Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

Here's a snippet of the new two weeks ahead! These capabilities in the latest release of VirtualShield, enhanced by VMware® VirtualCenter integration, allow Blue Lane ’s layer 7 architecture to apply granular application/protocol/port-based policy enforcement on the flows between VMs. The result is the industry’s broadest spectrum of protection for virtualized data centers, including inter-VM protection for VMs residing on the same host. VirtualShield’s accuracy, comprehensive protection and minimal processing requirements make it the first IPS capable of protecting virtualized production data centers from network-based attacks. “ Blue Lane ’s advanced Layer 7 architecture delivers unprecedented protection and visibility for virtualized infrastructure without the common operational and traffic tradeoffs inherent in traditional deep packet network intrusion prevention systems,” said Allwyn Sequeira, SVP product operations at Blue Lane Technologies. “VirtualShield 4.2 is ...

LOS GATOS, Calif., March 31, 2008 – Hifn™ (NASDAQ: HIFN), the catalyst behind storage and networking innovation, will showcase its Swarm™ secure iSCSI SAN appliances at FOSE 2008 Conference and Exhibition, April 1-3 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C., Booth #1517N. Hifn’s Swarm appliances are the only iSCSI storage appliances available with integrated AES256 hardware data encryption, providing a simple-to-deploy and easy-to-use, out-of-the-box regulatory compliance solution for government installations facing the complexity of protecting people’s data and mandates governing the retention of information. In addition, Hifn’s Swarm 3000 model was the world’s first iSCSI storage appliance to feature RAID level 6, adding an extra layer of protection against potential data loss during the longer array rebuild times associated with high-capacity SATA drives. Hifn’s IP SAN storage system allows government users to leverage their existing Gigabit Ethernet infrast...

SANTA CLARA, CA – April 1, 2008 – Citrix Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq:CTXS), the global leader in application delivery infrastructure today announced the general availability of Citrix XenServer™ 4.1, the product line’s first release since Citrix completed the acquisition of XenSource in late 2007. With the new release, Citrix also unveiled a groundbreaking new pricing model that allows customers to deploy an unlimited number of virtual machines per server at a single low price. The new simplified pricing applies to all editions of XenServer, including the recently announced XenServer Platinum Edition that brings the benefits of the dynamic datacenter to both physical and virtual servers for the first time ever. These enhancements, together with a rapidly expanding list of resellers and strategic infrastructure partners are making virtualization far easier and more affordable for customers of all sizes. “Server virtualization technology is tracking to be equally as ubiquitous as the system...

SANTA CLARA , CA – March 31, 2008 – Citrix Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: CTXS), the global leader in application delivery infrastructure, and NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP), a leading provider of innovative data management solutions, today announced a global, strategic partnership to deliver a complete server virtualization solution capable of fully leveraging the power of NetApp® storage solutions. Citrix XenServer™ Adapter for NetApp Data ONTAP® enables customers to unlock the power of virtualized storage in Citrix XenServer environments. This jointly developed certified solution simplifies virtual machine creation and management by allowing customers to centrally manage storage configuration and provisioning from a single console, making it one of the industry’s few virtualization solutions optimized for storage environments. Citrix and NetApp are building on their existing relationship and extending virtualized data management environment capabilities included in Citrix XenServer 4.1, which be...

I can fully understand the pressures of being a CIO. Someday I might be at that post, although I'd rather be a CSO ;-). But seriously the time to wait and see is come and gone, CIOs, Sr. Managers are gearing up to act. The ones who still want to see the virtualization phenomena as a freak wave, might have to really put on those glasses and aim for their guns. I might (Still need Citrix to confirm that for me though ;-))be doing a CIO/Business Strategy Session at the upcoming Citrix Summit "Synergy 08" , and the audience are CIOs and business managers. I'd love to share with you my perspectives/insights that I have gained in various industries. Anyways here a perspective from the Arab world: With more of the same set to arrive in forthcoming generations of server technology, there is a potential temptation to play ‘wait and see' - although as virtualisation is apparently here to stay, this process is likely to be never-ending. Potentially more interesting is the ...

You have to start testing the XenDesktop beta and go to the XenDesktop forums to have your questions answered. This is a snippet copy/paste from the Citrix Blog: If you have followed the discussions in the XenDesktop forums , or - even better - if you've tried the beta version of XenDesktop, you'll be aware that it integrates with Active Directory. Indeed, in particular the Desktop Delivery Controller (DDC - the component responsible for brokering end users to their virtual desktops) has a strong dependency on AD, and stores some data in AD that relates to security and determines how virtual desktops discover and communicate with desktop delivery controllers. Several questions have come up on this integration, and on what is actually stored in Active Directory. This post will show in more detail what's going on under the covers. Just a note of caution: the information in this post reflects the beta release of XenDesktop; however we're not expecting major changes in thi...

Are you going there? I might be doing a keynote there myself! Register now for Citrix Synergy - where virtualization, networking and application delivery meet, May 20–23, 2008, in Houston, Texas. And the summit is going to be at the cool George R Brown convention center in Houston , I've worked in Houston back in 97 so I'm curious to see how things have changed out there ;-)

Saw at Citrix forums, handy stuff for your helpdesk staff when your virtualized desktops start melting ;-) download it here.

This article comes just about in time. today I was having a discussion with my colleague about why we should start putting the security and start hardening the ESX hypervisor against any malicious attacks/hacks. I (and some other colleagues) have rewritten our "Virtualization: Design Guide" completely and I was the guy pushing the security into our every other deployments. There is one thing for sure: "There will be a breach somewhere, The 451Group has predicted that a malicious ESX hack is coming, Joanna did also talk about the Escape phenomena. I think the thinning of the TSA (Threat Surface Area) with ESX 3i will help the decrease the chances of the attack/hack getting thinner but a mere statement that: "Since the TSA footprint is much smaller, we are a lot safer than yesterday" is like hoping that a nuclear warhead will not hit your country since you are so small, and trust me you will feel nuked when that happens in your data center! So my adivce to all f...

But the love-fest was short-lived. Microsoft (MSFT) has entered the race with lower-cost virtualization software, and while it is still only in beta, the threat of the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant sent shudders through most investors when the company starting pounding the table on virtualization in late January. This has made VMware look -- to some -- like the next Netscape, another innovative Silicon Valley software maker that briefly ruled its market before getting crushed by Microsoft . The market already seems to have voted. VMware's stock, which debuted at $29 a share in August, soared past the $125 mark by late October. The shares then sharply reversed -- no doubt helped by a general downturn in technology stocks - - and have since sunk back below the $50 mark. The stock closed at $51 on the day of its IPO. "Maybe VMware has a very strong product offering today, but the question investors are struggling with is, for how long can VMware continue to h...

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...

Randall has some tests he carried out: Benefiting from the management tools built around Virtuozzo, the company's OS partitioning solution for Linux and Windows, Parallels Server takes aim at the 800-pound gorilla of server virtualization (VMware ESX) and the looming elephant (Microsoft Hyper-V) by providing a product that supports both “bare metal” and “lightweight hypervisor” runtime models. In the former, Parallels will boot a scaled-down Linux kernel that acts as the hypervisor layer upon which you can build your VM (the ESX model). In the latter, Parallels will install a combination device driver/service on a host OS (the Hyper-V model), allowing you to build your VM infrastructure atop an existing server platform. Parallels was kind enough to allow us a sneak peak at an early beta build of Parallels Server. Installing the Windows hosted version onto an existing Windows Server 2003 system was straightforward, and it didn’t even require a reboot. Once installed, Parallels Ser...

Brian talks about it on his site and thinks not: VMware deserves a lot of credit. Even though hardware virtualization has been around for decades in one form or another, we wouldn't have it in the x86 space without VMware. The hardware and OS vendors would have been happy to keep selling hardware that was only 20% utilized. VMware turned this industry on its head. They deserve credit not only for the move towards virtual hardware, but also for the whole VDI concept. (Even though VMware did not initially embrace VDI, the early adopters / creators of the concept couldn't have done it without VMware.) So kudos to VMware for doing some awesome stuff. But VMware will face some tough times ahead: Hardware virtualization is becoming a commodity, and when this happens, you end up with a lot of competitors, feature parity across vendors, and a price race to the bottom. The "easy" virtualization sales have been made already. What's left is the more complex stuff, with lo...

All of the ecosystem partners will continue to help further VMware’s success because it is a symbiotic relationship—right now, everyone is making money. But in so doing, there is a big risk that over time, VMware will marginalize most, if not all, of its ecosystem partners. VMware is in a position to deliver more and more functionality that will increasingly impact the very ecosystem that is complicit in making it successful. Since VMware today is fundamentally an infrastructure company, it will build concentric circles of capability from that point outward. That is why its proprietary file system is so important—it enables VMware to manage and control data. It gives VMware the keys to the kingdom and they know it. Microsoft never quite got this and still doesn’t today. In the meantime, VMware is in a position to create more software that will impact storage, backup and replication. Many of the ecosystem partners – the server, storage, backup, data protection and operating system vendo...

Finally I see how Allan looks like :-) Here's what he had to say: The main contender for control of the enterprise data center are the blade server vendors: IBM, HP, Rackable, Verari and others. The movement toward blade servers for manageability and lower overall lower total cost of ownership has been underway for a number of years. As these blade servers get more powerful and at the same time more power and cooling efficient, organizations will be spending a significant amount of money on these devices – and that gives these vendors a step up on building trust and control in the enterprise data center. A number of CIOs that I have spoken with agree with this sentiment but are looking for these vendors to provide better manageability features for their blade servers. As you may expect, the benefits of trusting the control of your data center to a server vendor increases significantly if you have a homogenous implementation. More here...

Mountain View , Calif. – March 26, 2008 – Gear6, accelerating I/O for real time application performance, today announced it has secured a $10 million dollar financing round led by Horizon Ventures. Existing investors U.S. Venture Partners and InterWest Partners also participated in the round. The funds will be used to bolster the company’s market expansion being fueled by increasing demand for its CACHEfx line of scalable caching appliances. Centralized storage caching is rapidly emerging as the most simple and cost-effective way to increase data center application performance while dramatically reducing total storage costs. “Gear6 has made great progress delivering centralized caching solutions in the data center,” said Doug Tsui, managing director at Horizon Ventures. “The company’s products showcase the kind of compelling customer rewards we expect when investing in new, industry-transforming solutions. CACHEfx appliances not only deliver significant performance improvements ...

Melissa Martin, senior market analyst, enterprise end-user programmes, IDC Australia said half of responding CIOs have Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is their 2008 budgets. “This is interesting as many IT industry participants first saw SOA as another standards and application development paradigm wave that would just fade away,” she said. According to Martin virtualisation is another of the top technologies that CIOs will be investing in this year. This is no surprise as CIOs are now on the journey to enable their environments to be as flexible and ‘future proofed' as possible. SOA and Virtualisation technologies are enablers that can support these objectives," added Martin. Link

And I still think they are two years too late. I had suggested it back in 2006 but with Microsoft and Citrix spreading their broad globally-reachable wings, it may be a tad bit too late. Anyways here's the news: VMware president and CEO Diane Greene announced in Bangalore that the new initiative includes investing US$100 million (S$139 million) in India by 2010. The planned expansion involves a new, state-of-the-art 82,000 square foot development centre in South Bangalore, including a 4,000 square foot computer lab; and doubling the company’s India-based development team to more than 1,000 people in the next two years. The Palo Alto, California-headquartered company entered India in 2004 and currently boasts of a strong presence across the South Asian country with offices in Bangalore, Pune, Chennai, Delhi, and Mumbai, employing about 700 people. Commenting on the decision to expand the company’s research operations, Greene said: “India is also one of our fastest growing markets ...

PORTSMOUTH, N.H., March 26, 2008 – VKernel Corporation, a provider of easy-to-use and quick-to-deploy virtual appliances for managing virtual server environments, announced today that Gartner, Inc., a leading independent research firm, has named the company as a “Cool Vendor in Server Virtualization Management, 2008.” The report issued on March 17, 2007 lists VKernel as one of the “leading contenders attempting to address optimization of the virtual-server infrastructure.” According to the Gartner report, the rapid deployment of virtual-server technology is resulting in increased demand for tools to provide more-effective planning and oversight. As organizations scale their virtual infrastructures with velocity, new solutions are needed to solve new management challenges. VKernel is changing today’s cumbersome systems management approach with tools that are optimized to save overburdened IT departments time with virtual appliances that quickly deploy, require no learning curve, and ...

I'm reading Eckart's book, a neat moleskine one, called "Eckart's Notes". This man bought a company for 10 guilders back in 1976 and made a multinational out of it with 10,000 employees! After selling his firm to Philip's , he went deep into Green computing/energy wth this firm called Extent (Eck's tent) . Obituary/condolence Register here

So hang in tight, people!

The poll is here and the current results look like this: also join the LinkedIn discussion to say what you really feel about it!

Ottawa , March 24, 2008 – Embotics , the Virtualization Lifecycle Management Company™, today announced its membership in the Microsoft Startup Accelerator Program . Stewarded by the Emerging Business Team (EBT) at Microsoft Corp., the program is designed to connect high-potential startups committed to the Microsoft platform to an extensive support network. This program provides access to Microsoft people and programs, guidance on future directions and support to accelerate their success. “Being a part of the Microsoft Startup Accelerator Program validates our position in the virtualization lifecycle management and automation market,” said Jay Litkey, CEO and founder of Embotics. “Microsoft’s selection of Embotics for this program further propels our success and growth with current customers, as well as solidifies our stance in the industry as a company to watch.” Designed specifically for virtual environments, Embotics’ V-Commander complements and extends existing virt...

So I chatted with Jerry, CTO at Marathon once again, and he explained about the everrun VM release. How does Marathon provide HA to today's loosely coupled virtualization solutions? As Simon Crosby says, “everRun VM brings fault-tolerant computing to the masses.” Our new software transparently creates and manages what we call “protected virtual machines” running on redundant hosts in a XenServer resource pool. Disk data is mirrored synchronously to redundant storage and redundant networks are managed across the hosts. If a failure occurs in a disk or network device, everRun automatically reconfigures resources to permit the application to continue operating without interruption. And we’re bringing fault-tolerant computing to the masses by making it brain-dead simple. You can deploy everRun VM from bare metal in 30 minutes. I’m not kidding, it really is 30 minutes or less. And once it’s up and running we automate everything so that it practically runs itself. What a...

Littleton , Mass. , March 24, 2008 — Marathon Technologies Corporation announced everRun VM, the world’s first fault-tolerant , high availability software for server virtualization. Based on the same everRun ® automated availability software employed by over 1800 organizations, everRun VM prevents outages and data loss in Citrix XenServer virtual infrastructures. The significance of this new software for the IT industry is threefold: 1. Companies can now reliably run production applications in virtual machines, gaining the benefits of virtualization across a much broader range of applications 2. It will now be practical to make high availability and DR a standard part of the IT infrastructure for midsize and larger companies 3. A key component is in place to accelerate the next wave of server virtualization adoption Enabling Virtualization of Production Applications To date, most of the applications that have been migrated to virtual servers remain in...

On March 17, 2008, BMC Software announced its intent to acquire BladeLogic, the world’s leading and fastest-growing IT data center automation company. Extending BMC’s Business Service Management (BSM) portfolio to include BladeLogic is the next natural step in the evolution of BSM. The acquisition of BladeLogic will create an IT Service Automation leader unique in its superior ability to deliver what CIOs are calling for: business-relevant automation of the IT lifecycle, with continuous compliance built in. Benefits of the BMC and BladeLogic Combination Agility and efficiency through life cycle of change and change management across all infrastructures Fastest time to value, with up to 90% improvement in operational efficiency in 90 days Application release management — automated lifecycle of critical applications, not just technology — that tightly ties into BMC Remedy Change Management Built-in continuous compliance Automated lifecycle management of critical business services ac...

The interview with the CTO is coming soon. The announcement is scheduled for March 24th 2008!

Microsoft's story James goes on price/VM: Who's cheapest now ? Now if the customer is prepared to $5,750 (plus support, training, and extra management tools) on VI3 enterprise... what would they get if they spent that on RAM VMware VI3 enterprise Free Hypervisor Total Cost $17,748 $17,748 Windows Licences $5998 $5998 Virtualization licences $5750 $0 2 way Server, $6000 $6000 RAM 4GB 32GB VMs 14 (with 2x overcommit) 63 Price per VM $1268 $281 Who's cheapest now ? Oh look it's Microsoft again. read rest here. Citrix's response on what VDI is and what it is not and VMware's blog where Petrillo does some talking again . Funny thing though here, Mike. I'd never push this client into som...