Earlier Virtualization
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 …
EMC says virtual arrays a sales tool, not a threat
Virtual storage arrays may become more attractive to customers, but EMC believes the pace of data growth will mean many users still need physical appliances.
That’s the opinion of Chuck Hollis, EMC's Vice President and Global Marketing CTO, who told El Reg that users like virtual arrays, but aren’t using them for anything …
Speaking in Tech: We grill EMC's Mr VMWare
Podcast speaking_in_tech Greg Knieriemen podcast enterprise
It's another enterprise and techcast with Greg Knieriemen, Ed Saipetch and Sarah Vela. This week, your hosts are grilling a special guest: EMC's Chad Sakac. Last night they spoke to the storage guru, prolific blogger and virtual geek – who become a senior veep at EMC in …
Citrix profits pinched by Europe, Uncle Sam
Stalled sales in Europe and Latin America, coupled with uncertainty around the US Federal budget during this election year and ongoing economic malaise, helped to put the squeeze on profits at virtualizer and optimizer Citrix Systems in the second quarter.
But the company is still growing well, despite some very tough …
Oracle cranks Exalogic software stack up to 2
Oracle could have launched its new Exalogic hardware in conjunction with the new rev of its middleware software stack, as El Reg speculated earlier this week, but the software giant decided it didn't need the latest Xeon E5 processors from Intel to boost the performance of its Exalogic "engineered systems." Instead, it rolled …
Stratus slides Avance virtual clusters onto Xeon E5 servers
Stratus Technologies has revved up Avance, its high-availability clustering software that hosts virtual servers.
The fault-tolerant server maker tweaked the product to run on Intel's new Xeon E5 processors while at the same time boosting the scalability of the system's underlying hypervisor.
The initial Avance product was …
Tax office will let you deduct virtualisation software
The Australian Taxation Office's (ATO's) e-tax software doesn't run on Macs, which has long been a grumpiness-inducer for those who like their computers fruity and their tax affairs digital.
But the ATO now has a cost-effective way out: run Windows in a virtual machine, run e-tax in that VM and then – this is the good part – …
Pano does browser-thin virty desktops
For some end users, giving them a PC is like giving them a sports car when all they really need is a bike and a helmet – a fact of life that Pano Logic, a maker of desktop virtualization tools, aims to capitalize on.
A PC, Pano Logic knows, is way overkill for the actual work many users need to do, and they are a risk to …
VMware shells out $1.26bn for virtual networker Nicira
The networking business just got a wake-up call from server virtualizer VMware in the guise of a $1.26bn acquisition of virty networker Nicira.
VMware's CTO Steve Herrod has been talking up the concept of the "software-defined data center" for the past couple of months, and the server virtualization juggernaut and cloud wannabe …
VCE hires Cisco exec to run the company
VCE has finally added a CEO to the top of its management stack after operating without one for almost a year.
The converged infrastructure player - a collaboration between EMC, Cisco and VMware - has lured Praveen Akkiraju, Cisco senior veep and GM for the Services Routing Technology Group.
The new man climbing on board …
Bunging apps, files into virtual desktops ain't worth it - Gartner
The financial arguments for turning PCs into glorified remote terminals just don't stack up, says a Gartner bod.
The bean counter estimates "virtual hosted desktops" - which shift applications and file storage into a centralised farm of servers - will form a market of 80 million units worldwide by 2016. This is a four-fold …
Cisco buys Virtuata for virty security
Networking juggernaut and server player Cisco Systems has snapped up Virtuata, a stealthy startup that is working on security software for virtual machines that has not really said much about itself to date – and now never will.
The acquisition was announced in a blog post by Hilton Romanski, vice president of corporate …
VMware weaves Oracle databases into vFabric Data Director
When VMware tuned the open-source PostgreSQL 9 database for its ESXi 5.0 hypervisor in the vFabric Spring Java framework, it knew it had to do more to make a convincing production database.
With vFabric Data Director 2.0, the company is therefore adding Oracle databases to the mix and hopes to add support for other obvious …
Spring father Rod Johnson pushes eject, pops out of VMware
Spring Framework creator Rod Johnson has left VMware, where he headed up the virtualisation giant’s open-source Java and middleware efforts.
In his blog, Johnson said he had left to “pursue other interests".
He’s understood to have been spending more time in his native Australia, away from the VMware mothership in California, …
Cisco, Fusion-io's blade lovechild in EMC flash face-off
Blocks and Files Will VCE ship Vblocks - its virtual machine battery farms - with Fusion-io flash cards inside instead of EMC's VFCache memory rival?
In June Cisco entered into an OEM deal with Fusion-io whereby the networking hardware titan would incorporate Fusion's ioDrive2 PCIe flash cards into its UCS B-Series blade servers. The aim is to …
Red Hat: Keep clouds open, like Linux
Red Hat Summit At last year's Red Hat Summit, it was CEO Jim Whitehurst who preached to the open source choir about the need to keep virtualization and the cloudy extensions of it open. And at this year's event in Boston, it was Paul Cormier, president of products at the billion-dollar commercial open source software powerhouse, who banged on …
Bromium twists chip virty circuits to secure PCs and servers
Bromium, the security startup launched a year ago by the techies behind the open source Xen server virtualization hypervisor, are lifting the veil a bit on the software that they are cooking up, while at the same time announcing a big new bag of cash to pay for the ongoing development of what the company is calling a microvisor …
HP rolls up virty desktop system bundles for SMBs
HP has refreshed its server lineup with the myriad Xeon E5 processors in its ProLiant Gen8 machines, so small and medium businesses now have lots of options from which to choose. But these days, SMBs are not just interested in buying raw iron. Sometimes they want to plunk in a new stack, appliance style, that solves a specific …
Oracle tweaks LDom hypervisor homegrown Sparcs
The Logical Domain hypervisor for Sparc T series processors, known formally as Oracle VM Server for Sparc, is probably one of the best technologies created by the former Sun Microsystems for its homegrown servers.
(Solaris and ZFS are two other key technologies.) Oracle has just kicked out a 2.2 release that makes LDoms more …
VMware's Asian new biz Veep jumps to VCE
Paul Harapin, VMware’s vice president for business development and cloud across Asia Pacific and Japan, has left the company, The Reg can reveal.
His new post is heading up VCE, the private cloud joint venture formed by EMC, Cisco, Intel and VMware.
Harapin was VMware’s first leader in Australia, having previously set up Tivoli …
Chargeback exposes IT shops as slow, expensive suppliers
In the heady days of 2008, when server virtualisation was young-ish and low hanging fruit of physical servers could be found on every rack in data centres and server rooms around the world, VMware slipped out an update to its Lifecycle Manager that included chargeback features.
Chargeback enables metering of IT resources, even …
VMware sees Mirage, buys up company
Virtualization juggernaut VMware gobbled up four year old VDI vendor Wanova today, giving the virtualization juggernaut another weapon to fire at Citrix.
VMware pretty much still owns the x86 virtualization racket among enterprise IT shops, despite heroic efforts to dislodge it by Microsoft, Citrix Systems, and Red Hat, but the …
Oracle juices homegrown Xen to match own-brand Linux
System maker Oracle has upgraded its version of the Xen server virtualization hypervisor with its own variant of the Linux kernel to bring it in synch with its Enterprise Linux server operating system distro.
The new Oracle VM Server also includes some nips and tucks specifically for admins babysitting hypervisors.
A bare-metal …
Microsoft, NetApp, Citrix, team for FreeBSD on Hyper-V
NetApp, Microsoft and Citrix have teamed up to let Free BSD run natively in Hyper-V.
The move makes sense for Microsoft: FreeBSD may not be a major OS player, but W3techs says it still has 1.2 per cent of the web server market. If it enjoys even half of that market share for other servers, that almost certainly means plenty of …
You can feed 800 VMs off 1 of our boxes, startup brags
Apparently, just adding a tincture of Tintri to your virtualised server-storage array pathway gets those VMs running like super-charged rockets. The firm says a European customer is running 800 virtual machines off one Tintri box, leaving a NetApp array chastened in the background.
The unnamed customer makes things like railway …
Graphics shocker: Nvidia virtualizes Kepler GPUs
GTC 2012 You game-console makers who still want to be in the hardware business, look out. You console makers who don't want to be in the hardware business (this might mean you, Microsoft), you can all breathe a sigh of relief: after a five-year effort, Nvidia is adding graphics virtualization to its latest "Kepler" line of GPUs.
The …
VMware puts on new vFabric suite, takes your database on a date
VMware pretty much owns the virtualization layer on X86 iron inside of enterprises, but it has a long way to go to get the same kind of uptake for its vFabric application framework.
Just as it did when it turned the bare-metal ESX Server hypervisor into a server virtualization stack and then a cloudy infrastructure ubertool, the …
Egenera runs virty tools on IBM BladeCenters
Egenera, the virtualized server infrastructure pioneer, has certified its PAN Manager control freakery to run on IBM's BladeCenter blade servers.
With the certification on Big Blue's blades, Egenera now supports the major suppliers of X86-based blade servers – that's Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Dell – as well as Fujitsu – which …
AppSense revs up user virt tools to 8.4
AppSense figured out that managing users was a headache long before virtual desktop infrastructure became a possibility for enterprises. The company has spent the last decade evolving user management tools that spanned many different kinds of systems and application virtualization layers, such as the Citrix Presentation Server ( …
Speaking in Tech: VMware polishes post-PC virty tools
Podcast It's time for another Speaking in Tech enterprise and tech biz roundup, with The Dude of enterprise tech, Greg Knieriemen, cloud and storage meister Ed Saipetch and web2.0 insider Sarah Vela. Our special guest this week is John Mark Troyer, the director of social media evangelism at VMware.
This week we discuss..
The flood of …
HP spreads Superdome vPar partitions across Integrity line
Hewlett-Packard has just rolled up an update to its venerable Unix platform that gives more virtualization options to more customers and better control over virtualization hypervisors and guests running on its Itanium-based Integrity and Superdome iron.
HP is on an odyssey – a a Project Odyssey in fact – to bring Xeon …
VMware confirms ESX source code had been stolen and published
VMware has confirmed that software posted online is part of the source code for its ESX hypervisor and has warned that more code could be released.
The code was posted by a hacker calling himself Hardcore Charlie and may come from military contractor China National Import & Export Corp (CEIEC), which he claimed to have …
Dell flashes 40GE blade switch, fabric manager
The engineers who used to work at the formerly independent Force 10 have forged the first 40 Gigabit Ethernet switch for new owner Dell's PowerEdge M1000e blade server chassis.
If you sell servers, storage, and networking, you are arguably a system maker these days, and that is one of the reasons why Dell bought Force 10 …
How to wrestle storage in virtual server bear pits
Deep Dive Server virtualisation is no longer just a topic for server admins; it also affects the management of storage and networking equipment. And the introduction of server virtualisation means that all of a sudden server operations people have to learn how to deal with storage.
This can create administrative complexity, as additional …
IBM fires Power-powered Penguins at x86's weak spots
Big Blue has not made any huge proclamations to date, but it is not exactly a secret that the people in charge of IBM's Systems and Software Group want the Power7 processor and its follow-ons to grab a larger share of the systems racket.
To that end, Big Blue is reviving a Linux-only variant of its Power Systems lineup with …
HP, Microsoft hop into bed for VS3 private cloud kit romp
System integrators had better polish up their resumes, because every IT vendor wants to sell preconfigured systems with servers, storage, networking, and management software – all pre-integrated and ready to have software poured onto their virtual machines to start doing real work in hours.
Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft have …
NetApp dips a toe into Flash Pool
NetApp has revealed plans to enhance its flash offerings and offer a single tier, flash cached array design with a sexy new name. Remember Hybrid Aggregates? They have become Flash Pools.
According to our close-to-Sunnyvale sources, we should envisage an array with a controller having Flash Cache – for read I/O acceleration – …
TMS and DataCore peddle flashy support for virtual servers
TMS flash arrays are being bundled with SANsymphony-V software from DataCore to provide fast flash-based SAN array support to virtualised servers.
The combination of RamSan flash appliances from TMS with the DataCore storage hypervisor software is aimed at VMware servers and accelerating hem by adding an automatically tiered …
VMware still shines in a Facebook world
It's tough for VMware to compete for mindshare in a world where Facebook is getting ready to go public and social media is so much more graspable for the masses compared to the virtual infrastructure that VMware sells.
But VMware's finances are still impressive enough to warrant some love for infrastructure, with revenues up 25 …
Hitachi's flexible servers sport homegrown LPAR virtualization
Sometimes Hitachi and IBM are bitter enemies, as they were in the peak days of the mainframe market, and sometimes they are partners, as they have been with Hitachi making some entry mainframes for Big Blue in recent years while also reselling IBM's Power-based AIX servers in Japan. It looks like the two are working together on …
VMware buys up benchmarketeer tools
Server virtualization juggernaut VMware doesn't just want to own the lion's share of the cloudy infrastructure inside data centers. It wants to convince all data centers to virtualize all workloads, and use the best virtualization tools available to do so. But to do that, the company has to prove that real-world workloads in …
OnLive goes legit with licensing downshift for virtual Windows
Updated Microsoft has claimed a partial victory in getting OnLive to change its Windows-on-an-iPad service to comply with Windows 7 licensing terms.
OnLive set up a Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) system, offering users of the iPad and other hardware to use a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) version of Windows 7 on their devices. …
