Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

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This is an interesting, in fact very interesting from a strategic and tactical weakness perspective. Here’s my problem with VMware in this situation. Ninety percent of the VMware sales organization is made up of former Dell employees. In fact there are so many ex-Dell sales people at VMware that they have had a self-imposed moratorium on hiring from Dell. As we know until recent years Dell was a very successful company. In fact they never had a layoff until 2001. For the first 16 years they were layoff free. Now those same sales people are at VMware and they have never experienced a downturn in sales or if they have they have not proven their ability to successfully fight their way out of it. I know several experienced sales people who are former Dell employees, but they in the minority. Dell was the least expensive and that goes a long way to selling units in the PC world. When HP and others figured out a way to produce boxes as cheaply that’s when Dell started to lose. When you are...

International business-to-business distributor, Hagemeyer, selected Ceedo Technologies' Ceedo Enterprise as a migration platform to its new software architecture through virtualization. When Hagemeyer made the decision to upgrade their entire software architecture, one critical aspect of the project was to be able to allow the new architecture to run in parallel with existing applications, which are still in use by many employees. To solve this problem, the company chose Ceedo Enterprise to virtualize existing applications and make them available to employees without interference to the new architecture. Source

Fortisphere, a leading provider of policy-based virtualization management software, today announced that it plans to support VMware VMsafe™ technology, expanding the market reach of its Virtual Essentials™ software suite, which provides customers with greater levels of visibility and control over their VMware virtualized environments. VMware VMsafe technology helps vendors combat the challenges of compliance, management and security in ways previously not possible in physical environments. VMsafe technology integrates into the VMware hypervisor and enables vendors to develop open, interoperable and cross-platform technologies that enable better granularity, visibility, correlation and scalability in VMware environments. “With VMware VMsafe technology, Fortisphere can offer customers an effective solution to help enforce operational, security and compliance policies in real time,” said Nand Mulchandani, senior director, product management and marketing at VMware. “Together, VMware and o...

CO2 emissions has been the sole cause of eliminating life in the past and it will take our life once again. On a mass scale unless we act. NOW! Following shocking revelations from the past tell us tales that we are in the eye of the storm already. Hundreds of millions of years ago, a sharp rise in CO2 led to mass extinctions. Today humans are witnessing and are responsible for that sharp rise. This is calculated with GEOCARB. Temperature variations since the past 400,000 years. These are changes in CO2 level since industrial revolution.

I have been talking about virtualization security for quite a while. My last speech in EMEA, Belgium 2008 specifically, at the Open Source Virtualization Conference , I mentioned this, see this picture and think about it. Think about it as a security expert, think about it as a CIO, think about it as a company lawyer and think about it as an employee! Just give yourself a moment, look at this picture: Now tell me what you see in it? Well lets ponder about it once again. My Real-Time consultations and observations across the globe tell me one thing. just like the iRobot movie line from the robots: " You will comply!" or even better yet: "Wanna spend you life in jail?". You will have to deal with several compliances when the IT and Business domains converge. I have said it on several occasions. The consolidation is bound to continue. It will go on this time till we have reached an absolute state of meshed or mashup domains. There will be several disorders and there w...

Santa Clara, CA – July 15, 2008 – Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CTXS), the global leader in application delivery infrastructure, today announced “ Project Kensho ,” which will deliver Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) tools that, for the first time, allow independent software vendors (ISVs) and enterprise IT managers to easily create hypervisor-independent, portable enterprise application workloads. These tools will allow application workloads to be imported and run across Citrix XenServer™, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V™ and VMware™ ESX virtual environments. As virtualization becomes a mainstream component of enterprise IT infrastructure, users need ways to automate and secure the lifecycle of their application workloads without being tied to a single hypervisor platform or virtual hard disk format. By implementing the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) OVF standard, Project Kensho will enable ISVs and enterprise IT staff to leverage a hypervisor-independent porta...

ArsTechnica thinks so. Also: The comment of What Maritz said about Netscape are also notable. Will he try to cut off Microsoft's air supply? (He knows the guys inside-out) but there could also be a whammer surprise move: Joining hands with Microsoft to go after the x86 market. There are more players in the market. Who isn't doing virtualization these days? Storage firms, Security firms, heck even a Bank (Credit Suisse) wants a piece of it! (They are the coolest when it comes to the whole heterogeneous OR environment" Although the removal of Greene has come as a shock to many, insiders say that her replacement has been on the cards for some time. Greene's limited business skills were overwhelmed by both VMware's rapid success and the subsequent shifts in the marketplace. Maritz is a hardened fighter willing to do whatever it takes to win; during Microsoft's browser war with Netscape, Maritz is claimed to have said that Microsoft would "cut off Netscape...

As part of this new contract, Atos Origin will manage all infrastructure services for NXP’s core business 24/7 to help consolidate and optimize all global manufacturing and engineering data centres. These services, which comprise consulting and outsourcing services, are based on Atos Origin’s global sourcing strategy. Atos Origin and NXP will work with jointly agreed key performance indicators including systems availability, continuous service, cost reductions and output performance levels. This indicates the strategic importance to NXP and high level of confidence that Atos Origin holds to perform according to set targets. "We have been working with Atos Origin for many years, and they have proven to be a reliable partner that generates results. For this deal which supports our core business, we need a partner with international presence and who knows our business. Our strategy focuses on increased efficiency by returning to our core activities, and Atos Origin will be our long-t...

The particle physics: Evolution, aspergerism and massless massness Greatest things in life come and go and all you have left is memories. The LHC's attempt to look for the Higgs particle, often also called the God particle by some who are a too much into the "discovery of evolution thing", sometimes makes me wonder: We all have that in us. There is space and anti-space and then there is the air that breathes it. VMware is exactly such a software company. The firm has solid faith and tremendous following. The employees breathe and live the Higgs field. This field was created by the folks who brought this company to where it is today. VMware had better lived in some distant universe, untouched by folks that kept bugging their passion and telling them to say things the way it should have been told. They did a great jo at it but they also got fooled into it. The truth of the matter is exactly that. There is matter and anti-matter. The rest doesn't exist and the world does...

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The Register has suggested that maybe its time for Tucci to pick up his own pink slip! By firing VMware chief Diane Greene, EMC's top dog Joe Tucci has sent a message to investors that his personal likes and dislikes come before their broader interests. That's not exactly what you want to see from an executive who has already done so very little for investors over the past five years. We've written more than any other publication about the tension that existed between Tucci and Greene. Such bad blood seemed inevitable once EMC decided to offer part of VMware up in an initial public offering. You've got the stodgy parent company trudging along with a crepe-flat share price, while the young upstart soars into the stratosphere. Since it still held more than 85 per cent of VMware, EMC benefited from its virtualization arm's gains. Its share price finally started moving up after years of languishing. Thing is, it was Greene's team and not Tucci's that was to th...

My good pal, CEO of Virtualization.com just called me while I was driving back home after having a solid workout, that Diane Greene has been replaced by an ex-Microsoft exec! This news is shocking for: - The great leadership that Diane offered to the company - She had an amazing vision, OK CNN, Forbes et al have always spoken of the lack of business acumen - She had a strong following of her solid engineering staff and I'm sure a lot will be reconsidering their future immediately - A lot might change in the top exec ranks of VMware as well, for instance what will happen to Mendel etc This is definitely a breaking news and still in a way a sad news. I am fond of Diane and her style and I'm sure she'll start a revolution someplace else soon enough. Here's the link to Virtualization.com who picked it up from MarketWatch . Reuters thinks that its mere competition and not weak economy: "You have to believe this (change in revenue forecast) is due more to new competiti...

Ok so all those whisperings were getting ouder and louder in my head and I had to just let it out. The video is by Greg Hartman and my industry insider friend, who wishes anonymity, had some pointers: Featured opinion from an industry insider/researcher (This individual has no affiliation to VMware, Citrix , Microsoft or whoever): o The rate-of-change has gone up significantly, and fairly uniformly across all parts of the kernel (core, arch-specific, device drivers, networking, etc). It's greater than any other software project on Earth. It's also broaden out (flattened), with lots of changes coming from a broader set of people. o KVM will win out over the Xen/VMware models. KVM uses Linux as the hypervisor, whereas Xen needs to recreate its own NUMA model, scheduling, memory management, power management, and needs to use Linux for drivers. KVM gets all these things for free from Linux (Qumranet's opinion also). Combined with the rate of change and massive amount of contr...

Weighed down by energy prices and the housing crisis, employers laid off workers in stores, factories and forsaken building sites. With more job cuts expected in coming months, there's growing concern that many people will pull back on their spending later this year when the bracing effect of the tax rebates fades, dealing a dangerous setback to the shaky economy. These worries are rekindling recession fears. "The deteriorating jobs climate will dampen many a barbecue this weekend. It's hard to celebrate when you are out of a job," said Richard Yamarone, economist at Argus Research. In June alone, employers got rid of 62,000 jobs, bringing total losses so far this year close to a staggering half-million — 438,000, according to the Labor Department's report released Thursday. The economy needs to generate more than 100,000 new jobs a month for employment to remain stable. The jobless rate held steady at 5.5 percent after jumping in May by the most ...

For the quarter, IBM’s worldwide server revenue remained $3.9 billion but Gartner revised its numbers and reduced HP’s estimated revenue sales from $4 billion to $3.8 billion. The numbers for the other top server vendors – Dell, Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu/Fujitsu-Siemens – remained the same. Gartner’s server shipment number remained the same. HP shipped more than 680,000 servers during the quarter, while IBM shipped about 302,000 systems. The numbers for the other vendors also remained the same. In a statement, Gartner offered a vague explanation for why it changed the numbers in favor of IBM. The research firm also indicted that overall revenue only increased 2.5 percent instead of the 4.3 percent it originally calculated. Now, Gartner estimated server revenue for the first quarter topped $13.3 billion worldwide instead of $13.6 billion. Source

Saw this on the net. Even though Microsoft is yet to officially breathe a single word on the matter, the virtualization capabilities of Windows 7 will also evolve in comparison to what is offered with Windows Vista today. Vista was the Redmond giant’s first client for which virtualization was introduced into the End User License Agreement, and Windows 7 will take it one step further. The next iteration of the Windows client will feature a solution designed to permit end users to access remotely virtualized operating systems running on top of a hypervisor. “As part of hosted desktop virtualization initiative, in Win7 we are building a platform with suite of products that enables remote connectivity to virtual desktops running under Hyper-V via thin or traditional clients. The products enables remote desktop and application publishing, provisioning and connecting to VMs via RDP and management which leverages SCVMM. The platform will also provide rich value-add opportunities for ISVs ...

Well that is what the Gartner thinks where VMware may get stuck in its boots. The same thing which I describe from my Puddle perspective. I think VMware will have to really work on the humbling down and getting to the little fellas and explaining the value of virtualization to one and all. There is still time! "The enterprise is going to be very leery of Microsoft, but the on-ramp to VMware is a bit steep for small businesses. VMware doesn't want to lose that potential business, but the company was getting a bit drunk on enterprise dollars," says Thomas Bittman, Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst. "Microsoft could grab small businesses and grow up, and VMware should do anything it can do to get that market share, even if it costs revenue." By packaging its hypervisor with a server release, Microsoft will gain access into many accounts -- except the adoption curve may mirror that of servers, which could hold Hyper-V back a bit, Bittman says. But ov...

With the Hong Kong SAR Government seeking a reduction in energy intensity of at least 25 percent by 2030 1 , local business leaders are under increased pressure from stakeholders to employ green initiatives. At the same time, CEOs are planning to increase their corporate social responsibility (CSR) investments by 25 percent over the next three years 2 as customers pay careful attention to their suppliers’ CSR profiles, including “green” initiatives. With the rising expectation that suppliers are socially responsible, and the increasing realization of the importance of energy efficiency, IBM’s comprehensive set of solutions are perfectly timed to meet market demand. “Project Big Green reflects our commitment to the environment and to delivering energy efficient solutions to help our clients tackle the escalating energy and rental costs challenge in their data centers,” said Dominic Tong, General Manager, IBM China/Hong Kong Limited. “With a blend of hardware, software, technology and...

Satyam Foundation’s CSR activities in Visakhapatnam began in February 2008, when initiatives to help local communities were taken up as part of Satyam’s 20-year anniversary celebrations. Today’s launch will reinforce those efforts to enable social transformation in and around the city. Initial efforts in Vizag include encouraging volunteerism and creating enabling platforms, alliances, and partnerships with the community, NGOs, government agencies, and businesses. These efforts will help identify and prioritize Satyam Foundation programs, which extensively leverage key Satyam differentiators, such as technology, innovation and leadership “Wherever Satyam has a significant presence, we lead programs that serve both the corporation and society,” said Naveen Yelloji, the chief executive officer and director of Satyam Foundation. “The incubation of the Call 104 Health Helpline and the subsequent scaling up of comprehensive health services to all residents of Andhra Pradesh are excellent ex...

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

Security is going to be a very hot topic whether you are virtualizing or not. The general floatability of data-sets and employees across the globe is going to create a huge challenge for firms. NeoAccel's comprehensive offering of SSL VPN-Plus under VMware consist of 3 separate options 1) SSL VPN-Plus & NAC-Plus running on an existing VMware Server platform 2) SSL VPN-Plus Evaluation Virtual Appliance for the VMware Player and 3) Globally Managed SSL VPN-Plus Farm for ASPs/MSPs/ISPs. 1) SSL VPN-Plus and NAC-Plus can now be purchased as virtual appliances and run on a VMware ESX Server. Network administrators get all the benefits of a virtualized infrastructure including on-demand replication, scalability, and backup of the VMware environment without the hassles of buying and maintaining hardware. SSL VPN-Plus on VMware is ideal for disaster recovery situations by being able to replicate one SSL VPN-Plus image to many and provide 100x the ...

Where Ms Greene differs from the old school of high-tech bosses is how she sees the interplay between competition and co-operation. “I grew up playing Monopoly and Risk,” she says. “You have to collaborate to win these games—and compete when it is time to compete. But if you compete and break somebody’s trust you are going to lose the next time.” Maintaining trust means always being clear about what you are doing, she says, particularly since many of her firm’s partners are also rivals. What is more, Ms Greene argues, “With the internet, you can compete more effectively by being open.” When Microsoft tried to restrict how VMware’s customers could use its software with Windows, for instance, customers complained publicly and helped VMware prepare a white paper about Microsoft’s licensing practices that was posted online—after which the software giant relented. Sadly, being open and playing nice has often been a recipe for losing against Microsoft. Even within VMware, some people observ...

This one is pretty optimistic about India: Two other Indian cities also made it to the top 10 list--New Delhi edged out Manila for the number two spot, while Mumbai dropped three places from last year's list to seventh. Jenna Griffin, senior research analyst for global delivery services research at IDC Asia-Pacific, told ZDNet Asia that Bangalore and New Delhi were attractive due to existing infrastructure, large quantity of skilled workers as well as competitive pricing. She noted, however, that the appreciating rupee was eroding the cost arbitrage. Auckland and Beijing made significant progress over last year, moving up five and three notches, respectively. Griffin said Auckland's ranking was influenced by factors such as greater government support, an increased emphasis toward a digital economy and currency depreciation. On the other hand, the investment into Beijing's infrastructure and the environment for the upcoming Olympic Games has sharpened the city's competit...

Qumranet, the commercial sponsor of the KVM virtualization software, has begun beta-testing a desktop virtualization system aimed at geographically distributed organizations. The company's existing Solid ICE desktop virtualization system was designed to combat performance issues, which continue to be a down-side of desktop virtualization. Solid ICE Multi-Site takes Qumranet's efforts a step further, dealing with branch offices and remote sites. Under Solid ICE, the user's desktop runs in a KVM virtual machine in a data center, and the user accesses it via the SPICE remote rendering software on a thin client or repurposed PC. Unlike virtualization companies such as VMware, whose technology was generally designed with server virtualization in mind, the Solid ICE framework was designed to solve the performance problems inherent in virtualized desktops, Qumranet said. Source

GigaOM: Can you tell me how the launch of Hyper-V affects Citrix Xen products? Crosby: Our key founding philosophy was fast, free, compatible and ubiquitous hypervisors. Microsoft’s Hyper-V which is compatible with XenServer, is alright when it comes to being fast; it’s 28 bucks, so close to free; and because it’s Microsoft it will be ubiquitous. So for us, it’s good. The problem is it took them too darn long to get it out. Working with Microsoft has been a little bit like having a ring through the nose of the bull. We have a rope tied to that ring because we’re ahead of them on this thing, but when they charge I’m going to get out the way and point them at VMware. GigaOM: But will Hyper-V compete with the Citrix server virtualization business anyway? Crosby: You should look forward to interesting announcements of products to add value to Hyper-V. We’re going to sell into that footprint much like Citrix has always extended the use cases of Microsoft products. GigaOM: What about VMware?...

But as VMware adds features to its file system, there's growing suspicion among storage vendors that the company is trying to move storage system value-adds into its Hypervisor. Some storage vendors think that VMware is stepping on their toes, especially when it comes to Storage VMotion, a feature in VMware ESX Server version 3.5 that migrates the back-end storage attached to virtual machines. It's a matter of virtualisation vendors like VMware "looking for ways to add value" as the virtualisation becomes commoditized, says Bruce McCorkendale, distinguished engineer in the office of the CTO for Symantec Corp. As more companies virtualize their server environments, users who once struggled with running multiple operating systems will now struggle with running physical and virtual servers, and in some cases, with running multiple hypervisors. This is where Symantec sees the value proposition for its vendor- and platform-agnostic storage, security and server management s...

This kind of thing happens a lot to hot new issues. Six to 12 months after the IPO, reality comes barging in. If it’s not a bruising competitor like Microsoft, it’s something else that pours cold water on the enthusiasm. You see it a lot with glamour stocks that get ahead of themselves. As a new-issues trader who goes both ways, my friend Cash McDash loves these situations. He’s got an eagle eye when it comes to spotting highflier short setups. If you don’t mind dabbling on the “dark side”... or if you just want an early warning on some of the high-profile longs in your portfolio... you should keep tabs on what Cash has to say. Stay tuned for more on that front soon. Original Source

Atos Origin was selected as the architect of the information system and lead manager of the consortium of technology firms that will conduct the pilot phase from March to September 2010. An ERDF spokesman said the contract to act as architect of the information system was worth 100 million euros ($158.8 million). He would no give further details but French daily Les Echos reported last month that EDF's planned investment in the replacement of the meters was between 4 and 5 billion euros. More here...

Watching folks panic and start picking up glass-balls and attempting to predict the future made me worry a bit. I got drawn to it and indeed fell prey to the trap. So I got myself thinking and wrote up a little piece of what we ought to expect from this evolving market. Real-Time Market Analysis We are at the brink of a cylindrical upstaging . VMware is more challenged than any other party we have to mention today. KVM is the least worrisome of the rest. Microsoft's Hyper-V has its own trajectory and will soon define and refine its own strategy as it goes on embedding (maybe they'll just call it embedding and still do the old fashioned hulky-bulky way) its "virtualization technology" into all their core-applications (where they draw a revenue of $12Bn yearly, more or less). Citrix's purchase of Xen is indeed still an edible, digestible and maybe at some time in the future a launchpad (I am not saying disposable) to its future directions. Could that be a pos...

With this acquisition, VMware will leverage the B-hive team and technology to enhance the VMware portfolio of application and infrastructure management products by offering proactive performance management and service level reporting for applications running within virtual machines. B-hive technology brings insight into the performance of applications and the ability to automate changes using VMware’s industry-leading datacenter virtualization and management suite, VMware Infrastructure, to reallocate resources as needed to ensure service level objectives. In addition, with this acquisition, B-hive’s R&D facility and team will form the core of VMware’s new development center in Israel. Press

I think writing off a technology that is the core of most future computing, is in my personal opinion, absolutely ridiculous. So how about a few sensational stories such as: VMware may eventually face bankruptcy as competition, IP bleeding intensifies ! Microsoft's Hyper-V is a failed product ESX Server is a poor insecure linux configuration or maybe even worst , to scare off the open-source averse folks: VMware's ESX uses linux open source technology ! Making headlines by writing off products that are being embedded in mobile phones, but Brian did exactly what he wanted to do: attention. And I know that there is word on the street and a lot of guys have approached me as well and I too will write about it but I am in no position to do a comparison as to VMware will exist or not. Anyways, I haven't met Brian and I really am not that inquisitive about cool cats out there. I am one myself, the only one . Simon's response: So Brian's latest piece predicting the end of ...

I've been thinking a lot lately on the Prairietekism (PrairieTek was a company that almost owned most of the 5 and 10 inch disk drive market before going bankrupt because of some fundamental wrong decisions in their product strategy) and wanted to write up an article and compare it with VMware's fate in the coming years to see. It does not have to go this way but will certainly mean that a sound product still does not guarantee you a sound future, if it is not aligned with the rest of the market's expectations and directions. About Qlusters, we already knew that they were going to go away. It is sad but it has happened. Systems management start-up Qlusters Inc. has closed down after seven years. Management yesterday notified the 30 employees of the move. The company failed to take off even though the sector is a hot one with takeovers at hundreds of millions of dollars. According to IVC Online, Qlusters raised $34 million, including $10 million in a financing round a year ...

When I saw Toon do this stuff on his site, I thought it might be a great idea for most of my executive readers (who normally own a iPhone or Blackberry). The mobile website is: http://avastu.mofuse.mobi