AMD finds itself in the increasing novel situation – sorta like Microsoft with its promised Surface tablets – of possibly competing against its OEMs with a system – and not just a box with Intel chips in it – which is novel enough, imagine AMD selling Intel chips – but a complete plug-and-play system with scads of external storage that it’s building itself.
It’s the first time AMD has gone into the storage business and it owes this little adventure in vertical integration to its $334 million acquisition of micro server maker SeaMicro earlier this year.
SeaMicro builds dense, energy-efficient micro servers that are aimed at the 500 top clouds and Big Data houses. AMD bought SeaMicro out from under Intel in February as a way to backstroke out of its evaporating PC pool.
Ironically it was Intel that predicted that micro servers would claim 10% of the server market by 2015.
Important! VMware’s Kickoff News and Promotions
By Rob O’Shaughnessy
Opening week for the NFL, apple cider donuts and VMware product announcements are all signs that autumn is finally here. I’m not sure what I’m more excited about, no more vRAM entitlement conversations or the Patriots new look offense. Being a big sports nut and self-titled President all things Boston Sports in greater Los Angeles I should say the Patriots, but not having to explain vRAM and this many gigabytes is what you get with that edition and 12-month average and high water marks, etc. etc. etc. is going to be nice.
VMware announced version 5.0 on August 22nd last year so I spent a whole year’s worth of breaths talking about vRAM. I want those breaths back VMware!!! I could have used that time to eat apple cider donuts. I digress. So some of you may have heard the announcements, or got a sprinkling of the announcements, or may not even know what I’m talking about, but that’s okay, because what I’ve put together is a little short list of important stuff to know in the world of VMware.
vSphere:
First and foremost vSphere 5.1 was released and this update will just be licensed by the socket. VMware is no longer requiring vRAM entitlement, so the days of thinking about the numbers 32, 64 and 96 are now gone. In addition, the other good news is that vSphere 5.1’s pricing did not change. There is also a new edition to the vSphere family. VMware has added vSphere Standard with Operations Management, so now there are four editions of vSphere to choose from:
vSphere Standard
-vSphere Standard with Operations Management
-vSphere Enterprise
-vSphere Enterprise Plus
It addition to adding vSphere Standard with Operations Management to the product line-up, VMware has also included it into their Acceleration Kit portfolio, so along with the Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus Acceleration Kits, there will also be a vSphere Standard with Operations Management Acceleration Kit. These four kit options will include 6 processor licenses of the vSphere edition of your choice and vCenter Standard Server. One change to note is that the vSphere Standard Acceleration Kit used to include 8 processors, but it now just includes six. Last, all the Accelerations Kits and the Essentials Plus kit will now include the vSphere Storage Appliance at no additional charge. Sweet!
Desktop Products:
Desktop Products such as View, Workstation and Fusion have had a price increase of 10%. Also announced is VMware View’s new management product vCenter Operations Manager for View. This product is available as an add-on component for VMware View Enterprise and Premier. Using the same concurrent user license model as VMware View, packages are available in increments of 10 and 100 concurrent users.
vCloud Suites:
VMware also made the announcement of their new vCloud Suites, which combine VMware’s top products into one bundle. VMware is offering 3 editions:
vCloud Suite Standard – $4,999: vSphere Enterprise Plus, vCloud Director & vCloud Connector, vCloud Networking and Security Standard
vCloud Suite Advanced – $7,495: vSphere Enterprise Plus, vCloud Director & vCloud Connector, vCloud Networking and Security Advanced, vCOps Advanced
vCloud Suite Enterprise – $11,495: vSphere Enterprise Plus, vCloud Director & vCloud Connector, vCloud Networking and Security Advanced, vCOps Enterprise, vCenter Chargeback Manager, Configuration Manager, Infrastructure Navigation, vFabric Application Director and SRM
So an interesting thing to point out: Looking at the Standard Edition of vCloud Suite you’ll see that it retails for $4,999 and includes a bunch of stuff like: vSphere Enterprise Plus, VMware vCloud Director, VMware vCloud Connector, VMware vCloud Networking and Security Standard. On the other hand vSphere Enterprise Plus alone retails for $3,495 so for another $1,504 the vCloud Suite Standard Ed will get you vSphere Enterprise Plus and all that other stuff. It’s sort of VMware’s version of Super-Size Me.
Promotions:
VMware is offering some nice promotions to this as well and here are a couple of popular ones to note. For a full list of all VMware’s promotions there is a nifty app you can download on your phone: http://www.vmware.com/go/promoapp
vCloud Promo:
Upgrade from vSphere Enterprise Plus to vCloud Suite Standard for free!
Or, Upgrade from vSphere Enterprise or Enterprise Plus to vCloud Suite Advanced or Enterprise for around 35% (it’s 32-38% depending on the edition you currently own).
Available until December 15, 2012.
**Customers can qualify for this promotion in one of two ways. Customers must:
1. Have an active Support and Subscription (SnS) agreement to vSphere Enterprise or vSphere Enterprise Plus made prior to August 27, 2012 and at time of upgrade, and must complete their upgrade transaction with VMware before the expiration of the promotion.
2. Or, reinstate SnS to vSphere Enterprise or vSphere Enterprise Plus before December 10, 2012, have active SnS at time of upgrade, and complete their upgrade transaction with VMware by December 15, 2012 mbennett@unum.com mbennett@unum.com
**New purchases of vSphere Enterprise or vSphere Enterprise Plus made on or after August 27, 2012 are not eligible for this promotion.
vSphere Std w/ Ops Promo:
Upgrade to VMware vSphere Standard with Operations Management and save 30%
Available until December 15, 2012
View 5 Premier Bundle Promo:
Get 25% off View 500 pack or 18% off View 250 pack
Available until December 15, 2012
VC Ops for View Promo:
25% discount on vCenter Operations Manager for View 10 and 100 packs
Available until December 15, 2012
Horizon App Manager Bundle Promo:
50% off Horizon Application Manager with purchase of View Premier
Available until December 15, 2012
Purchase a minimum of 100 pack of View Premier and get 50% off the license list price for Horizon Application Manager.
Building a Bridge to the Cloud
One of the key focus areas of our Private Cloud 2.0 series is that the 2.0 part represents the ‘outside world’, even though it is focused on a Private Cloud scenario. This is simply because it is inevitable and one of the valuable features of the Private Cloud approach – At some point you’ll want […]
Can the cloud assist the banking industry?
The banking industry has faced a vast number of challenges recently and continues to do so, particularly with increasing regulations, unhappy customers, strengthening competition and decreasing levels of profitability.
So, in a time full of change, it would seem that banks need to keep up with the times! Cloud hosting can certainly help the banking industry do this…
Modern Demands
As more banks begin to transform their product offerings, channels and customer services to reflect modern day demands, banks will need to enable a more competitive, consumer-focused business model that will also need to be more efficient.
This is where cloud computing comes in.
Thanks to its low cost, high scalability, unlimited processing power, agility, storage benefits and speed, banks will certainly be in a beneficial position if they properly implement cloud hosting.
Some key movements in banks’ use of cloud computing have been identified this week, such as cloud …
Cloud Standards Roadmap
A keynote document to use for planning your migration to Cloud Computing is the USA CIO Council’s recent publication: ‘Creating Effective Cloud Computing Contracts for the Federal Government‘.
“Standards specification: In accordance with Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular A-119, Federal Participation in the Development and Use of Voluntary Consensus Standards and in Conformity Assessment Activities, agencies should specify relevant voluntary consensus standards in their procurements. The NIST Standards.gov website includes a useful list of questions that agencies should consider before selecting standards for agency use”.
Cloud Computing: New SoftLayer Message Queue Service Delivers Scalability
SoftLayer Technologies on Thursday announced the launch of the SoftLayer Message Queue service, a cost-effective messaging and notification service that scales seamlessly to support development of bigger, bottleneck-free applications.
“Message Queue is built to scale easily, giving web and app developers unlimited potential to grow virtually any type of application,” said Duke Skarda, chief technology officer for SoftLayer. “This new service provides a means to pass control flow and information between application servers deployed across our global platform. The uses for a service like this are endless. And since we developed this in partnership with our managed database as a service partner, Cloudant, the persistence and scalability are rock solid.”
SoftLayer Message Queue combines robust and scalable messaging queuing and notification services into a single solution, integrated with the company’s global platform and allowing for secure transmission between geographically distributed processes across SoftLayer’s global private network.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Why Capacity Management as You Know It Is Dead
Capacity management may not be dead yet, but with the adoption of virtualization and cloud computing models it’s barely recognizable. IT organizations are radically changing how they plan and manage infrastructure to cope with the complexity of these large-scale shared environments and prevent the over-provisioning that results from old school planning approaches. The focus has shifted from leveraging simple tools and basic trending toward approaches that model demand “pipelines” and forecast based on capacity bookings, which more resembles a hotel reservation system than traditional capacity management. This is creating a whole new operational model that looks at the flow of workloads in and out of an environment (on-boarding and de-commissioning), as well as organic growth, all while optimizing workload placements and resource allocations to ensure optimal use of available capacity.
Cloud Computing in China
Driven by large-scale government initiatives as well as private investment, cloud computing has become a hot growth area in China. Named a ‘Strategic Emerging Industry’ in the government’s 12th Five Year Plan (2011 – 2015), cloud computing is slated to become a primary force in the Chinese IT industry and overall economy in the next 3–5 years. In fact, according to IDC Asia-Pacific, China spent $286 million on cloud-computing infrastructure last year, and the amount will increase to more than $1 billion in 2016. The Asia Cloud Computing Association reports that total investment in cloud computing projects in China is expected to reach $154 billion over the coming few years.
So with all the internal focus on building a suitable infrastructure and nurturing cloud innovation, what factors will companies need to consider when deploying applications to the cloud in China? Key among the issues will be Chinese data privacy and state secrecy laws. Still nascent in comparison to similar laws in other part of the world, national Chinese data privacy regulations are considered quite vague (although they are currently undergoing broad revisions). And the sweeping state secrecy laws permit national security to be used as the rationale for almost any measure pertaining to data privacy and the Internet/cloud.
Can Cloud Computing Scuttle Software Piracy?
With a growing amount of software applications using the Software-as-a-Service model, experts claim that software piracy will eventually be eliminated.
Others, however, are claiming that users will just find ways to circumvent everything so that they won’t pay for software use.
The Business Software Alliance (BSA) released new survey results revealing 42 percent of the 15,000 PC users-respondents in 33 countries admitted to sharing their login credentials to paid cloud computing services with other people within their organizations, according to an article on CloudTimes.org.
According to BSA President and CEO Robert Holleyman, such an act doesn’t constitute piracy, as some cloud computing services do allow simultaneous logins using just one account. Other than that, sharing login credentials can cause terms of service violations or license abuse.
Some members of BSA believe cloud applications will greatly minimize software piracy. Last year, in an interview with Forbes, Adobe Systems CEO Shantanu Narayen said that piracy will be significantly reduced because cloud and Software-as-a-Service applications will continuously require an Internet connection.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: The Five Steps to Deploying a Private Cloud
If your organization has been looking into deploying a private cloud, you must know the five steps to take to initiate its development. In particular, there are key operational and IT processes that organizations need to agree upon in order to build a cloud successfully.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Dr. Rich Wolski, CTO and Co-founder of Eucalyptus Systems Inc., will explain how to bring about greater efficiencies within the data center through a scalable, elastic private cloud.