Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

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IDC says its study, Virtualizing the Desktop Part 2: Client-Hosted Virtualization Leadership Grid, "compares the solutions of the top vendors providing desktop virtualization solutions, executed directly on the client. Solutions are ranked in an IDC Leadership Grid, and extensive information is provided on solution capabilities and vendor market positioning." Terrific, but just four vendors products are evaluated and they are VMware, RingCube, MokaFive, and Sentillion. Don't bother looking for Xen Desktop in the study. It isn't there. Nor is the IBM virtual desktop. Just in case you think that VMware is it and you can forget the other three vendors in the study, IDC says: "from a technological perspective RingCube offered some of the best features currently available, while VMware held the strongest marketing position and ecosystem. MokaFive delivered a strong product with excellent management features and Sentillion provided a solution with a high degree of secu...

So, Big Blue cranked up its PR machine, and pulled some statistics out of its, er, sales database and wanted everyone to know that more than 5,000 companies worldwide have replaced iron from HP, Sun Microsystems, and EMC since 2004 and moved to them to IBM alternatives. Breaking this down a little, IBM is claiming that in less than one year, more than 150 customers have moved onto its System z mainframes from HP and Sun platforms. When pressed for more details about where these customers were coming from, IBM's PR people said they would get me some answers, but all I got was static. And since the inception of the so-called Migration Factory that IBM set up "several years ago," more than 1,300 customers have been moved to Power-based servers from Sun and HP platforms, and this year alone, another 800 customers have moved onto System x iron (which presumably also includes BladeCenter blade servers). Yes, IBM is mixing different categories and different time scales, but this...

Well, according to the Fools and also VMware's own staff, this Transitive was a great firm for a potential acquisition. Read on... You blew it, VMware (NYSE: VMW ) . Or maybe you didn't. But whatever the behind-the-scenes machinations, virtualization toolmaker Transitive is now in IBM 's (NYSE: IBM ) hands. (Big Blue acquired the firm last week for an undisclosed sum, Computerworld reports.) Transitive should have been yours, VMware. Here's what your team said about the company in a blog post from May, ahead of the digital VMworld.com conference: Transitive does something quite interesting -- they can dynamically translate from one machine architecture to another. This can be quite complementary to VMware and our flavor of virtualization. You can, for instance, take your apps compiled for the Solaris/SPARC platform, move them to your new x86 box running ESX and Linux and go to town. IBM's interest is easy to understand. Transitive's code is baked i...

Fool says: Impressive, yes? I'll say, but for cloud computing to endure, it'll have to give IT managers and other industry participants more than just a good do-it-yourself, zero-infrastructure starter kit. NetSuite (NYSE: N) just booked a deal with Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) that should help to achieve that goal. HP will grant NetSuite access to its channel of 15,000 resellers in exchange for support resources. The result will presumably be a broader embrace of cloud computing among traditional systems integrators and value-added resellers -- firms that profit by customizing packaged software to fulfill a business need. Think of what Accenture (NYSE: ACN) and India's Infosys (Nasdaq: INFY) do, but on a smaller, more specialized scale. Cloud computing has been considered a bane for VARs and SIs because of there's no "software" to customize; all the code resides on a distant web server. Source

IBM calls it the Resilient Cloud Validation program. Big Blue hopes to work with cloud providers to offer a program that reassures businesses that a cloud doesn’t go down often as well as helping answer other questions that keep businesses from trusting in the cloud model. Coincidentally (yeah, right) companies hoping to gain that seal of approval will need to work with IBM’s cloud consulting practice. IBM is also announcing as part of that practice that it can help answer a question I’ve long bothered cloud providers with — When is it most cost effective to outsource your application to a cloud and when should you build your own, or at least buy your own, servers? IBM has been pretty quiet about its cloud efforts. In part because it didn’t want to hack off large customers buying a ton of IBM servers by competing with them. The computing giant hasn’t been pushing its own cloud business until a half-hearted announcement at the end of July, about a month and half after a company exec had...

This could come to Google as a massive surprise. The economy is under pressure. A lot of Microsoft's customers will be forced to think to move their applications, if not the whole data center, to the clouds. Google may have had luck with the silent rise in the search/query 1.0 world, but this is more complex. Microsoft is investing heavily in its 30 20 odd hi-fi data centers and they surely want to get into the data crunching game as well. Will the consumers listen? And who will they turn to is the big question. The rush for gold has begun but I hope that those billions of dollars haven't been thrown in for nothing. What if no one comes to your data center? We'll soon do a detailed SWOT analysis on the Cloud Data Center build up. For now, check out the BW's article: Corporate America is increasingly leaving computing to the experts. Why go to the trouble and expense of building and managing complex systems to handle your spiraling data-crunching needs when another comp...

This is an interesting article. Maritz is on the move. "In technology, if you stand still, eventually your value proposition evaporates," he says, holding forth in a sunlit conference room at the company's Palo Alto (Calif.) headquarters. On Nov. 10, VMware announced it had bought the French company Trango Virtual Processors , moving it into the market for software that powers mobile phones. In late October the company launched its first advertising campaign, featuring customer testimonials. Even competitors say Maritz is already making his mark. "He's a great hire for VMware," says Marc Benioff , CEO of Salesforce.com. "He understands where VMware should go." Next stop: an ambitious project called the "Virtual Data Center Operating System," a complex piece of software that promises to help companies make their IT operations even more efficient by acting as a traffic cop among their hundreds of servers, disk drives, networking devices,...

TechCrunch When Jonathan Schwartz took over the company, Sun was perceived as a major platform vendor with challenges in monetizing its resources. His strategy of marshalling the company’s assets and harnessing the viral nature of open source dynamics has maintained Sun’s relationships with developers, but nowhere has there been the kind of disruptive messaging around the cloud computing paradigm that Schwartz employed to such good effect in marketing Sun in the Web 2.0 phase. By contrast, even Apple jumped aggressively into the conversation with MobileMe; Google, Amazon, Rackspace, even Dell with a URL grab not only had a message but extended it with price cuts, acquisitions, and social media product announcements. Schwartz, who came to the job with a refreshing understanding of the power of blogging, Web services, and open source, projected confidence that these tools and communities could be intertwined with Sun’s leadership in disruptive hardware design and systems synergy. The ...

The big computer makers are starting to flex their muscles after ceding the early lead to smaller companies, like Fremont, Calif.-based Rackable Systems Inc. (RACK) and Verari Systems Inc. of San Diego. Both were among the first to commercialize high-density server systems. Dell has emerged as a cutting-edge player in this market, a little more than one year after creating a unit specifically tasked with developing customized products and services for "hyper-scale" data center customers. "Hyper-scale computing environments - where infrastructure deployments are measured by up to millions of servers, storage and networking equipment - are changing the way organizations are thinking about their data center requirements," said Brad Anderson, a senior vice president in Dell's business product unit. That has left H-P and IBM trying to catch up. "H-P and IBM are behind in this particular data center business," said Roger Kay of Endpoint Technology Associate...

1. Have You Prevented Against "Sticker Shock" Down the Road? One of SaaS's biggest selling points is its simplified pricing model: those pay-as-you-go, per-user monthly fees. The term "flat" usually stars in a SaaS vendor's marketing materials. However, companies are still confused by uncertainties in pricing models and contract agreements, note Forrester analysts William Band and Peter Marston in the May 2008 "Best Practices: The Smart Way To Implement CRM" report. (For more on rolling out SaaS CRM, see "Five Best Practices for Implementing SaaS CRM.") "SaaS pricing models that seem simple and inexpensive (flat per-user monthly fees) can become costly and complex when users sign up for different pieces of functionality and support options," the analysts write. "Additional charges often apply for support, configuration services, additional functionality or going beyond a preset storage limit." In addition, business use...

Mike Clesceri, vice president of marketing for Laurus Technologies in Itasca, Ill., said Symantec acquisitions also make things easier for clients. "Our customers don't want to manage a lot of vendors," he said. Clesceri also said that Symantec legitimizes the companies it acquires -- which makes those acquired products and services easier for partners to sell. VARs typically don't want to stake their reputations on niche technologies that have a lot of buzz but uncertain futures, but the Symantec name allays a lot of those concerns, Klein said. "Being an evangelist is not the way to go," he said. When Symantec combined its own channel program with that of Veritas, it created new processes and procedures that drew the ire of partners -- and Symantec didn't fully fix those problems until last year. Symantec has since learned from those mistakes, Klein said. "Veritas wasn't the best integration out there, but they've seemingly done a better jo...

Stephanie reporting: Poor Bill Gates. He spurs the personal computer revolution. Then becomes one of the planet's largest benefactors, trying to eradicate disease worldwide . But he's still not cool. Now, he's started a new company that could be cool--because it's " mysterious ." The entity, called bgC3, (for Bill Gates Company #3?) has the nerdosphere buzzing. It will " oversee Gates' personal pursuit of breakthrough ideas in science and technology," reports TechFlash , which broke the news. " You didn't think Willy G would be content fading away into the background after stepping down as the head of Microsoft, did you?" says Boy Genius Report . The new company might "be focused on creating catalyst business ideas to spin off to Microsoft, the Gates Foundation or elsewhere," speculates ReadWriteWeb . "It sounds like an intellectual romper room --a spot for Gates to extend his annual 'think week' sessions an...

Mike Arington reporting... Web hosting provider Rackspace has acquired JungleDisk, an online backup service, and Virtual Machine provider Slicehost in a deal designed to help bolster its offerings against top competitor Amazon Web Services. The announced acquisition price is $11.5 million in cash and stock, with the possibility of up to an additional $16.5 million depending on performance. Jungle Disk is a file storage and backup service that up until now has relied on Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). With the new announcement the company says that it will begin offering the service using Rackspace’s similar service Cloud Files, but will continue to support storage using Amazon with plans to support even more services in the future. Slicehost offers developers “slices” in Xen-based virtual servers that are much cheaper and generally easier to use than a traditional dedicated server. The service is a direct competitor to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Source

But hey , just look around. Before I do the simple copy-paste of that techcruncher, the financial markets are in panic. A human factor, panic and pandemonium has taken over. My Time magazine subscriptions are spelling doomdays. Last mag had pictures of the great depression and this week it was about London sinking. Gawwshh.... So the times are hard and some real hardcore warriors are needed should any firmwant to go out there and chase newer markets. Now back to VMware, simple and quick advice: Go global Go to BRIC countries now! Keep expanding your presence in EMEA and other newer economies Keep flattening the pie and go to mass markets Cloud Computing is emerging trend, ride it out and you'll ride out the recession My list of advice can go on and on. There has been a shake up and surely other competitors will go after you. VI4 is coming, and pack it up with some really mass consumerable juices. Now reality check and the post from Techcrunch Given the current economic climate, VM...

Saving Money Through Technology New technologies and approaches also anticipate lean times ahead. Diane Bryant, CIO of Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), spoke to a global workforce increasingly collaborating and sharing data and information. The world is going green, said Bryant, and Intel's goal is to efficiently manage information and data to enable business growth and agility. Bryant outlined an approach for managing the explosion of information based on policies and procedures for information lifecycle, data, capacity, security and rights management, and engineering innovation through SAN/NAS virtualization, thin provisioning, next-generation backup and recovery, fabric unification, and FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet). The Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) featured a multi vendor FCoE demo, and the SNW Hands-On Labs featured FCoE exercises from Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO), Intel, NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) and QLogic (NASDAQ: QLGC). An FCoE case study presented by SNIA (Storage Networking I...

This blogger's assumption that Google was a CC leader is not at all incorrect, its just an early-muse. Right now, Amazon is the CC leader and probably the only one who is stacking up: - Apps Space (SimpleDB to Oracle Apps) - Utility Billing Model - Security - Reliability - SLA etc So what do we really understand about the Cloud Computing and what do I think that Google understands about it? Go and read that other blog post of mine. Some of the core requirements for a CC provider. Many other Telco's too will come close to getting there. I do agree that Google is building it's business case around Cloud Computing, but given that they are still busy with their internal academic exercise talking about the diverse areas from Android to AppEngine to asking Universities to use its AppPack. I am a heavy Google Cloud Services user and do enjoy the benefits of several core requirements (or the lack of it) from my gmail account. I am not being billed, I am apparently secure (they may ...

Vivek Kundra, recruited to Washington to overhaul city computer networks plagued by cost overruns and viruses, treats his projects like stocks. The biggest ``buy'' on his trading floor is Google Inc. The 34-year-old city technology chief signed a contract worth almost $500,000 a year in June for all 38,000 municipal employees to use Google's e-mail, spreadsheet and word- processing programs, giving them an Internet-based alternative to Microsoft Corp.'s Office software, installed on computers. Accountants, teachers and firefighters use Google to set budgets, track truancy rates and map emergency routes. Google is cracking Microsoft's hold in the business- software market with skirmishes for orders like Kundra's. Microsoft gets $19 billion in annual sales from applications such as Office and beat back a challenge for Procter & Gamble Co.'s business this year. Google won clients such as Genentech Inc., and D.C. provides a glimpse into how the Web company i...

The security software firm said Wednesday it agreed to buy online messaging and Web security services provider MessageLabs for about $695.0 million in cash. The move is intended to strengthen the buyer's position in the growing software-as-services and messaging market. The merger is expected to be completed within the year. The Cupertino, Calif.-based Symantec added 1.3%, or 21 cents, $15.23 during midday trading in New York. The company's shares are trading hands for 27.3% less than a year ago. The final price tag for the privately held MessageLabs , which is based in Gloucester, England, is in play due to fluctuations in currency as Symantec will pay 310.0 million in British pounds and $154.0 million. The purchasing party said MessageLabs brought in roughly $145.0 million in sales during fiscal 2008, which ended July 31, representing a 20.0% jump from the year-ago period. Source

With a flood of announcements and investments in cloud computing, it's clear the concept is more than a flash in the pan. In fact, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, said organizations concerned about cloud computing's disruptions would rather disrupt themselves than let another company do it for them. "Every day that the economic crisis grows, there's going to be added emphasis on IT departments to do more for less," Gardner said. "If the delta that is the difference between what certain baseline computing functions and services cost to provide for yourself versus what you would pay on a cloud infrastructure, then any sizable delta like that can't be ignored for any given time." IBM has significant clout in the IT and business worlds and possesses all the pieces to put together its own cloud offering. Gardner predicts a horse race to see which company can come up with the best set of business-specific and low-risk services. ...