all your infrastructur...

IT managers have been advised to be wary of vendor hype surrounding storage virtualization because it is a technology that is poorly defined, misunderstood and not widely used, according to Dr. Kevin McIsaac, an adviser at research firm Intelligent Business Research Services Pty. (IBRS). Despite all the hype, McIsaac said that, over the next two years, network-based storage virtualization will remain a niche, while thin provisioning will enjoy rapid adoption in the enterprise. And while McIsaac readily admits that server virtualization is one of the best IT infrastructure trends to emerge in many years, he said the situation is very different when it comes to storage virtualization. "This idea of being able to layer virtualization over existing storage arrays is seriously flawed," he warned. McIsaac said a reasonable definition of storage virtualization is "the abstraction of logical storage from physical storage." However, given the sweeping nature of this definiti...

Like intel is on its massive 130 data center consolidation and virtualization spree, and it might take them 8 or so years, to get there. Many other data centers, large and small, ought to realize that this is a massive undertaking. Don't lose focus and make sure that you are ready for the next phase while you are half-way down the line, doing this consolidation and virtualization: Staffing : You need to shuffle, train and hire some "Virtualization Aware" with strong business- and customer facing capabilities. Just start talking to your HR already to make sure you have agile staff to manage you highly agile, but also at the same time, vulnerable virtual data center. Security : I sure hope for you, that you are doing this right from day one. If not go ahead and look for vendors that can provide you that. Check out Bluelane , Reflex Security , Catbird and several others (that I may have missed out here), even consult your virtualization vendors (VMware, Citrix, Microsoft) ...

As part of the Dynamic Desktop Initiative led by Citrix Systems, VXL believes that by streaming both operating system and applications to the virtual desktop, burdens on IT support are significantly reduced. Dynamic desktops provide the best TCO, security, performance and flexibility, allowing businesses to thrive in a dynamic world. VXL is one of the first thin client manufacturers to receive Citrix Ready verification on their desktop appliances and have designed a range of models designed specifically for the Citrix application delivery infrastructure. Keep ignoring Africa and you just might be a bit too late. Link

Despite that growth, however, managers complained budgets were not increasing at the same rate. For 69 per cent of respondents, data centre growth stood at 5 per cent a year, while 11 per cent reported 20 per cent or more growth per year. However, the average budget increase reported during the last two years stood at just 7 per cent worldwide. These budget constraints contributed to understaffing, which in turn undermined abilities to meet internal and external SLAs. In the APJ region, 62 per cent of data centre managers said their organisations had SLAs, with 85 per cent saying SLA expectations had increased over the last two years. Thirty eight per cent said they had experienced difficulty meeting those demands in the last two years. As in the rest of the world, APJ data centre managers said the main reason for problems meeting SLA involved difficulty finding qualified staff (71 per cent) or retaining employees (53 per cent). Read on...

As disaster recovery regulations mounted, servers piled up in the corporate controller's IT infrastructure at First Tennessee Bank, a subsidiary of First Horizon National Corp. ($37.9 billion in assets). Firewalled off from the rest of the organization for strict oversight, the system was overwhelming the two-employee department. "We just couldn't keep adding bigger servers and more disk space," says Bobby Robinson, the bank's accounting officer. "We needed a system that would grow manageably." In 2004 Robinson turned to the evolving concept of system consolidation via virtualization, which essentially allows one server to run multiple applications. To start, First Tennessee needed to move data from individual servers -- such as its Oracle (Redwood Shores, Calif) Hyperion and Microsoft (Redmond, Wash.) SQL database servers -- into a pool via a storage area network (SAN), explains Robinson. While the rest of the Memphis-based bank already had an EMC (Hopk...

My advice to firms hiring staff, and this I am telling you from past month juggling around and talking to big and small firms all over the country, is to act now. It has been an exhausting month, really, but I did end up learning a lot out there. : Go for Versatilists now! : These professionals are hard to find but trust me these guys will define the way how your businesses will and ought to change. Many companies are at cross-roads and are at their nerve ends to make such moves. I have said it before and cannot stress it enough: Get out of that "state-of-flux" and get started now, before your LOBs are rendered useless. Groom them to be the execs of the 2010-2012 past era : If you do get lucky and get a guy/gal like this in your shop, give them room and space to prove what they are worth. This is the wake up call for many shops, both big and small, these professionals are capable of doing more work for you than the typical business school grads. Well if they do lack that bus...

How soon before we get to the point where we have virtualization for everyone? Virtualization is definitely headed toward ubiquity. At VMworld [in September] we announced our embedded hypervisor, the ESX3i, and many of the major x86-based hardware vendors announced they will ship servers with an embedded ESX server in them. Anything that's virtualized has more flexibility, better utilization, and stronger reliability and security properties. I'd say there's still some hardware-assist work to be done. We estimate that about 90 percent of applications today belong in virtual machines. Once the final hardware assist is there from the processor and peripheral vendors, all applications will run in virtual machines. What it gives you is this single way to manage your software and manage it completely separately from your hardware. There's some industry talk about the eventual emergence of a complete virtualization system. What's your vi...

Go get it here!

Like most other companies these days, Intel is facing a growing demand for computing resources. As a result, our computing costs are going up along with that demand. All of these issues prompted us to take a hard look at our data center strategy, to see where we could make it more efficient. Therefore, we’ve launched into a significant undertaking. We’ve started the process to End of Life (EOL) or consolidate our data centers down to just eight strategic locations. This effort is planned to take us eight years, but we’re working to pull this in sooner. This initiative enables us to reduce costs, improve server and storage utilization, create higher density & more energy efficient data centers, and allows us to keep pace with our company’s rapid rate of innovation. The effort could deliver up to $750M in Net Present Value. View my video blog for more information. That is a massive undertaking! Hey, need a helping hand? Check out this blog!

Fortinet® - a pioneer and leading provider of unified threat management (UTM) solutions, today announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has awarded the company five additional patents for networking inventions, specifically supporting virtualization. The patents are part of the intellectual property Fortinet acquired from CoSine Communications, Inc., in a series of transactions between January 19, 2006, and December 7, 2006, which Fortinet's development team is leveraging to enhance virtualization capabilities already available in its FortiGate™ multi-threat security appliances. The five newly awarded patents strengthen Fortinet's intellectual property portfolio and provide the company with ownership of key innovations that address critical networking, virtualization and routing needs of large enterprises, managed security service providers and carriers. Fortinet currently holds 13 patents and has more than 80 patent-pending and in-process applications. The...

Actually when I do a post of a prediction, which soometimes can avarage at least one per day (blogging is a very small part of it), I can get a bit weary of "other" predictions. But anyways here we go: IDG says: Virtualization will become pervasive and integral to server and operating system design. In four to five years, we expect that virtualization will be as... Me:Me: 2 years max! How? rapid development, hyperacquisitions will accelerate the pace. There will continue to be revenue associated with virtualization layers. Me: But there wil also be open source disruptors (backed by Sun and IBM, for instance) who will offer you the virtualization as a free commodity with "cheaper optios". So my take is: Revenue will start to decline by 2009 as more intelligent technologies and trends like "Fabric" will lead to more consolidation and packing. And don;t forget, the "Use and throw" business sentiment, that will catalyze the business...

Well that is what the chatterboxes of Wall Street are saying.

However, in an attempt to retain customers and establish a stronghold over the marketplace, vendors are ensuring that by and large their products are not interoperable with that of their competitors in the marketplace. This is to encourage and almost leave customers with no choice but to opt for the same suite of products. This is dissuading potential customers from making a huge investment on any one particular product range. While vendor lock-in is definitely a key roadblock to the large scale deployment of storage virtualization technology, open source platforms provide an apt solution to deployment and development threats associated with this challenge. "Open source platform would not only enable unique and novel techniques to be embedded with existing technologies, but would also create a field of a competitive multi-vendor community with huge potential interest from the end-user community," explains Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Arvind Arun. "Open source pl...

Leading the industry beyond server virtualization, Egenera Inc. announced today that it will make Egenera® PAN Manager™ software available on other vendors' hardware platforms as part of its new software business. PAN Manager delivers Data Center Virtualization by combining server virtualization with network and storage virtualization to transform IT infrastructure into flexible, scalable assets that can be allocated as needed - resulting in rapid time to market, dynamic scalability and cost-effective high availability. Announcements regarding specific third-party platforms and availability will be made separately. Egenera will continue to innovate and advance the highly successful Egenera® BladeFrame® product line, featuring high-performance, integrated solutions designed for business and mission critical computing. The BladeFrame system will continue to be focused on the high end of the application set where the need for performance and availability are most critical. Egene...

A lot of ex-MS execs and Softricity. Desktone, Inc., provider of the first virtual client computing platform that enables desktops as a service, today announced significant expansion of its management team. Five new executives have joined the company: Les Yetton, Senior Vice President of Sales, Marketing and Business Development; Steven Baron, Vice President of Engineering; Julian Weinstock, Vice President of Product Management; Mark Lewandowski, Vice President of Support and Operations; and Jeff Fisher, Senior Director of Strategic Development. These executives join a vastly experienced Desktone management team, consisting of serial entrepreneurs, former heads of virtualization, client computing and services businesses, and leaders in technology innovation. "Each of these five gentlemen made his mark by growing software companies into successful businesses that led their industries in innovation and customer adoption," said Harry Ruda, CEO of Desktone. "I'm very ple...

I had promised Tom to not sneak out the news and I was a good boy, no? Anyways my brothers at Vyatta have released it today! The cool features of Vyatta 3.0 are: Since its debut, Vyatta’s networking software has been downloaded nearly 100,000 times. As the third major release, Vyatta Community Edition 3 adds a number of changes and enhancements, including: IPSec VPN – Vyatta now supports dedicated site-to-site (branch-to-branch or branch-to-HQ) virtual private networking and supports the most widely used cryptographic algorithms, including 3DES, AES (128 and 256-bit), MD5, and SHA1. In addition, IPsec VPN can now be configured in a cluster of multiple Vyatta units with failover mechanisms providing high availability for mission-critical services. Multi-link PPP (MLPPP) – MLPPP allows customers to increase WAN bandwidth by using multiple low-speed circuits, typically T1 links, in parallel, enabling a pay-as-you-grow strategy instead of paying the high cost of a T3 upgrade. BGP scalin...

OK, this I have to read properly since I do have the "Research Doc" the Butler Group guys wrote: The IT virtualization market is gaining significant momentum, and so I think it's a safe prediction to say that it will accelerate even faster over the coming years. Indeed, Butler Group believes that there will come a point when virtualised server infrastructure, in particular, becomes the de facto way of deploying new IT infrastructure. Any booming market is bound to attract the attentions of established vendors, and the IT virtualization market is no different. However, with such a grand prize to be had - i.e. underpinning every other IT system in the enterprise - the battle for virtual supremacy is likely to pitch newcomers against established industry vendors. I think important things to note are: Market to be in hyperdrive till 2010 : The market is going to get exceedingly volatile, Richard mentions if Microsoft will be the de facto vendor. Looking at how things are mov...

StoneFly, Inc., a leading supplier of integrated IP storage area network (SAN) systems and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dynamic Network Factory, Inc. (DNF), today introduced two new IP SANs as well as upgrades to its existing products. The Integrated Storage Concentrator (ISC) 801 is a new system designed for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in need of transitioning from direct attached storage to an entry-level IP SAN, while the High-Availability Storage Concentrator (HSC) 1601 delivers the industry's highest levels of redundancy to organizations in need of maximum data protection. Now available, the new ISC-801 is an easy-to-deploy "IP SAN-in-a-Box" that provides everything customers need for enterprise-class SAN storage, at an entry-level price. It installs in minutes and features centralized storage management and integrated business continuity, with support for eight drives and up to 4TB of storage. "The ISC-801 gives growing companies the perfect intr...

There is more than one way to offer virtualized desktops, whether it is by running them on a data center server or by running on the OS in a virtualized PC, for example. Lambert added that Citrix now has an advantage over VMware in that it can manage multiple types of virtualization from one console, compared with VMware's Virtual Desktop Infrastructure architecture that only allows the type of hosted desktop based on the use of virtual machines. When XenDesktop ships next year, it will come in several versions: standard, enterprise and platinum, depending on the size of the customer installation. Customers are expressing huge interest in desktop virtualization as a way to lower costs, improve security and to simplify desktop management. Citrix has had to pick up the pace to compete in a world it once owned. It now faces stiff competition from new players and new technologies. Link

And rightly so, why on earth would you spend huge amounts of money to put all those multiple copies of VMs (I know, developers, they are ALL important) on that expensive storage system! IT business services provider T-Systems, for example, made the architectural decision to go with NFS a couple of years ago when it was designing its VMware-based Dynamic Services managed hosting platform. "We really felt that networked NFS was the best option," said Dr. Gregory Smith, Dynamic Services director. "SAN [storage area network] has the advantage in terms of throughput, but in terms of flexibility and management, NFS is much better." As an industry-standard shared file system, NFS volumes are easy to mount and dismount, are supported by any number of clients, and are well understood by IT staffers. Link

Q: What are customers telling you they want? A: We measure the rates of adoption in production. Last year it was 85 percent now it’s over 90 percent. We also ask to what extent people put applications into virtual machines, and that number stays steady in the mid-40s. The difference is that our customer base has doubled. We also ask what applications are going into VMs. Over 60 percent said enterprise applications such as ERP, SalesForce, and databases. High end applications such as transactional applications are not yet virtualised, especially since some are not on x86. Because of today’s increased hardware performance, customers are not noticing any slight decrease in performance due to virtualisation. Also, people are saying that the flexibility they get far outweighs the virtualisation performance overhead. Also VMotion is being used by about 60 percent, HA and DRS by 42 percent, so it’s about more than just consolidation but it's gathering mainstream adoption. In the UK, the n...

And HP and IBM are busy deploying storage in the meantime... On the practical front, the executive disclosures seem to have brought us no closer to the truth. Hitz has backed up claims that Sun's Zettabyte File System (ZFS) infringes on NetApp patents. In addition, he's effectively painted Sun as a type of patent bully that tries to pump money out of rivals by abusing its IP portfolio. Meanwhile, Schwartz has delivered a solid time line of events that seems to prove NetApp actually led the bullying. And, of course, Schwartz stands by Sun's claims not only that ZFS does not violate NetApp patents but also that NetApp's most popular software violates Sun patents. The executive spew - and we believe it's the first of its kind - simply mimics the turgid filings of lawyers in these types of arguments but with a bit more colorful language. Given that the blogging back-and-forth adds no muscle to the actual dispute between the companies, we're surprised that Hitz has c...

"Unlike VMware, we have the platform building block for driving virtual machines with open (Application Program Interfaces) and an open management architecture. We have key partners like Symantec and Microsoft working with us in the space," said Crosby. With the completion of Citrix's acquisition of XenSource this week, the companies are offering two new products based on the Xen hypervisor, Citrix XenServer and Citrix XenDesktop. Citrix XenServer is the repackaged Xen hypervisor for creating virtual machines on servers. Crosby said there are currently 25,000 XenServers in production and 40 to 50 customers signing up each week. The first industry deal came from Dell, which this week adopted the XenServer OEM Edition. Dell will provide the XenServer across Dell's PowerEdge server line in the coming year, introducing built-in, easy-to-use virtual machine installation and management to millions of global Dell customers. Link

Well , it should have een worded: "Virtualization and Intelligent Data Centers key to Business Agility" Anyways... Virtualisation greatly reduces the number of servers, space, power and cooling demands and ultimately enables agility, said Gartner. "An agile datacentre will handle exceptions effectively, and learn from exceptions to improve standards and processes," said Tom Bittman, an analyst at Gartner. "Agility will become a major business differentiator in a connected world. Business agility requires agility in the datacentre, which is difficult as many of the technologies for improving the intelligence and self-management of IT are very immature, but they will evolve over the next ten years," said Bittman. Link

Billionaire Carl Icahn, BEA's biggest shareholder with approx 15% of its stock, has told a reporter that it is "insane" for the company to reject out of hand Oracle's unsolicited bid. "I'm not saying I accept $17," Icahn told Reuters. "It's going to be a three-month process." BEA is insisting that it's worth $21 per share. Icahn has written a letter to the BEA board, disclosed in an SEC filing, demanding that it let shareholders vote on what the best bid for BEA might be. The choices, he believes, ought necessarily to include the existing $6.7BN offer from Larry Ellison's Oracle Corp. I'm still wondering what's keeping VMware from not making this move.

Ian Pratt, of the University of Cambridge in England and the leader of the Xen project, said there were a number of reasons for the delay in including Xen in the kernel. Primarily, Xen 3.0 had suffered from a bit of feature creep. Physical Address Extension (PAE) 32b support and Virtualization Technology, for example, were added very late in the cycle. "We were aiming for an end-of-summer release, but this now looks on target for December," Pratt said. It didn't make much sense to start preparing patches for sending upstream until the Xen 3 guest API was close to being frozen, because there is a significant resource cost in maintaining multiple trees, he said. "We hit this point a month or so back, and there's actually been a lot of activity since then," Pratt said. "We've done a first cut reorganization of our patch into the form that was agreed on at the last Xen summit, forward ported it to the head of Linus [Torvalds'] tree, and put out a c...

While the likes of IBM, HP and Dell sell more servers in China, Inspur ranks as the top homegrown seller of corporate hardware. The company has now agreed to add a virtualization software component to its arsenal by pre-installing and/or reselling SWsoft's Virtuozzo package. Such a deal could be a win for SWsoft as it looks to gain ground in a market where VMware has yet to establish a dominant presence. SWsoft first started hawking its unique, non-hypervisor based virtualization software in China back in late 2005. It has seen 300 per cent growth in the past two years with software localized (simplified and traditional Chinese) for the Chinese market, according to SWsoft CEO Serguei Beloussov. El Reg is carrying the news.

The same day that XenSource, now owned by Citrix Systems, announced Dell will bundle its rebranded Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition—formerly the XenEnterprise suite—in Dell's PowerEdge servers, XenSource officials also said Hewlett-Packard has agreed to resell the virtualization technology with its line of servers. As with Dell, the Oct. 23 move will give server customers of HP, of Palo Alto, Calif., an additional choice when it comes to virtualization. eWeek

I have been telling them to do so long ago but I'm glad they do now, given cash is no problem now. VMware, Inc., announced the opening of its new Asia South headquarters in Singapore. The new office, located at Suntec City Tower 4 within Singapore’s prime business district, features training rooms for partners and customers as well as a state-of-the-art demo facility housing the latest virtualization and server technologies from partners such as AMD, EMC, HP, IBM, and Intel. “Our demo facility is designed to help our customers experience VMware products and solutions working within the ecosystem of partners,” said Lee Poh Wah, Regional Consulting Manager, Asia South, VMware. “We can demonstrate VMware’s latest products such as VMware Infrastructure 3, VirtualCenter, VMotion, Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), High Availability (HA), and VMware Consolidated Backup as well as Virtual Desktop Manager and Lab Manager. VMware Infrastructure 3 streamlines the management of IT environm...

New and Improved Features in VMware Fusion 1.1 Release Candidate * VMware Fusion 1.1 now includes English, French, German, and Japanese versions * Unity improvements include: o My Computer, My Documents, My Network Places, Control Panel, Run, and Search are now available in the Applications menu, Dock menu, and the Launch Applications window o Improved support for Windows Vista 32 and 64-bit editions o Improved Unity window dragging and resizing performance * Boot Camp improvements include: o Support for Microsoft Vista in a virtual machine o Improved support for preparing Boot Camp partitions o Automatically remount Boot Camp partition after Boot Camp virtual machine is shut down * Improved support for Mac OS X Leopard hosts * Improved 2D drawing performance, especially on Santa Rosa MacBook Pros

Third-quarter net income totaled $64.7 million, or 18¢ per share. Wall Street's consensus estimate was that VMware would earn 17¢ per share on $334 million in revenues, but the unofficial "whisper" estimate had investors looking for $355 million to $360 million in sales. As such, the results managed to vault the especially high hurdle analysts had set in advance of the Oct. 24 report. Investors bid up VMware shares in after-hours trading following the update, though some of that gain may have been driven by short-sellers forced to cover their positions after betting the company wouldn't meet the market's outsize expectations. Link

Yet open source Xen, which doesn’t even make the single digits on any analyst’s set of predictions, and its commercial instantiation XenSource may still have a chance in the corporate market. And don't overlook Microsoft's Windows Server Virtualization offering either. “Both have been talking up their plans and efforts for months, as well as their proposed superiority over competing solutions — namely VMware. In 2007, customers will finally be able to tell for themselves," says Charles King, analyst at Pund-IT Research. Link

Just spoke to the VP Product Strategy and got a better idea of what Surgient VQMS product can do. I've downloaded the latest version and will be trying it out in the weekend! Go get it here and join the forums here to resolve your technical issues with the product.

Unisys already has considerable knowledge and experience of working with large scale storage infrastructures and working with its clients to better manage their evolving storage requirements. Together with the Incipient suite of software products, Unisys will be able to further transform the storage infrastructures of its clients, offering them the flexibility they need to manage business growth while lowering the general costs of SAN ownership. Under the agreement with Incipient, Unisys will be entitled to offer to customers a proven solution for managing large-scale SAN environments. Feature sets such as non-disruptive data migration and automated storage provisioning will offer customers the ability to dynamically respond to rapid storage growth and to reduce planned downtime. Additionally, customers will benefit from reductions in capital and operational expenditures. With Incipient software, Unisys can also help customers move towards “on demand” storage, breaking the vendor lock-...

As enterprises grow and businesses expand, managing mounting data is something today’s organisations have to tackle deftly. This has become important for both business and legal reasons and has certainly made storage solutions a key IT component in the last few years. India is particularly at the thick of things as it contributes to the ever-growing storage solutions segment and is said to be the largest generator of data. And so, the country is becoming the focus of activities as far as storage solutions are concerned. From a mere storehouse of data, which used to exist in an oblivious corner in devices out of touch with other rapidly growing mainstream segments like servers, storage solutions are today one of the important facets of IT infrastructure. As Adrian De Luca, Director, Storage Solutions, Asia Pacific, Hitachi Data Systems, explained, storage solutions have well past the ‘consolidation’ stage, as technology matured over the years, that has driven up utilisation. Link

BASF IT Services, which has been pioneering implementation of the SoftGrid virtualisation solution from Microsoft, says it works well, enabling manufacturers to roll out new applications and updates much more quickly. The company is among the first to apply the new technology on a large scale, and says that many thousands of users at its clients are now working with applications that have been virtualised. Link

Simply Mail Solutions have adopted the latest Virtualisation Software technology to allow them to grow their service whilst improving service to customers and making more efficient use of hardware. Commented Colin Smith SMS Managing Director “To some companies virtualisation is just about running more servers on a given piece of hardware. For us it was about maintaining levels of service customer without the number of individual items of hardware getting out of hand and becoming unmanageable” SMS has adopted Infrastructure 3 from VMware, Inc – one of the hottest technology company flotations of 2007 (NYSE: VMW) and implemented it on a batch of powerful new servers from Dell. Link

Since Citrix announced its intent to acquire the company last summer, XenSource's business model has switched gears quite a bit. In August, the open source virtualization software company announced XenCenter OEM Edition, the industry's first embedded hypervisor. And this week, just days after Citrix closed its $500m acquisition of the company, Dell announced plans to ship XenCenter as an option on all of its x86 PowerEdge Servers. On the surface, Crosby's rhetoric appears to contradict XenSource's technical partnership with Microsoft on Viridian, the planned Xen compatible hypervisor for Windows Server 2008. Yet, behind the scenes, it appears that XenSource, Citrix and Microsoft may be expanding their close partnerships to defeat a common enemy: VMware. El Reg

VMW 103.52, -2.63, -2.5%) said it earned $65 million, or 18 cents a share, on revenue of $358 million. During the same period a year ago, which was before VMware became a public company, the company earned $19.2 million, or 6 cents a share, on $189 million in sales. Excluding charges and one-time expenses, VMware would have earned $85 million, or 23 cents a share. VMware topped the estimates of analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial, who forecast a profit of 17 cents a share on $334 million in revenue. VMware officials said the software license deals made up $247 million in the quarter's revenue, while services accounted for $110 million worth of sales. Link

Wyse Technology, the global leader in thin computing, today announced that its recently announced Wyse TCX Multimedia software has received the coveted Citrix Ready(tm) designation. This verification process confirms that Wyse TCX Multimedia has successfully met stringent testing and criteria set by Citrix. Wyse TCX Multimedia delivers multimedia capabilities across Citrix's Application Delivery Infrastructure products, including Citrix Presentation Server(tm) and Citrix XenDesktop(tm), for Wyse thin clients. Wyse TCX Multimedia is the first software product that extends Citrix ICA's powerful functionality to include rich full screen, full frame rate multimedia display on select thin clients, making this environment suitable for a whole new class of knowledge workers with more demanding needs for their application delivery model. "Our partnership with Wyse continues to extend what's technically possible at a desktop level," said David Jones, corporate vice preside...

In a virtual datacenter where numerous departments utilize shared resources many organizations are facing the challenge of figuring out what rate to charge users for memory, CPU, storage and network. Also challenging is how to recover costs for other expenses such as administrative fees, software licensing and cooling costs. While most organizations agree that utility based chargeback is the way to go help is desperately needed. VKernel has "cracked the code" and created a chargeback calculator and methodology to solve the chargeback challenge. The chargeback calculator takes into consideration many variables including; ESX hosts, storage and network devices, all associated costs, number of user departments/cost centers, who is using the resource, profit margins (if needed) and cost recovery timeframe. Automatically, the calculator outputs the rates an organization should be charging per day for memory, CPU, storage and network. The calculator is designed to be used on an ong...

• Virtualization is expected to speed up the wider movement toward business process automation and remote collaboration. The TechNavio findings appear to indicate that the market in general is expecting a major investment in this area within the next two to three years • Virtualization is also expected to boost the move toward network delivered computing or what is being termed PC-over-IP. This in turn will place vendors such as Cisco, NEC and Sun at the heart of the market, but interestingly leaves the door open for a host of innovative start-ups • As application virtualization speeds up Applications development and maintenance or AMD, vendors have a real opportunity to grow into a new market defined as optimizing legacy applications for virtualization. TechNavio estimates this market to be worth around the $700 million figure in 2007 alone • The biggest long term opportunity for virtualization vendors lies in the SMB space, specifically end-to-end solutions that allow SMBs to outsou...

Bailard analyst Sonya Thadhani says she expects the virtualization software developer to come in ahead of estimates. She's also anticipating volatility in the new issue. "But that is not unique to VMware. We're seeing that across the board" this earnings season when companies miss or surpass estimates. "There is no room for disappointment with this name," Thadhani says. "The growth opportunities are tremendous. It has an amazing hold on the virtualization market." TheStreet reporting

But Tom Buiocci, Brocade's vice president of marketing, said his company's framework differs in that its is application- and data-based, not entirely network-based. "All the intelligence will not go into the network. Our competitor would call [theirs] a network architecture," Buiocci said. "Our approach will leverage the intelligence our partners have put into servers, server virtualization, storage and of course the SAN. "This is not our version of their thing. Is the general category the same? Yes. Is the approach the same? No. The operating system is going to tell us how to behave." Link

This certification enables Data Electronics to join the VMware Service Provider Programme with expert capability to provide Irish customers with the benefits of virtualisation through a hosting model. The benefit of using a Certified VMware Hosted Data Centre focuses primarily on the capability to eliminate server sprawl by converting physical machines into fully functional virtual machines. This, in effect, radically increases the overall efficiency of hardware, reducing space requirement and maintenance, while increasing overall performance and reliability, with guaranteed business continuity. Virtualisation also allows companies to massively consolidate separate incidences of Windows, Unix or Linux.

and they have a lot of itneresting benchmarks. Go here.

And this was my contribution: Dear John, I have sailed the seas. I did that for 10 years. I loved the smell of the salt, then you came by. I was young but hungry, I was naive and foolish. Then came that big Kondratieff wave we call virtualization and I was looking for that proverbial kon-tiki boat, I searched the earth and I wandered. I was betrayed by your love, I felt lost and I felt tied. I wanted to break free and there came my Kon-Tiki, Vyatta! A breath of fresh air. I felt young, I felt lighter, I truly was in love. Thanks to you, I knew what real love is. Its time to move on, its time to sail again, but you aren't that boat. Sorry! Tarry Singh Write you Dear John letter TODAY!

and Intel and VMware are playing too. The event will see your reporter team with our analyst chums over at Freeform Dynamics to reveal the state of virtualization technology. We'll present data obtained through industry surveys and information supplied by our very own Reg readers, detailing what you actually care about in the virtualization game. A couple of top product gurus from VMware will join as well to discuss how customers can manage middleware sprawl in a virtualized environment and the pros and cons behind desktop virtualization. Link

And what about the customers? Will they go with you too? Although there are numerous vendors of server virtualization software, including Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, the company best known for it is VMware, which is owned by EMC. "We have not certified our products for VMWare," Phillips said, adding that "people do that on their own." Oracle will, instead, put more of its efforts behind Xen. "Our strategy is to want something that is standard and not proprietary," he said. Phillips said Oracle's needs for virtualization might be different than the needs of other software companies or end users, but he still sees it as an enabling technology. Well I am tempted to say things that I say to my close friends, when talking about Oracle. they ship the greatest product on the planet, they just need to start getting more accommodating! Read the rest.

VFE (Virtualization For Everyone has learnt that...aww c'mon go on the freaking Google and you can get that inverstors PDF by Phoenix ;-) Get that PDF here. The ball game is about to change. I have said that before, next year we will not even be talking hypervisors! We'll just come back to "Enterprise Applications"!

We all know Vyatta, don't we? Vyatta, the leader in Linux-based networking, today announced that its open-source networking software has received VMware Virtual Appliance Certification, thereby providing customers with a solution that has been optimized for a production-ready VMware environment. The company also announced it has joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) Program. As a member of TAP, Vyatta will offer its solutions via the TAP program website. With the Vyatta virtual appliance for VMware environments, organizations can now include Vyatta’s router, firewall and VPN functions as part of their virtualized infrastructure. Vyatta combines enterprise-class routing and security capabilities into an integrated, reliable and commercially supported software solution, delivering twice the performance of proprietary network solutions at half the price. Running Vyatta software as virtual appliances gives customers many more options for scaling their data centers and con...

From the press release: "For the first time, customers can try a spam-filtering appliance through the download of a virtual software file, to see how it performs relative to their current anti-spam solution," said Jack Marsal, director of product marketing for McAfee. "We're giving customers the opportunity to experience the benefits of McAfee Secure Internet Gateway on their own server, before making an investment in an appliance." The VMware trial has the same features and effectiveness of the physical Secure Internet Gateway appliance. Users can quickly and easily add the software to a server that is already up and running in the production environment, to conduct the evaluation without setting up a separate appliance. The McAfee Secure Internet Gateway provides the following benefits: * Comprehensive threat protection. A single appliance defends against both Web and e-mail threats, stopping spam, phishing, viruses, spyware and malicious Web sites * S...

Interesting this: Recently, I took a seat with 11,000 or so attendees in the huge Moscone Center auditorium. I was there for VMworld 2007. As hard rock throbbed and steam rose from the main stage, I sensed tectonic plates shifting. VMware Inc. President and CEO Diane Green sees a data center operating system coming. I was a bit stunned by that statement because earlier in her presentation she'd emphatically denied that VMware was an operating system. OK, I'll buy the "no OS here" argument for now, but one has to admit that VMware is much more than a hypervisor. And if VMware sees a data center operating system on its road map to the future, then an operating system is what VMware will surely become. Just as surely though, it will be a system unlike any we've seen before. So, is there a data center fabric in your future? Speaking the next day at this event, Cisco Systems Inc. CEO John Chambers preached the virtues of data center fabric on the horizon. What's th...

No, the original title of the post, which I will link you too was, "Everyone is doing it, few know how". But it really touches the core of this issue and actually, just the tip of it. This exactly prompted me to write the Multi-part series: "Virtualization: Shi(f)t happens!" Setting it all up and running it is piece of cake, today VMware has done it, tomorrow Citrix's offerings will have those cool windows GUI, with all the weird "Ok" buttons which is still not OK but we are not discussing that here, that will make the windows admins happy! c'mon we all know, it is those IT managers we all want to appease, it is those system admins, who we want to help "try this" technology. But there is more to it thn just installing it and running it. We just did a quick POC of our test environment, pretty quick! 3 days and the whole test environment was virtualized. Am I happy with it? Far from it! In many ways Virtualization is seen by many as the bla...

From the press: With the completion of the XenSource acquisition, Citrix now adds two new product lines to its portfolio, Citrix XenServer™ for server virtualization and Citrix XenDesktop™ for desktop virtualization. Combined with the company’s existing application virtualization products, these two new additions give Citrix the industry’s most comprehensive end-to-end virtualization portfolio: Server Virtualization with Citrix XenServer . The new Citrix XenServer product line is an enterprise-class platform for managing server virtualization in the datacenter as a flexible aggregated pool of computing and storage resources. Based on the high-performance Xen virtualization engine, Citrix XenServer combines comprehensive server virtualization capabilities with unparalleled scalability, performance and ease-of-use. The new product line ranges from Citrix XenServer Express Edition, an easy-to-use single-server solution available for free download, to the more comprehensive Citrix XenS...

General Introduction Virtualization has come a long way, it has come from the cradle of the developers to the masses. It has happened right under our noses, and then we are talking about the noses of all the big business firms that ignored the trend. It has happened and exploded while many of the vendors were sleeping, and now it is taking over the x86 servers, 95% of the market yet to be capitalized, and soon it will proliferate into the desktops, mobile devices and who knows, some day into your daily appliances such as washing machines, dryers, refrigerators, TV sets, Green Vehicles, Oven/Microwaves, all apparatuses that consume energy. And it will come to all of us, even to you, as a consumer, who will be held accountable for your energy consumption at work, but also at home. I see it as an "optimization phase", with the advent of windows we saw a visible shift from “Centralized Computing Environment”, the mainframes computing where everyone got its own “space” on the ...

Pitt Ohio Express (Pitt Ohio) is a total transportation solution provider that is headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Pitt Ohio delivers over 10,000 shipments daily, with an astounding 98 percent on-time delivery record that makes it one of the most reliable less-than-truckload carriers in the nation. As Pitt Ohio approached a technology refresh cycle within the company, it considered how virtualization could fit into its refresh plans. The company had many servers that were nearing end of life, but replacing each of these five-year-old servers with a brand new box didn’t seem cost-effective – particularly since many of the servers were under-utilized. Link

RepliWeb, a leader in web content deployment automation and managed file transfer software , today announced the release of RepliWeb Deployment Platform (R-1) version 4.0, which accelerates and automates the deployment of web server assets including static and dynamically created Web content, Web applications and Web server components such as IIS6 metabase. Customers have reported RepliWeb Deployment has accelerated content and code release cycles and reduced operating costs associated with updates, content and code management from 30 to 90 percent. The RepliWeb solution is unique in that it automates the deployment of complete websites and allows for seamless integration with existing web content-workflows, operating environments and policies, providing organizations the most comprehensive out-of-the-box deployment solution for maintaining web applications, intranet portals and corporate websites. Designed for organizations with ten or more physical or virtual web or application ser...