Earlier Virtualization
Cisco rolls up its own OpenStack distro
Cisco's software engineers have rolled up a distro of the open source OpenStack cloud controller for its "California" Unified Computing System blade and rack servers and related Nexus converged switches.
Cisco Systems might be very tight with storage juggernaut EMC and its VMware server virtualization minion, but that doesn't …
Tintri's VDI flash disk mix: The kit that booted 1,000 virtual desktops
VMWorld Barcelona Tintri and VMware showed the virtualisation players how it's done at VMWorld today when they tested a Tintri hybrid storage array booting 1,000 virtual desktops in two-and-a-half hours – nine seconds per desktop.
Tintri hybrid flash and disk drive arrays are purpose-designed to support virtual server operations.
The test set up …
VMware crams more cloudy calories in vCloud Suite's cakehole
VMworld Europe VMware's vCloud Suite is not even two months old and just started shipping a month ago - yet the virtualisation titan is already stuffing more wares into its cloudy tool suite, which does not have the vRAM memory tax but rather simple per-socket pricing.
At the VMworld Europe shindig in Barcelona, Spain today, the updated …
VMware brings out new madly complicated enterprise buyer plan
VMware wants to leverage its dominance in server virtualization inside of corporate data centers into juggernaut status for enterprise private clouds, and to help that process along the company is rolling out a new enterprise purchasing agreement that will presumably get some grease to the skids and the palms as companies look …
I can't wait for Pano to thrust some hard 3D love into size-zero models
Sysadmin Blog Around this time last year I reviewed Pano Logic's Zero Client Solution, a sort of super-thin-client set of kit. I was test-driving the company's first-generation hardware and a software suite two versions behind the latest release. I've now had a chance to review the second-generation hardware with its latest software, and I …
Red Hat stalks VMware in field sport ambush
Pic Giant Red Hat shadowman logo in field, with message, "Calling all enterprisers" Red Hat, you cheeky, cheeky monkeys
Red Hat wants to grab the attention of delegates to VMworld Europe in Barcelona with a guerrilla marketing stunt that deploys the biggest hashtag we have seen.
For its "Red Hat welcome", the vendor daubed the …
HP previews OpenFlow virty network controller
Everybody has their own twist and take on software-defined networks, or SDN, these days as virtualization moves on from servers and storage and into the still crufty world of networking. Server vendors who bought into networking to bolster themselves are now scrambling to be players in virtual networks when all they thought they …
Cisco fluffs up freebie Nexus virtual switch
Cisco is poised to begin beta testing of the latest version of its Nexus 1000V virtual switches, including a new Essential Edition which it will offer for the low, low price of nothing at all.
The reasoning behind this pricing policy is simplicity itself: if you are trying to take on VMware in the market for virtual switches, as …
UK air traffic controller lands 6,000-seater VDI on flashy Violin arrays
The UK's national air transportation service is basing a 6,000 seat private cloud VDI system on flash arrays from VIOLIN Memory.
NATS is the UK's provider of en-route and other air navigation services. It is separate from the Civil Aviation Authority which is the UK’s aviation regulator with responsibilities for airspace policy …
RackWare uncloaks self, unveils cloudy control freakery
The market for tools to manage virtual servers and the clouds they underpin is crowded, and it just got a little more so now that startup RackWare has uncloaked with its RackWare Management Module (RMM) tool and elbowed its way into the game.
RackWare, which was founded in 2009 with funding from unnamed angel investors, …
Inphi: Don't skimp on memory for those virty servers
The new Xeon E5 processors from Intel pack considerable oomph, but if you want to squeeze the most performance out of them, particularly in virtualized server environments doing real transaction processing and web front-end workloads, you have to remember the oldest bit of advice for the systems racket: don't skimp on the main …
Microsoft releases VMware-eater
One of the more interesting moments at this year's VMworld keynote saw outgoing CEO Paul Maritz proclaim, in an unusual-for-him strident tone, that one cannot beat Microsoft on price. One beats Microsoft on value, he concluded, before implying that VMware will do that blindfolded and with one arm tied behind its back.
The …
SUSE updates Linux control freak
SUSE Linux, the division of software conglomerate Attachmate that develops and sells the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server distribution of Linux, is hosting its SUSECon user and developer conference this week in Orlando, Florida and is using the occasion to launch SUSE Manager 1.7, a substantial update to the Linux server control …
OpenStack Foundation launches with $10m in funding
The OpenStack cloud controller and related projects developed under the Big Red O are finally and officially free of Rackspace Hosting, which has by and large been steering its development since July 2010, when the project was founded.
Unsatisfied with the closed nature of VMware's vCloud and the quasi-proprietary nature of the …
Size matters: Bromium 'microvisor' to guard PCs for big biz
Bromium, the security software company that was started by the techies who brought us the Xen open-source hypervisor out of Cambridge University, has brought vSentry, its first product, to market. But unless you are buying a new PC from a partner who is bundling the vSentry tool on a new machine, you probably won't be able to …
VMTurbo sucks up apps and blows them into clouds
VMTurbo, the startup that created a control freak that uses Adam Smith's invisible hand to allocate resources on public and private clouds, is now applying the same economic scheduling engine to application onboarding – the act of bringing applications from the physical world or another cloud into your own or into public …
Oracle tunes up VirtualBox hypervisor for Windows 8
The open source VirtualBox hypervisor is still alive and kicking after being absorbed into the Oracle collective more than two years ago, and has just gotten what the project calls a major update with release 4.2.
Oracle has also revved its Enterprise Manager 12c to turn it into a platform cloud manager for puffy infrastructure …
NEC, Egenera tag team on cloudy infrastructure freakage
Japanese server maker NEC has teamed up with automation and management software company Egenera of Boxborough, Massachusetts, to make the latter's PAN Manager physical and virtual server control freak the preferred – though by no means exclusive – tool for managing the former's SigmaBlade blade servers.
NEC and Egenera are also …
Love vSphere? You're going to have to love Flash too
If you're considering building your cloud infrastructure on the latest version of vSphere, you probably weren't banking on Adobe Flash being part of your set-up.
VMware has announced vSphere 5.1 and along with it an updated web based management client. Features new to vSphere 5.1 will only be available in the new web client, …
Gelsinger wants VMware to be the Apple of the data centre
VMworld 2012 Incoming VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger has not decided on personal goals for his time in the virty company's big chair, but does know what he hopes is the end result: a reputation for innovation to match that acquired by Apple.
Speaking to a throng of media from Asia-Pacific nations, Gelsinger said he feels he's got a tough gig …
VMware adds EMC daddy's deduping backup to vSphere
VMware is embedding EMC's Avamar deduplicating backup software into ESXi with the vSphere Data Protection product, making VMware seem more like EMC's baby than an open child.
What VMware wanted to do was provide virtual machine (VM) data protection for small and medium businesses (SMB) and enterprise departments that was an …
Speaking in Tech: VMware vNerds drop it like it's hot – LIVE
Podcast speaking_in_tech Greg Knieriemen podcast enterprise
Today we bring you a special live episode of our enterprise and consumer tech-cast, hosted by The Dude of enterprise tech, Greg Knieriemen, and cloud and storage master Ed Saipetch. Live from VMworld, they crash HP's customer appreciation reception.
Today's special guests …
VMware sees multi-device future on Horizon
VMworld 2012 VMware has inched its vision of mobile computing forward, releasing an Alpha of a new product called the Horizon Suite that it hopes will make it easier to share apps and data among many devices.
Horizon Suite includes ThinApp, Horizon Application Manager, and Horizon Mobile, along with the apps-in-smartphone-sandboxes "Project …
VMware: Our monster will eat servers, belch clouds, excrete profit
VMworld 2012 The scribbled Monster VM logo that server virtualization and cloudy wannabe VMware started using last year as a joke may be the most appropriate and honest emblem that any IT vendor has pulled from its cosmic ether.
Because VMware and its papa EMC want to do nothing less than gobble all of the hardware in your data center and …
VMware to penetrate OpenStack cloud
NASA and Rackspace spun up OpenStack as an open-source alternative to VMware for spinning up clouds two years ago. Now VMWare has applied to become a full OpenStack member with a decision to be taken at the OpenStack group’s first full board of directors’ meeting today.
Intel and NEC will also apply to join OpenStack at the …
VMware rolls up an integrated cloudy control freak
VMworld 2012 VMware wants to make it simpler for its customers to make the jump from virtualized servers running its ESXi hypervisor to full-on clouds complete with all of the automation, disaster recovery, and other control freakage.
And to that end, in conjunction with the launch of the new ESXi 5.1 hypervisor and add-on vSphere management …
EMC shows off XtremIO's Project X box
VMworld 2012 EMC has shown off an early version of the all-flash array it acquired when hoovering up XtremIO earlier this year.
Project X, as the array is known for now, has been revealed as a 4U tall beast that packs not one but two controllers, described by re-badged XtremIO-ers as “basically Intel servers”. Each packs a pair of un-named …
VMware kills vRAM memory tax with vSphere 5.1 server virt
VMworld 2012 The most important new feature of the new ESXi 5.1 hypervisor and its related vSphere 5.1 tools that made their debut at the VMworld virtualization extravaganza today is not a feed or speed, but the fact that VMware has dropped the much-hated vRAM memory tax that came out last year with vSphere 5.0.
With the vRAM memory tax, …
Broadcom launches Trident II switch chip
All of those apps you run on your smartphones and tablets and the surfing you do from PCs and other devices ultimately ends up whacking some data center network somewhere in the world. The appetite for bandwidth and low latency continues apace, and switch and adapter chip maker Broadcom aims to keep up with that demand with its …
HyTrust goes ballistic with virty compliance appliance
VMworld 2012 The US Air Force doesn't let a single operator of a missile site launch a nuke all by his or her lonesome, and HyTrust, a maker of policy management and access control software for VMware virtual infrastructure, thinks IT shops should adopt the secondary approval rule for a lot of things that go on inside of the ESXi hypervisor …
VMware desktop virt refresh lets you run Windows 8 everywhere
Just days ahead of its annual VMworld conference in San Francisco, VMware has announced new versions of its consumer desktop virtualization solutions for Windows and Mac OS X, both with improved support for Windows 8.
VMware Workstation 9, which the company announced on Thursday, has been optimized for running on Windows 8 host …
SkyTap embeds Cloud Foundry in app dev cloud
The floating application development laboratory called SkyTap is burrowing deeper into the VMware fold and making itself more useful to coders by supporting the Cloud Foundry framework on its eponymous dev and test cloud. The company, funded in part by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is also firing up new templates for SkyTap that …
Speaking in Tech: Can you sell technology without having AWESOME HAIR?
Podcast speaking_in_tech Greg Knieriemen podcast enterprise
It's all about virtualisation and the cloud this week at our enterprise techcast, hosted by Greg Knieriemen, Ed Saipetch and Sarah Vela. Our special guest this week is Vaughn Stewart, director of cloud computing and virtualisation evangelist at NetApp, who gives us the …
HotLink extends SuperVisor virty control freak to EC2, CloudStack
HotLink, the startup server virtualization management tool maker that came out of stealth mode a year ago, is reaching out from private clouds into public clouds with a new product called HotLink Hybrid Express.
The idea is to create a new kind of tool, which HotLink calls a SuperVisor, that acts as an uber control freak that …
Speaking in Tech: The rock'n'roll lifestyle of VMware vNerds
Podcast speaking_in_tech Greg Knieriemen podcast enterprise
The stars of our enterprise tech-cast are back and ready to speak their brains on everything from OpenStack noise to noisy babies on aeroplanes.
Hosted by Greg Knieriemen and Ed Saipetch, this week's podcast features special guest Stephen Spellicy, director of enterprise …
Rackspace rolls up OpenStack for private clouds
Amazon doesn't believe in private clouds, only public clouds and when you get down to it, only its own Amazon Web Services. Rackspace Hosting, which has supported other people's apps for a lot longer than AWS, believes in public clouds just as much as Amazon - enough to start the OpenStack cloud controller project and use the …
VMware lets you take vClouds out for a spin
VMware wants to make it easier for cloudy infrastructure builders to see how its vCloud stack of software runs their applications, but it doesn't want to be in the cloud business itself.
So, the vendor has teamed up with a hosting firm to tune up a vCloud service evaluation cloud that lets application developers and system …
SanDisk goes hard for soft VMware server caches
SanDisk is touting a VMware server cache that could accelerate applications three to five times and increase the number of virtual machines a host can support by 100 to 200 per cent.
SanDisk has a long history of shipping consumer flash memory for gadgets including cameras and digital video recorders. It's lately moved into the …
HP hardens switches to juggle myriad virty networks
Hewlett-Packard has tweaked the Comware operating system at the heart of its switches to make them more amenable to the clouds and to implement what is being called software-defined networking (SDN).
Communication between computers is now more fluid than ever as servers and storage are increasingly virtualised and made more …
VMware snacks on Pattern Insight's log tool
VMware has an insatiable appetite and billions of dollars in cash, so hardly a month goes by when it doesn't buy something. The server virtualization and soon-to-be network virtualization juggernaut – once it closes its $1.26bn acquisition of Nicira – has just snapped up the log analysis products of Pattern Insight – and taken …
Luminex rips virtual tape from data centres, shoves it in the cloud
While EMC thinks the next move in storage is to rip the tape out of the mainframe and replace it with the virtual stuff, Luminex seems to be going one step further: by grabbing its virtual tape from the data centre and floating it up to the cloud.
Mainframe virtual tape library (VTL) vendor Luminex has buddied up with cloud …
Speaking in Tech: Virtualisation, storage and flying balls
Podcast speaking_in_tech Greg Knieriemen podcast enterprise
The crew at our enterprise tech-cast have brought you another storage and virtualisation scoop with the second part of their interview with Chad Sakac, senior vice president at EMC. Your hosts Greg Knieriemen, cloud and storage expert Ed Saipetch and new media ace Sarah Vela …
