«Extending our partnership with VMware into the cloud is a boon for enterprise customers,» said Michael Miller, vice president of global alliances and marketing for SUSE. SUSE extended its partnership to make SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware available through VMware vCloud Hybrid Service.
Miller noted that «SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is an ideal guest operating system for running Linux workloads in any virtual environment, notably VMware. Customers will be able to get these same benefits through VMware vCloud Hybrid Service.»
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Opening Up the Cloud for Real Business Value
Open source clouds are taking off fast, but some still doubt their practical business application. In reality, however, open clouds better deliver on all the benefits that made cloud appealing in the first place: interoperability, innovation and cost efficiency. With an open cloud, companies aren’t investing in obsolete technology; instead, an active community keeps them on the cutting edge of innovation.
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Kyle MacDonald, Vice President of Cloud at Canonical, will explore the tangible benefits of open clouds and explain why open clouds strive to be interoperable with proprietary clouds too, ensuring that whatever cloud investments companies make, open clouds will add even more value to them.
Hybrid clouds: From reluctant acceptance to strategic imperative
It’s been well over a year that Forrester’s James Staten (@staten7) has been gently orating from the rooftops that «you are already hybrid.»
In his foresight, he was referring to the broad existence of so-called shadow-IT, the tendency of competent non-IT folk to pull out their credit cards and purchase public cloud services and SaaS services, thereby solving their own problems.
This week, a spate of articles from Forbes, WSJ (requires login) and elsewhere are telling the tale of a far more intentional approach to hybrid cloud.
This acceptance that certain workloads, for logistical, financial, or pragmatic reasons, are best housed locally – and that others, due to spikiness (technical term) or proximity to endpoint or resource profile, are best deployed to a service provider.
Infact, the Forbes article cites different tiers of an application potentially residing at different places.
There are a few implications of this current discussion …
VMware Announces Availability of vSphere 5.5
VMware announced the release of the latest generation of its flagship product, VMware vSphere 5.5. Enhancements include support for larger storage systems, support for management and deployment of big data environments, and support for Flash Memory performance improvements. VMware vSphere 5.5 also expanded its support by allowing configurations with two times the previous physical CPU, memory and NUMA node limits.
Rapid Fire Summary of Opening Keynote at VMworld 2013
By Chris Ward, CTO, LogicsOne
For those of you who aren’t out in San Francisco at the 10th annual VMworld event, here is a quick overview of what was covered in the opening keynote delivered by CEO Pat Gelsinger’s opening:
- Social, Mobile, Cloud & Big Data are the 4 largest forces shaping IT today
- Transitioned from Mainframe –>Client Server –>Mobile Cloud
- Pat sets the stage that the theme of this year’s event is networking – basically setting the stage for a ton of Nicira/NSX information. I think VMware sees the core of the software defined datacenter as networking-based, and they are in a very fast race to beat out the competition in that space
- Pat also mentioned that his passion is to get every x86 application/workload 100% virtualized. He drew parallels to Bill Gates saying his dream was a PC on every desk in every home that runs Microsoft software.
- Next came announcements around vSphere 5.5 & vCloud Suite 5.5…here are some of the highlights:
- 2x CPU and Memory limits and 32x storage capacity per volume to support mission critical and big applications
- Application Aware high availability
- Big Data Extensions – multi-tenant Hadoop capability via Serengeti
- vSAN officially announced as public beta and will be GA by 1st half of 2014
- vVOL is now in tech preview
- vSphere Flash Read Cache included in vSphere 5.5
Next, we heard from Martin Casado. Martin is the CTO – Networking at VMware and came over from the Nicira acquisition and was speaking about VMware NSX. NSX is a combination of vCloud Network and Security (vCNS) and Nicira. Essentially, NSX is a network hypervisor that abstracts the underlying networking hardware just like ESX abstracts underlying server hardware.
Other topics to note:
- IDC names VMware #1 in Cloud Management
- VMware hypervisor fully supported as part of OpenStack
- Growing focus on hybrid cloud. VMware will have 4 datacenters soon (Las Vegas, Santa Clara, Sterling, & Dallas). Also announcing partnerships with Savvis in NYC & Chicago to provide vCHS services out of Savvis datacenters.
- End User Computing
- Desktop as a Service on vCHS is being announced (I have an EUC Summit Dinner later on tonight so I will be able to go into more detail afterward that).
So, all-in-all a good start to the event. Network virtualization/NSX is clearly the focus of this conference and vCHS is a not too distant 2nd. Something that was omitted from the keynote was the rewritten SSO engine for vCenter 5.5. The piece was weak for 5.1 and has been vastly improved with 5.5…this could be addressed tomorrow as most of the tech staff is in Tuesday’s general session.
If you’re at the event…I’ll actually be speaking on a panel tomorrow at 2:30 about balancing agility with service standardization. I’ll be joining Khalid Hakim and Kurt Milne of VMware, along with Dave Bartoletti of Forrester Research and Ian Clayton of Service Management 101. I will also be co-presenting on Wednesday with my colleague John Dixon at 2:30-3:30 in the Moscone West Room 2011 about deploying a private cloud service catalogue. Hopefully you can swing by.
More to come soon!
Cloud Expo: Mobility Plus Agile Deployment = New Face of Cloud Computing
Mobility is the way of the future. In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Jason Prater, VP of Development at Plex Systems, will outline the hybrid approach behind the development of a groundbreaking application that combines mobility and cloud technology for manufacturers. He will outline how his product and platform development teams were able to bring SMBs the flexibility of using any mobile platform and location to access cloud functions.
Because an enhancement is useless until it is in the users’ hands, Prater coupled agile development with an agile, continuous deployment process to launch this mobile cloud computing capability within an accelerated timeframe. Hear, in this «Hot Topics» track session, how this was accomplished.
The Power of Online Collaboration for Gaining New Business
Ohio-based LLT Barcode & Label, has found powerful new ways to develop sales and leads inexpensively using Ariba Discovery to better connect with qualified new customers.
Social tools, big data and business networks are reshaping e-commerce in such a way that buyers and sellers are linking up in ways not possible even a few years ago.
In one example, Ohio-based LLT Barcode & Label, has found powerful new ways to develop sales and leads inexpensively using Ariba Discovery to better connect with qualified new customers.
Cloud Expo: Removing the Cloud of Suspicion Surrounding High Availability
Why has cloud computing failed to deliver on the promise of true high availability? Have we reached the limits of operational performance? Or are there emerging technologies that may make terms, like ‘downtime,’ ‘scheduled outage,’ or ‘unreachable’ obsolete?
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Dr. Jay Smith, CTO of Lagrange Systems will review weaknesses inherent in today’s approach to cloud computing and showcase how the next generation of technological advances will enable 99.999% or better.
TwinStrata Enables Live, In-Cloud Testing for Disaster Recovery
TwinStrata on Monday unveiled the latest release of its CloudArray software, which gives customers the ability to access production snapshots of their data remotely. Coupled with new accelerated cache reload capabilities, the new release drastically simplifies disaster recovery and testing. TwinStrata CloudArray 4.7 also provides improved encryption key protection, fully integrated support for Cleversafe’s dsNet® dispersed storage technology and support for Keystone authentication for OpenStack platforms.
In May, TwinStrata introduced CloudArray Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), which provides on-demand disaster recovery for VMware environments. CloudArray 4.7 further extends that capability, enabling organizations to more easily test their disaster recovery plans by providing access to in-cloud, production snapshots of their data from a secondary CloudArray. As a result, customers can conduct fire drills without shutting down their primary site, streamlining the process and reducing the impact of such tests on day-to-day operations.
Cloud Monitoring Essentials | Part 3: Availability
Users need to focus upon cost, security, and availability to reap full cloud benefits. This article, part 3 in a series, present key aspects of availability monitoring.
While cost brings people to the cloud, agility and availability keep them using. For sophisticated users, AWS (and other public clouds) offers tremendous advantages in terms of availability – need another 100 servers? We can spin those up instantly. Unexpected CDN demand? No problem. Want to test something out? We’ll get the resources right away.
The public cloud offers nearly unlimited capacity in a nearly instantaneous manner.
However, using a public cloud is far more complex than it first appears. There are numerous opportunities for missteps. Unfortunately, the errors are rarely obvious and always sacrifice functionality (see a detailed survey of actual user errors).