November 20th, 2008
Wyse, more than just thin clients
I’ve followed Wyse for the longest time and yet, when I had an opportunity to speak with Jeff McNaught, CMO of Wyse Technology I was surprised at how far they’re business has evolved from that base. The company now is doing interesting things in three areas: virtual clients, cloud computing and green computing. When one considers where the company started, creating thin clients for Citrix and Microsoft terminal services-based environments, evolving in the direction of creating hardware and software that makes accessing virtual desktops and virtual systems cost effective and productive makes a great deal of sense.
November 19th, 2008
Lanamark Vready
Mark Angelo, CEO of Lanamark, dropped by to tell me about Vready, a new service his company is offering. I’ve spoken with representatives with many smaller organizations and think that Lanamark has a good grasp on the problems these organizations are facing when they choose to embark on the journey to a more virtualized environment.
November 18th, 2008
Parallels Desktop 4 for Mac or how I lost my socks
Some demonstrations seem fated to be postponed time and again before the stars align and I’m finally able to sit back and enjoy the show some supplier wants to present. My meeting with the good folks from Parallels seemed to follow this pattern. Since I’ve known the executives of this company since I was at IDC and have followed them closely in my research on virtual machine software and operating system virtualization and partitioning software, I knew that seeing a demonstration of Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac was certainly worth the wait. I was impressed.
Read the rest of this entry »
November 17th, 2008
Conversation with Replicate Technologies
Rich Miller, CEO, and Oren Teich, VP Product, both of Replicate Technologies spent a while providing an introduction to the company and an explanation of what they’re doing. It was great catching up with both of them. Rich was the CTO of Univa, a company focused on bringing high performance computing tools to commercial companies and suffered through being a panel member on one of my panel discussions at LinuxWorld, ClusterWorld or some such. Oren has had the misfortune of speaking with me while at Sun, Montavista Software and Cobalt networks. Poor fellow. The conversation was lively and interesting
Replicate Technologies is applying its massive levels of expertise to finding ways to bring the levels of reliability and availability found today in physical datacenters to the virtual datacenter. They would pose that increasingly IT staff don’t know and, to a great extent, don’t care where applications are running from moment to moment. They’re seeing their industry standard systems as a pool of resources that can be deployed as needed to meet service level objectives and adhere to guidelines set by the organization. While this level of agility has its benefits, it also imposes significant challenges and, thus, increased costs when things don’t go as planned
November 14th, 2008
Adventures in CA Support Day 2
As I pointed out in the post Adventures in CA support, I received a routine message from CA telling me that my subscription to their CA Internet Security Suite was coming to an end and I needed to purchase an update. When I did and installed the updated software, problems arose, problems that CA support did little to help resolve. They have refunded my money. Cold comfort there.
November 14th, 2008
Live migration across different platforms demonstrated
A while back I received a note from Red Hat’s PR company that exclaimed that Red Hat and AMD had successfully migrated a running virtual machine from a dual socket Intel Xeon DP Quad Core E5420-based system to a system based on the forthcoming 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processor, utilizing Red Hat’s open source virtualization software. Neat trick. Read the rest of this entry »
November 13th, 2008
Adventures in CA support
I received an Email notice this morning that my support agreement with CA for their Internet Security Suite was ending and that I should pay for an update. Since I’m well aware of how long a Windows XP system will survive on the network without a security breach, I dutifully went to the online shop and purchased an update. My whirlwind adventure began after downloading the product. As you might expect, it went from bad to worse throughout the day.
After the updated software was installed, I found that my data stored on my file server was no longer available. Furthermore, I started seeing application errors poping up all over the place. I was told “The instruction at “<some address>” referenced memory at “<some address>”. The memory could not be read. Click on OK to terminate the program. Since I had never seen this message before updating the CA software, I knew it had to be something related to that installation.
November 13th, 2008
VMware follows in Virtuallogix’s footsteps
My friends at VMware recently sent me a note telling me 1) that they had acquired Trango Virtual Processors and 2) they were jumping into the mobile device virtual machine market.Trago VMware has chosen to rename Trago’s product as VMware Mobile Platform. This isn’t the only entry into this market, however. Others have been engaged in bringing virtual machine technology into this market for quite some time.
November 12th, 2008
Ncomputing the benefits of operating system virtualization
In a rapid fire presentation, the Ncomputing folks provided a very interesting view into what they’ve been doing to help organizations take advantage of the unused power in today’s desktop systems to support many workloads. As I mentioned in the post Ncomputing: Sharing the power of a single computer, this is not a new idea. Although not a new idea, Ncomputing has implemented it in a very clever, very efficient way.
November 11th, 2008
VMware’s MVP brings virtualization to mobile phones
VMware provides a full line of virtualization software for the data center and down to the desktop. Now it is reaching down to an even smaller form factor: mobile phones.
On Monday, the Palo Alto, Calif. virtualization pioneer unveiled its new VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP), based on technology it acquired fom Trango Virtual Processors last month.
The MVP, as it is known, is a “thin layer of software that is embedded on a mobile phone to decouple the applications and data from the underlying hardware. It is optimized to run efficiently on low power consuming and memory constrained mobile phones,” VMware noted.
MVP currently supports Windows CE 5.0 and 6.0, Linux 2.6.x, Symbian 9.x, eCos, µITRON NORTi and µC/OS-II.
The intent is to isolate the applications and data from the hardware so that handset manufacturers can deploy devices more quickly and so that application developers can write a mobile app or service once and run it anywhere. ”The use of multiple chipsets, operating systems and device drivers across a product family” significantly slows down manufacturers’ ability to ship new devices into the market. The MVP software promises to reduce time-to-market for handset manufacturers and service providers.
It will also help handset manufacturers embrace open source operating systems, VMware notes.
“Increasingly handset vendors and carriers are looking to migrate from proprietary operating systems to rich, open operating systems so their customers can choose from the widest selection of applications,” according to a release issued about MVP this week. ”With this transition to open operating systems, protection of trusted services such as digital rights management, authentication, billing, etc. is becoming an increasing concern. VMware MVP allows vendors to isolate these important trusted services from the open operating system and run them in isolated and tamper-proof virtual machines so that even if the open environment is compromised, the trusted services are not impacted.”
Finally, the MVP software offers end users and their employers an additional benefit.
“Companies are under increasing pressure from employees to support employee-owned mobile devices,” VMware states. “MVP will allow IT organizations to deploy a corporate phone personality that can run along side the employee’s personal phone on the same physical device. ”
In addition to support for corporate and personal profiles, the MVP code allows end users to create a “persona” on the go that consists of files, applications, services and data rolled up into a package that can be moved from one device to another.
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