October 13th, 2008
Can virtualization help when times get tough?
When times get tough, many organizations look for new ways to reduce costs while still being able to provide their customers with the products and services they need. This appears to be just such a time. Virtualization technology can most certainly be part of the solution. Let’s review how each of the layers could be of assistance.
October 10th, 2008
Virtualization 2.0 panel recording from NGDC is available
Back in August, I had the opportunity to moderate a panel at the Next Generation Data Center Conference, entitled “Virtualization 2.0“.The panel included Albert Lee, Chief Strategy Officer and Board Director of xkoto, Greg O’Connor, CEO of Trigence, Jonah Paransky, Marketing VP of StackSafe and Lawrence Stein, Engineering VP of Scalent Systems. Not only did it appear that the audience enjoyed the panel (the audience ratings were quite good), the panel members enjoyed the conversation as well.
Jonah went to the trouble of acquiring the recording and the transcript of the panel and posted that content on StackSafe’s website. Here’s a pointer to that content for those interested in setting the Wayback Machine for August 2008 and the place to the Next Generation Datacenter Conference in San Francisco.
October 9th, 2008
Desktone “Desktops as a Service”
I had the opportunity to chat with Desktone about their recent announcements. In the last little while they announced a pilot of virtual desktops as a service and partnerships with both Wyse and Microsoft.
Here’s what Desktone had to say in the desktop as a service announcement:
Desktone, Inc., provider of the first solution that enables virtual desktops as an outsourced subscription service, announced today at VMworld a new program that helps enterprises easily evaluate the benefits of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) without building the environment themselves. The new Desktone Desktops as a Service (DaaS) Pilot will be available beginning October 1, 2008.
October 8th, 2008
Cisco SONA
Cisco caught my attention by asking me if I wanted to see the results of a study indicating how organizations are seeing Web 2.0 and/or Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) application adoption. Having executed dozens of studies of this nature while I was at IDC, I was interested in the results, but even more interesting to me was the methodology. While this study was only representative of people at a specific event, the results can not been seen as representing the views of the market as a whole.
October 7th, 2008
Windows Vista Woes or helping my Grandson with homework
Considering my background, it’s not at all hard to understand how I’ve become the tech support helpdesk for family, friends and the neighborhood as a whole. I’ve done my best to accept my lot in life with grace and courage. This time, my Grandson, Steven, was trying to complete a homework assignment, to create a presentation on Gettysburg and the Civil War. He had completed nearly a half of his assignment when it was time to go home. So, he copied his PowerPoint 2007 deck to a thumb drive and brought it over to our home so he could finish it up after a family dinner.
He appeared to be getting more and more frustrated with something and my daughter, Lori, suggested that I go over and see if I could help. He couldn’t get OpenOffice to open the PowerPoint deck. As I’m able to do that magic trick with the version I have on my Windows, Linux and Mac systems, I was pretty sure that he merely needed to download a recent update.
October 6th, 2008
Why bother with desktop virtualization?
The proponents of making proper use of desktop virtualization technology including access virtualization, application virtualization and VDI (the combination of access virtualization and processing virtualization) do their best to make it sound like the best things since pockets. Aren’t today’s laptops, desktops and handheld devices good enough to get the job done? Some suppliers, after all, will promise the sun and the stars, but in the end only provide the moon.
October 3rd, 2008
Microsoft Hyper-V Server
Microsoft was kind enough to let me know that the Hyper-V Server, that is a dedicated, minimal Windows 2008 Server platform dedicated to being a bare metal, type-1 hypervisor, is now available. It joins products of this type available from VMware, Citrix and several Linux distributions.
October 2nd, 2008
Citrix desktop virtualization
I’ve been thinking about a virtual desktop demonstration Citrix presented at its analyst day a few weeks ago. I posted a bit about my experiences (see Mark Templeton shares his vision at Citrix event), but haven’t been able to post reviews on everything I saw there. Their desktop virtualization demonstration was outstanding on a number of levels. What caught my eye was how integrated various types of virtualization software, security and management were integrated and appeared to be a single facility.
October 1st, 2008
How can virtualization help when the economy falters?
When times get tough, many organizations look for new ways to reduce costs while still being able to provide their customers with the products and services they need. This appears to be just such a time. Virtualization technology can most certainly be part of the solution. Let’s review how each of the layers could be of assistance.
- Access virtualization, such as that offered by Citrix and Microsoft, can make it possible for administrative and operational cost reductions while still making needed applications available in a secure, reliable way.
- Application virtualization, such as that offered by Citrix, Microsoft and many others, can make it possible for applications to be made available to staff members in a reliable way and even make it easier to update these applications without having to visit each and every laptop or desktop computer.
- Processing virtualization, such as that offered by Citrix, IBM, HP, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, Virtual Iron and many others can either allow many machines to work together to get tasks done more quickly to optimize staff member’s time or consolidate tasks onto a smaller number of physical machines. This approach can result in hardware, software, operational and adminisitrative cost reductions.
- Network virtualization can make it possible to reduce the costs of administrative and operating costs.
- Storage virtualization can do for storage what processing virtualization does for processing.
- Management and security software for virtualized environments may be the area having the biggest opportunity for cost reduction.
This very quick run down of how virtualization technology only touches on the benefits that can be found.
How is your organization using this technology in these trying times?
October 1st, 2008
Accellion Secure File Transfer
Paula Skokowski, VP of Marketing for Accellion, and I had a lovely debate, err, conversation over the need for her company’s product, a file transfer “virtualization” product. In the end, she won me over and I was forced through gritted teeth to agree that Accellion’s managed file transfer solution could be very useful for medium to large organizations. In quite a number of circumstances it does make sence to “centralize” large file transfers rather than having workers send large files as attachments to Email messages.
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