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Citrix survey: Is the cloud confusing?

A survey from Wakefield Research for virtualisation experts Citrix has shown that, for consumers, many Americans are unaware of what ‘the cloud’ entails.

32% of respondents stated that cloud was “a thing of the future”, while 95% of those surveyed who thought they weren’t using the cloud actually were, for such simple tasks as online banking and social networking.

The research, which garnered responses from over 1000 American nationals, found some surprising and eye-opening results. Highlights included:

  • 40% of respondents stated an advantage of the cloud was being able to access work information in their “birthday suit”
  • A quarter of those surveyed said the cloud was great for keeping embarrassing videos off the hard drive
  • A third of interviewees said they faked knowledge of the cloud at work, with 14% pretending to know for a job interview and 17% winging it on a first date

Thankfully, Americans did see …

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VMware’s OpenStack Hook-up: Analysis & Comments

VMware has applied to join the OpenStack Foundation, potentially giving the burgeoning open source cloud stack movement a huge dose of credibility in the enterprise. There are risks to the community in VMware’s involvement, of course, but on the balance this could be a pivotal event. There is an alternative explanation, which I will hit at the end, but it’s a pretty exciting development no matter VMware’s true motivations.

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Featured, Miscellaneous IT, Virtualization, VMware, VMworld

VMworld Recap: Day One

Day 1 at VMworld 2012 has been pretty action packed.  The first order of business was the official handing over of the reins from Paul Maritz to Pat Gelsinger as CEO of VMware.  Paul will remain involved as he is taking the Chief Strategist role at EMC which owns 80% of VMware so I would not expect his influence to go away anytime soon.  From conversations I’ve had with others both inside and outside of VMware, the primary reason for this move seems to be purely operational.  Paul is an absolute visionary and has taken VMware to some fantastic heights over his four-year tenure, however there have been some challenges on the operational side in executing on the great visions.  This is where Pat comes into the picture as he’s historically been a pure operations guy so I envision the team of Paul and Pat to do some great things for VMware going forward.

Some other key highlights from the Keynote are as follows:

  1. It is estimated that 60% of all x86 server workloads in the world are now virtualized and 80% of that 60% are virtualized on ESX/vSphere.
  2. There are now 125,000 VCP certified engineers worldwide, almost a 5-fold increase from 4 years ago
  3. The dreaded vRAM allocation licensing model for vSphere 5 is now officially dead with the release of vSphere 5.1.  VMware is going back to per socket licensing and neither RAM nor cores matter.  Personally, I am not sure this was a great move as I think most people were over the headache of vRAM and in reality I never saw a single customer who was adversely affected by it.  When Pat announced this, I think he thought the entire auditorium would roar in appreciation but that was not the case.  Yes, there was some cheering, but even Pat made mention of the fact that it wasn’t the full on reaction he expected.
  4. There are a lot of new certifications and certification tracks that were announced to better align with VMware’s definition of the new “stack.”  These tracks include the pre-existing datacenter infrastructure certs plus new ones around Cloud (think vCloud Director here), Desktop (View and Wanova/Mirage), and Apps (SpringSource).  I’ll be taking the new VCP-IaaS exam tomorrow so wish me luck!
  5. There was a light touch on both the Dynamic Ops and Nicira acquisitions.  Both of these have huge implications for VMware but really not much was announced at the show.  Both of these are very recent acquisitions so it will take some time for VMware to get them integrated but I am very excited about the possibilities of each.
  6. There was an announcement of the vCloud Suite, which essentially is a bundling of existing VMware products under a singular license model.  There are the typical Standard, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus editions of the suite which include different pieces and parts, but the Enterprise Plus edition throws in about everything and the kitchen sink including….
    1. vSphere 5.1 Enterprise Plus
    2. vCenter Operations Enterprise
    3. vCloud Director
    4. vCloud networking/security (I assume this will eventually include Nicira networking virtualization and the vShield product family)
    5. Site Recovery Manager
    6. vFabric Application Director
    7. Lots of focus on virtualization of business critical applications and not just the usual suspects of SQL, Oracle, Exchange, etc.  There was a cool demo of Hadoop via Project Serengeti which automates the spinning up/down of various Hadoop VMs and this is delivered as a single virtual appliance.  GreenPages has done a lot in the business critical app virtualization space over the past couple of years and we remain excited about the possibilities that virtualization brings to these beefy apps.
    8. One of the big geeky announcements is around the concept of shared nothing vMotion.  This means that you can now move a live running VM between two host servers but without any requirement for shared storage, basically vMotion without a SAN.  This has massive implications in the SMB and branch office spaces where the cost of shared storage was very prohibitive.  Now you can get some of the cool benefits of virtualization using only very cheap direct attached storage!
    9. The final piece of the keynote showed VMware’s vision for virtualization of “everything” including compute, storage, and networking.  Look for some very cool stuff coming over the next 6 months or so in relation to new ways of thinking about networking and storage within a virtual environment.  These are two elements that really have not fundamentally changed how they work since the advent of x86 virtualization and we are now running into limitations due to this.  VMware is leading the charge in changing the way we think about these two critical elements and looking at very interesting ways to attack design and in the end making it much simpler to work with networking and storage technologies within virtualized environments.

Have to jump back over for Day 2 activities now, but be on the lookout for some upcoming GreenPages events where we’ll dive deeper into the announcements from the show!

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The 1-2-3 about Parallels PartnerNet

About three months ago, we announced an expanded Partner Program which included a new Member level and all-new Parallels PartnerNet portal. There are now over 1,000 users in PartnerNet, and it is just getting started!

 

For any existing or potential Parallels Partners that haven’t yet registered, here’s 3 good reasons why you should to take a moment and do so:

  1. 1) Complete your Company Profile (located in the top navigation) and this will link externally to the Partner Locator found on the Parallels website. (NOTE: this feature is only available for Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum partners, and is not available for Members.)
  2. 2) Be sure to take advantage of the Parallels Plesk 11 launch resources page – there is some fantastic product collateral, messaging, and guidance available, localized into multiple languages.
  3. 3) Visit the SMB Headquarters for access to our primary research and SMB-focused materials, as well as our Marketing Best Practices page for whitepapers and checklists that you can use.

-Joshua Beil
SP Marketing
jbeil@parallels.com
@joshbeil

 

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HP Expands Converged Cloud Portfolio

HP has announced that it’s expanding its HP Converged Cloud portfolio with new solutions for VMware vCloud Suite 5.1, enabling clients to transform traditional virtualization deployments into private and hybrid cloud environments with less risk and complexity.
Combined with VMware vCloud Suite 5.1, HP CloudSystem doubles VM density, reduces network complexity, and provides added flexibility to support almost any workload, says HP.
Introduced in April, HP Converged Cloud extends the power of the cloud across infrastructure, data and applications. Based on a single architecture, HP Converged Cloud helps integrate many combinations of private, managed and public clouds, as well as traditional IT, providing workload portability as well as dynamic scaling.

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Ways Cloud Computing Will Change by 2020

Think cloud computing is just the latest IT fad? Think again.
According to an article on ZDNet, by 2020 cloud is going to be a major – and permanent – part of the enterprise computing infrastructure.
Forrester predicts the global cloud computing market will grow from $35 billion in 2011 to around $150 billion by 2020 as it becomes key to many organizations’ IT infrastructures.
By 2020, a generational shift will have occurred in organizations. A new generation of CIOs will be in charge that have grown up using cloud-based tools, making them far more willing to adopt cloud on an enterprise scale.

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Cloud Storage, Storage

The World of Cloud Computing and Online Storage

Cloud computing and cloud storage have revolutionized how we as businesses and individuals work. Think of how we used to work before the cloud entered our consciousness—we’d have to print documents, make copies, and deal with temperamental servers, as well as crashing computers. Sure, these things are still part of the bigger picture, yet doing our work and business online has made it less of a cumbersome experience and that much more user-friendly.

The Advantages of Cloud Computing and Cloud Storage

Think about the last time you actually sent someone a letter by regular mail. Was it years, or decades ago? Depending on your age, you may never have actually physically mailed a friend a letter before. As technology changes, so does the world around us—what we once considered science fiction has now become our reality. The good news is, however, this brave new world does offer some pretty cool advantages.

Cost is perhaps the biggest selling point for cloud computing. Businesses that use cloud computing and the best online storage methods almost always see a major decrease in cost, as cloud storage companies are able to charge significantly less than a company would pay not just to purchase, but to maintain and repair their servers. With a cloud storage company, you also get top of the line service and the best technology, again at a significantly lower cost than you’d be paying on your own.

With cloud computing and storage, we can also all seamlessly share our data with other businesses or clients or even friends across the world. Remember the days of overnighting fed-ex packages (and paying enormously painful international rates)? Those days are now thankfully gone, at least for the most part—with cloud computing and storage the ease in which we do business has greatly improved.

Travel and gas costs have significantly decreased as well, as the cloud allows us to work with others without having to travel “door to door” to accomplish our daily business. Businesses can now have clients and employees access related files from anywhere, simply through an organization’s cloud.

The Cloud Critics

Every advance in technology has its critics, and the cloud is certainly no exception. But the truth is, the cloud is actually a much safer alternative to more traditional methods of data storage.

Though hacking is often listed as the #1 concern of most considering cloud storage, what most people don’t realize is that your less at risk of being hacked with a cloud storage company than you are with your own backup methods. This is because most cloud storage companies have made security their top priority, and they’re equipped with more advanced security technology than most companies or individuals could even begin to afford on their own.

Systems inevitably crash; the advantage of cloud storage is that you’ll still have a backup of all your data. And unlike expensive hard drives, the cloud will not just one day conk out on you.

With cloud storage, your files can also be reconfigured automatically, complying with computer languages that are always changing, therefore allowing your information to be accessible for many years down the line.


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Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: The Cloud Service Broker

Next-generation cloud service management software will offer service brokering capabilities. A broker allows the federation of resources across heterogeneous Cloud Service Providers and thus plays an important role in avoiding vendor lock-in.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Jamie Marshall, the CTO of Prologue (France), will provide an overview of the architecture of an open source cloud service broker that would allow for the description, provision, deployment and management of any type or configuration of cloud services delivered by heterogeneous cloud service providers in accordance with a consumer’s SLA. He will end with a live demonstration showing how a federation of multiple OpenStack providers can be managed by CompatibleOne, an open source cloud service broker, in a multi-cloud environment.

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Cloud and Change Management

Change management is important for any Technology initiative and since many Cloud services focus on rapid deployments, this area is sometimes forgotten. The move to Cloud has not only technology implications but also business implications. Business processes and operations can be encapsulated as services and delivered expeditiously. Change management for the Cloud should look into the strategic, technology and development changes and related impacts. If you need new tires for your car do you just go and buy the first set of tires you see or do you check specifications, compatibility, price etc to determine how this change will impact your vehicle. This may appear to be common sense but in the excitement of moving to the Cloud it is easy to get carried away and not think about all aspects of change management.

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The cloud news categorized.