Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

I had an interesting chat with John Hamilton, the EVP & COO at Trigence. They also happen to have alliance with my new employer, AtosOrigin, so I guess I'll hear a lot about them from my insiders. Here's John's profile from Trigence's site: John Hamilton, EVP and Chief Operating Officer John is a seasoned senior executive with extensive management expertise including leadership of global sales and technical services organizations in enterprise software industries. Prior to joining Trigence, John was at Softricity, Inc. (recently acquired by Microsoft) where he was Vice President, Worldwide Sales, responsible for national and international sales, channels and customer technical services. Prior to joining Softricity, he served as Vice President of North American Sales for Phase Forward, Inc., where he was responsible for sales and revenue for North America. Previously, he was Executive Vice President, Worldwide Sales and Services, at Concord Communicat...

Like I said, we did a Vendor Briefing with the StackSafe guys last week and here's the official statement. StackSafe, Inc., a provider of pre-production staging and testing solutions for IT operations teams, announced today the immediate availability of StackSafe™ Test Center. Test Center is the first virtualized staging and testing solution for IT Operations teams that improves availability and resiliency through enhanced software infrastructure testing. StackSafe's solution directly addresses incomplete and ineffective IT Operations testing and analysis of changes to multi-tiered software infrastructure stacks. "If IT Operations teams can test and certify changes to software infrastructures before they go live, then IT services become more available and resilient as well as more repeatable and better documented," said Donna Scott, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "Comprehensive and efficient staging, testing and analysis are essential to ach...

Hi Steve, please tell us a bit about yourself? My background: I have spent about 25 years of my career in the data storage industry and was one of the founders of Exabyte Corp. Before founding ProStor, I was the CEO of Network Photonics, a telecom equipment manufacturer. I hold about 20 U.S. and international patents. Tell us a bit about ProStor, how did it come to life? The ProStor founders have a long history in the backup and archive markets. ProStor Systems came to life after recognizing that disk-to-disk backup solutions would not be able to replace tape until there was a form of removable media for offsite storage for disaster recovery and for long-term archive at low cost. This prompted the development of RDX® removable disk technology. Tell us about InfiniVault Appliance? InfiniVault™ is the first storage system to take advantage of RDX removable disk medi...

I don't need to elaborate here

Merrill Lynch & Co. said on Monday co-President Ahmass Fakahany will leave the company as the brokerage builds a new management team following a credit implosion that triggered US$12-billion in net losses in the second half of 2007. Fakahany's departure is effective February 1. No replacement was announced. Before his promotion in May to co-president, Fakahany duties included responsibility for market risk management as Merrill's build-up of risky collateralized debt obligations surged. Exposure to the subprime-laden debt vehicles backfired. Soured CDO positions were mostly to blame for Merrill's US$24-billion in write-downs last year and huge net losses. Rest at Financial Times

In an interview done last week in advance of today's announcement of the Cloud Edition plans, Zurek declined to disclose specifics about the company's pricing plans. But the pricing "will be disruptive," he said. "I don't think Oracle will like this." Zurek didn't stop there in his predictions. "What MySQL was for LAMP, we will be for the cloud," he said, referring to the popular open-source technology stack of Linux, Apache, MySQL and either Perl, PHP or Python. The new database will be hosted on and run from Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, while database table data will be stored using Amazon's S3 online storage service. Read the rest! Let the convergence begin!

I have had numerous discussions with Greg in the past two year or so. Greg does a lot of evalgelization around security. Since we had never spoken we spoke a few days back. I was in the train heading back home after the Virtualization event in Belgium. Here's a summarized version of our chat! Hi Greg, tell us a bit about yourself and your role at Blue Lane? I'm the VP Marketing at Blue Lane Technologies. We're down the street from Apple's original Cupertino headquarters. I've been at Blue Lane for about two years. Before joining Blue Lane I held exec marketing positions at Juniper Networks, Redline Networks, IntruVert and ShoreTel. The basic strategy behind my career since 2000 has been joining companies that I felt were introducing timely, breakthrough technologies (with "A" player exec teams)that would be game changers: VoIP; IPS; App delivery (AFE); and now layer 7 server and VM security. Tell us a bit about Blue Lane? When was it...

"The ever-changing needs of today's enterprise data centers call for a virtualization solution that is flexible and delivers high performance," said Serguei Beloussov, CEO of Parallels. "With the release of Parallels Virtuozzo Containers 4.0, we are launching the next wave of virtualization, including a suite of products that help IT administrators effectively manage their growing virtual infrastructures." Beloussov continued that Parallels customers are already doing large-scale virtualization deployments, including service provider data centers and software-as-a-service applications. "Parallels offers the right technological approach coupled with the best economics to deliver a comprehensive suite of virtualization and automation products for any hardware or software environment," said Beloussov. Parallels Virtuozzo Containers is different from traditional hardware virtualization solutions in that it dynamically partitions a single Windows or Linux o...

Just got this from Reflex Security's PR: Atlanta , Ga. – January 28, 2007 – Reflex Security, the leader in integrated network security for data center, core networks, and virtual environments, today announced that Reflex VSA (Virtual Security Appliance) now supports Citrix XenServer. Reflex will be exhibiting at Citrix Summit this week in booth # 412 . Reflex Virtual Security Appliance provides a new layer of security for the virtual environment providing comprehensive intrusion prevention or detection, LAN-based firewall, network access control, IP to ID, and network discovery for traffic inside virtual network. Reflex VSA protects virtual server environments which are subjected to many of the same security threats that physical servers are subjected to. Reflex VSA offers proven technology no only to secure virtual environments but to increase overall security for the entire organization by leveraging the virtualization platform “We’re pleased to lead the market by ...

VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW - News) the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, today announced financial results for the fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2007: * Total revenues for the fourth quarter were $412 million, an increase of 80% compared to the year-ago quarter. * GAAP operating income for the fourth quarter was $76 million compared to $37 million in the fourth quarter of 2006. Non-GAAP operating income was $108 million, representing 26% of fourth-quarter revenues and an increase of 72% over the year-ago quarter. * GAAP net income for the quarter was $78 million, or $0.19 per diluted share, compared to $31 million, or $0.09 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Non-GAAP net income for the quarter was $103 million, or $0.26 per diluted share. GAAP and non-GAAP net income for the fourth quarter of 2007 include a $0.01 per diluted share benefit from a chang...

WALTHAM, Mass., Jan. 29, 2008 – In the fourth quarter of 2007, data virtualization middleware solutions provider xkoto Inc. , reported significant revenue growth of more than 150 percent over the same period in 2006. The company's growth and momentum was fueled by the increasing demand from enterprise customers requiring highly reliable and scalable solutions capable of ensuring continuous access to corporate data. Highlights of the quarter and full year include the significant expansion of xkoto’s management team, distribution channel and partner programs, as well as new customer adoption in North America and Europe and a major new release of xkoto’s flagship product, GRIDSCALE ® . “Customers and prospects in virtually all data intensive segments require high performance, highly reliable, scalable access to data for mission-critical systems. As a result, we’re witnessing the rapid adoption of xkoto’s proven data virtualization technology,” said David Patrick, President and CE...

We are seeing a lot of complementers are turning to Citrix. Citrix channel partners are growing by huge numbers and we are seeing a massive build-up for toolkits in that direction. VMlogix announced it, Reflex Security announced it , and many more will follow suit!

This blogger is covering it live from Florida at Citrix Summit 2008.

Topics to be covered are: We invite research/technical papers on the following topics: 1) Nanotechnology 2) VLSI and Embedded System 3) Micro Electronics Mechanical System 4) Soft Computing (fuzzy logic, neural network , genetic algorithm) 5) Power System and Energy Conservation 6) Biometrics and its Application 7) Virtual Instrumentation and Data Acquisition 8) Low Cost Industry Automation 9) Artificial Intelligence 10) Power System and Energy Conservation 11) E-Governance 12) Mobile and Distributed Computing 13) Object Oriented Software Engineering A great place to hire young and Avastu researchers for our Biotech, Alternative Energy, AI etc. you'll hear more from us. More here.

Quick diag. of what the CAStore does? AUSTIN, Texas, January 28th, 2008 – Caringo Inc., a leading provider of content storage software that delivers a clustered storage infrastructure for storing both active and archive content, today released a comprehensive white paper detailing the performance characteristics of its CAStor™ software. The paper provides IT managers with valuable information for understanding what’s needed to design and deploy a performance-optimized content storage solution to meet the speed and budget requirements of competitive business operations. The white paper titled “Performance Considerations and Metrics” and authored by Caringo co-founder and President Jonathan Ring, provides potential customers an understanding of the environmental and technical considerations to be addressed such as application and client workloads as well as CPU and RAM configurations. The performance numbers in this paper demonstrate CAStor’s unique ability to provide the speed of prima...

This just in from our JPR folks. We will chat up with NetEX folks coming Wednesday! MINNEAPOLIS, MN – January 28th, 2008 – NetEx, the leader in high speed data transport over TCP, today announced a new version of its award winning HyperIP® software technology that boosts performance by almost 50 percent to deliver near-native wire speed performance of 800 Mb/s and currently residing on a non-proprietary, off-the-self Intel appliance. This new speed standard enables NetEx customers to purchase the HyperIP data acceleration solution on an industry standard platform at 1.5 Mb/s and then add performance as needed up to 800 Mb/s all in the same appliance with no hardware upgrades required. Customers can purchase the performance they need instead of being forced to purchase a specific hardware model with vendor-imposed performance limits as offered by other WAN optimization products that lack the capabilities to compete in enterprise replication and recovery environments. As bandwidth requi...

Yes, you heard it, I am throwing the term Open Source out of the window! We have seen enough battles between Open Source and Closed Source. My keynote at the International Virtualization Conference in Belgium was about just that: Usable Source! Talking to our good friend and CEO of the rockstar Networking start-up, Kelly Herrell was just the same. Kelly is a fan of Clayton Christensen , like me. I love the work of Porter, Dawkins, Beer, Nohria, Prahlad etc as well. Anyways talking to Kelly was really fun. This man is smart, witty and is steering a great start-up! As CEO and member of the Board of Directors, Kelly provides the strategic leadership and vision for Vyatta and drives it through to rapid execution. Kelly has a proven track record for growing companies based on open source in the systems, embedded and telephony industries. Before joining Vyatta, Kelly was the SVP of Strategic Operations at MontaVista Software, the world's pre-eminent embedded Linux supplier, where he l...

Powered by OneFS®, Isilon IQ delivers the industry's first single file system that unifies and provides instant and ubiquitous access to the rapidly growing stores of digital content, eliminating the cost and complexity barriers of traditional storage architectures. OneFS is a unified operating system software layer that powers all of Isilon's award-winning IQ family of clustered storage systems including the Isilon IQ 200, 1920, 3000, 6000, 9000, 12000, Accelerator, and EX 6000, 9000, and 12000. Isilon also provides a robust suite of software applications including SnapshotIQ®, SmartConnect™, SmartQuotas, MigrationIQ™ and SyncIQ® that leverage OneFS and clustered storage, providing the highest levels of data protection and automated data management. Press Release X-Series release: What can it do? Isilon's X-Series clustered storage systems serve as a critical component of the next-generation data center, providing enterprise businesses with unprecedented storage scalabilit...

IGEL Technology launches the industry’s first 19 inch LCD integrated thin client from a major manufacturer Based on the attractive and cost competitive Samsung® 19” LCD panel, the Elegance 9319LX and 9619XP are ideal for users needing an integrated LCD thin client that provides a large screen, rich digital services, minimal cabling and small desktop footprint. Reading, England, 28th January 2008 - IGEL Technology today announced its new integrated 19 inch flat panel LCD thin clients using Samsung hardware technology. The Elegance 9319 LX and 9619 XP are ideal for point-of-sales solutions or space-constrained environments in retail, financial services and healthcare. Prices start at just €739/£499/$989 (+tax). Alongside a high quality display from one of the world’s leading flat screen vendors, the latest Elegance models contain a premium set of digital services including Citrix® ICA 10, Microsoft® RDP 6, a Leostream® VDI client for connecting to virtual PCs, terminal emulation, web bro...

I forgot to mention. Last week I had a vendor briefing with StakSafe folks. The news will be released in a couple of hours. Keep watching here and at StackSafe !

We all know how Yankee Group was shredded by the community when they came out with all kinds of figures against the Open Source, Linux and having written several articles which were apparently biased. Well at Slashdot Yankee was shredded pretty bad! I don't know if Burton group is biased but this blogger thinks so: Is the Burton Group not even trying to conceal its love and obedience for Microsoft? Remember that previous post and very recent “love letter” ? How about the Group’s dependence on Microsoft technologies? Who will the Burton Group attack next, on behalf of its beloved masters? That is just what today’s analysts are for . Check out the rest Update: This blogger takes a totally different road to interpretation though. Grammatical errors aside and a daedal yet balderdash one-line analysis: But Mr. Jones post is interesting for another reason: throught it the Burton Group takes a strong and neat position against Microsoft. ... he "cleverly" shows that you can rend...

Robert offers some really insightful points here, as an ex-Novell employee, he knows what went wrong back then. Quoting Robert: So how is history repeating itself, you may ask? So in late 2004, Microsoft acquired the virtualization assets of Connectix and launched Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. By comparison to VMware, it doesn't scale and performance is so poor its not really useful to the broad market. Hmmm - Sounds like LAN Manager doesn't it? So Microsoft has restarted from scratch and is launching Hyper-V, its new virtualization solution. At this point, it's a promise, and from Beta reports appears to be akin to Windows NT first releases: better than before, and good enough for a broader market, but still not as rich and mature as VMware's ESX server. So what will the clincher be? Microsoft is already showing that it is integrating its virtualization solution with its whole course meal; integrations with its broad menu of products. On January 21st, Microsof...

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...

img_4277.jpg , originally uploaded by raphinou_flickr .

img_4251.jpg , originally uploaded by raphinou_flickr . Panel Discussion. Ther parties involved: Publish Post Left to Right: Dirk Tombeur, ex-CTO Belgium (now Platform Strategy Manager Belgium &Luxembourg) Microsoft Roger Baskerville, Regional Director EMEA, Citrix Virtualization Myself (in my role as independent analyst from my Avastu) Frank Kohler, Project Manager, Novell Jeremy van Doorn, SE Manager, VMware Werner Fischer, Thomas-Krenn.AG (openVZ expert) and John Abbot Co-Founder/Chief Analyst, The451Group

img_4239.jpg , originally uploaded by raphinou_flickr . This is me here. After John's talk of his 451Group story, I spoke about the convergence and the challenges we are going to face in the coming years (with or without virtualization).

img_4290.jpg Originally uploaded by raphinou_flickr

Watch it as a slideshow at Flickr

I spoke to our good friend and entrepreneur Ratmir, the founder of Aelita (which he sold to Quest for over $100M) some time back. When Ratmir started with this new idea on this newer turf, he was entering a "stage battlefield"where he has learned to master the game during the Microsoft-Novell battle and eventual migration abilities. This seems to be repeating itself with a possible Microsoft Citrix acquisition. I am personally advising that this should better happen at a later stage, like 2009 Q2, but any other developments and an aggressive push from a third party can make this happen this year as well. Anyways, you know what I am getting at. Microsoft has a different challenge today and on a different turf (horizontal, flatter, blogomaniacal age) and we are very curious how the "new middle" will be situated established in this game. Anyways, here is the (summarized) chat I had with Ratmir : 1. Hi Ratmir, what has changed at Veeam Software since we last s...