Virtually Speaking

July 2nd, 2009

DataCore Advanced Site Recovery

Posted by Dan Kusnetzky @ 3:00 am

Categories: Managing virtualized environments, Virtual storage, Virtualization

Tags: Data Center, Recovery, Approach, DataCore, Data Centers, Storage, Disaster Recovery, Hardware, Data Management, Dan Kusnetzky

It’s been quite a while since I last spoke with the folks from DataCore. I believe that the last post on this company was back in August 2008 (see Datacore - nothing but storage.) Last time the discussion focused on the need organizations should recognize to pair virtual storage solutions with their virtual processing solutions. This time, the discussion focused on DataCore’s Advanced Site Recovery (ASR) and preparing for disasters and increasing availability without also increasing costs dramatically.

Some approaches to high availability and disaster recovery require that an organization maintain a separate datacenter, DataCore’s approach is to utilize excess capacity in current datacenters. This approach is likely to be appealing to small to medium sized organizations that don’t have the luxury of maintaining a separate datacenter for disaster recovery.
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July 1st, 2009

FireFox 3.5, Add-ons and Backwards Compatibility

Posted by Dan Kusnetzky @ 3:06 am

Categories: Off topic

Tags: Dan Kusnetzky

On a whim, I updated one of my systems from Firefox 3.0.11 to 3.5 yesterday. I wanted to personally experience the speed improvements that industry reports have said Firefox 3.5 provided over previous versions. After working with the software for a short time, I have to agree that the browser seems more responsive and Web pages render more quickly. That’s all well and good, but my update experience was not as good as I had hoped. A number of my add-ons wouldn’t load. Unfortunately, one of them is the tool I use to create posts for ZDnet.

So, I’m faced with finding other ways to accomplish every-day functions. Although I can understand that this incompatibility can be attributed to changes in the underlying APIs. I would also guess that no attempt was made to provide some sort of backward compatibility so that things would continue to work while developers of these add-ons updated their code. I find it irritating.

Although this is ancient history now, I remember working with applications that were developed for early versions of Digital Equipment’s VAX/VMS operating system that worked quite well five versions later. Digital spent a great deal of time and energy thinking about backward compatibility. It appears that kind of thought has fallen by the wayside in today’s rush to get a product out the door.

Don’t you think that backward compatibility should be part of all software supplier’s thinking and development processes?

8:30 AM update

You just have to love the ZDnet audience! A wonderful reader, jjhanna, sent the following message shortly after my post went up this morning.

Simply download Mr Tech Toolkit extension

It makes anything compatible with Firefox Upgrades…

http://www.mrtech.com/extensions/#toolkit

I did and it does!

Thanks, jjhanna!

June 30th, 2009

Sun VirtualBox 3.0

Posted by Dan Kusnetzky @ 3:00 am

Categories: Virtual machine software, Virtual processing software, Virtualization

Tags: Innotek VirtualBox, Hypervisor, Sun Microsystems Inc., VirtualBox 3.0, Desktop Virtualization, Hardware, Virtualization, Dan Kusnetzky

Sun Microsystems released VirtualBox 3.0 today. One goal of this release is supporting workloads, such as database management systems, some collaborative applications and many web-based applications that rely on multiple processes running simultaneously. Another is offering support for high performance graphics for desktop applications.

Read the rest of this entry »

June 29th, 2009

Platform Computing: Herding Clouds

Posted by Dan Kusnetzky @ 3:00 am

Categories: Cloud computing/SAAS/ISP Issues, Managing virtualized environments, Virtualization

Tags: Platform Computing Inc., Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Hardware, Dan Kusnetzky

After the post Platform Computing Announces Infrastructure Sharing Services appeared on ZDnet, I had the opportunity to speak with Songnian Zhou, CEO of Platform Computing. Although the plans were for me to speak with Platform prior to the post going live, scheduling problems made that impossible. So, the focus of our conversation moved from the announcement of Platform’s new product to a more general, philosophical review of the industry march towards the adoption of cloud computing in some form.

Here are some important points from our discussion:

• Cloud Computing is in the “over hype” stage of development. That is, anyone doing anything vaguely touching on distributed, virtualized computing that offers pay-as-you-play pricing and self management is waving the cloud banner. The industry must find a standardized definition of what is and isn’t cloud computing. My colleagues at the 451 Group, Rachel Chalmers, William Fellows, Dan Golding, Antonio Piraino and others have done their best to do just that in an upcoming report.
• Management is one of the key requirements and features of a complete cloud computing environment. The good Dr. Zhou would point out that Platform has been offering powerful management tools for distributed, extreme computing environment for well over a decade and is well positioned for the evolution into cloud computing.
• While it appears that industry standard systems are an increasingly important part of organizations’ overall computing strategies, cloud computing is likely to include products from suppliers of many systems, operating systems, virtualization tools, databases, development tools and applications. Management tools that only support a single product in any of those categories is likely to be of limited use to many organizations.
• Giving organizations the ability to gently move workloads from their own IT infrastructure to that offered by an outside supplier and back again upon need is a critical requirement.
• Being able to control the environment so that costs and execution location are always known, is also a critical success factor. No run-away processes should be allowed.

June 25th, 2009

MokaFive launches version 2 of its MokaFive Suite

Posted by Dan Kusnetzky @ 3:00 am

Categories: Cloud computing/SAAS/ISP Issues, Virtual machine software, Virtual processing software, Virtualization

Tags: Desktop Management, MokaFive, MokaFive Suite, Desktop Management Cost, Desktops, Desktop Virtualization, Virtualization, Hardware, Dan Kusnetzky

Desktop virtualization (the combination of access virtualization, application virtualization and/or processing virtualization for client-side deployment) has not gotten the intense industry attention that its cousin, server virtualization, has and yet, a number of suppliers have pegged their hopes and dreams to that nascent market. MokaFive is one of those suppliers. I’ve posted about MokaFive on a number of occasions and have been overly creative with the company’s name (see Moka5 - a different take on application virtualization and Mokafive Version 1.)

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June 24th, 2009

Platform Computing Announces Infrastructure Sharing Services

Posted by Dan Kusnetzky @ 3:00 am

Categories: Cloud computing/SAAS/ISP Issues, Virtualization

Tags: Platform Computing Inc., Platform Infrastructure Sharing Facility, Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Hardware, Dan Kusnetzky

The folks at Platform Computing are at it again.  This time, they’ve announced a product to support cloud computing in the form of infrastructure as a service (IaaS). They’re calling it Platform Infrastructure Sharing Service (ISF).

As often is the case with a new product from a long established player, the technology appears to offer a great deal of capability, but that really isn’t the issue when it comes to Platform Computing. The real issue for Platform is making decision makers aware of who it is and what it can do to help and then leading those who have become aware of Platform and its products to become interested enough to seek more information, come to desire the product because it can solve problems they’re facing and, finally, take action to acquire the product. Awareness beyond its circle of friends has not been one of Platform’s strongest areas in the past. Read the rest of this entry »

June 23rd, 2009

RNA Networks launches RNAcache

Posted by Dan Kusnetzky @ 2:57 am

Categories: Network Virtualization, Virtual processing software, Virtual storage, Virtualization

Tags: RNA, Data Center, Virtualization, RNA Networks, RNACACHE RNA Network, Biotechnology, Data Centers, Storage, Hardware, Data Management

RNA Networks is launching RNAcache, a product that lives along the border of processing virtualization, network virtualization and storage virtualization by offering the capability to use server memory on many systems as a shared network resource. RNA Networks is one a number of suppliers that are melding high performance computing, clustering and virtualization technology together to create what is, in essence, very large, some would say extreme, multiprocessing systems. RNA networks has been the topic of a few earlier posts including RNA Networks and memory virtualization and Creating extreme systems - an RNA Networks Customer Profile. Let’s look at this announcement, shall we? Read the rest of this entry »

June 22nd, 2009

Another view on Red Hat's Virtualization Portfolio

Posted by Dan Kusnetzky @ 3:00 am

Categories: Access virtualization, Cloud computing/SAAS/ISP Issues, Managing virtualized environments, Virtual machine software, Virtual processing software, Virtualization

Tags: Virtualization, Red Hat Inc., Open Source, Dan Kusnetzky

Red Hat just trumpeted that its Virtualization Portfolio was just about cooked and ready to serve. While that announcement (see Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Beta Draws Industry Interest) did gather some industry comment, including that made by my colleage Paula Rooney (see Red Hat’s KVM-based virtualization platform moves into beta testing), it certainly can be seen as a predictable move. Rather than just repeating what has already been said, I’m going to present a different view.

When I posted Red Hat acquires Qumranet, several things were clear including the following:

• Red Hat didn’t trust Citrix to shepherd the Xen community because of its deep ties with Microsoft.
• Red Hat saw that it needed to have its own hypervisor technology if it was going to be able to fully serve the needs of the open source community. It would need to continue to play along with the Xen community. It also knew that it was necessary to develop KVM as a strong contender. Acquiring Qumranet gave it access to KVM and its developers.
• Red Hat saw that if it was going to continue to be a strong competitor in the infrastructure software market, it needed a strong story in the related areas of desktop virtualization, server virtualization, management of virtualized environments and security for those environments.  It didn’t trust Citrix to continue providing that technology.  Qumranet had a running start at a desktop virtualization (virtual access software, a hypervisor and related management software) and with some help, that technology could be the foundation of a much broader offering.
• As various forms of cloud computing move from the early adoptor phase to mainstream acceptance, having a complete, robust infrastructure offering for hosting and managed services suppliers was an absolute necessity. These suppliers often care far more for commodity pricing, standardization, reliability, performance and manageability than for brand names.  If others control significant components of a complete infrastructure for cloud computing, Red Hat would find itself hamstrung when completing with players like Microsoft, IBM, HP, Sun/Oracle and the like.

Snapshot Analysis

It appears that Red Hat has a good technological base for moving forward. It also faces a steep, up hill climb, if it hopes to capture industry mindshare from VMware, Microsoft and Citrix. Many organizations have already standardized on products from one or more of those suppliers. Getting them to consider an alternative when the products are only in beta testing is going to be problematic.

Unasked for, shoot-from-the-hip advice

Red Hat, I would suggest that you go after small companies that haven’t yet made a choice of suppliers and cloud computing suppliers with your products. If your pricing is right, they might listen to you.

June 17th, 2009

Northern Maine, No wireless and Off Line

Posted by Dan Kusnetzky @ 6:14 am

Categories: Off topic, Travel issues

Tags: Maine, Wireless, Internet, Wireless LANs, Wi-Fi, Wireless And Mobility, Dan Kusnetzky

I’m up in Maine just South of the Canadian border.  Elizabeth and I are visiting our daugher, Sarah, her husband, Ben and their son, Billy.  No cell phone service is avaialble here (although if we cross the border Rogers has service) and I have very limited access to the Internet.  Although the advertising for the “camp” indicated that WiFi was available, something is wrong with the DNS server.  We never get sent an IP address.

So, I’ll be off line until Friday.

Please come back then!

Dan K

June 16th, 2009

Red Hat's KVM-based virtualization platform moves into beta testing

Posted by Paula Rooney @ 8:56 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Hypervisor, Red Hat Inc., Xen, KVM, Virtualization, Cloud Computing, Storage Management, Utility Computing, Open Source, Hardware

It was a big day for Xen and a big day for the other open source virtualizatio hypervisor as well.

Red Hat’s KVM-based virtualization platform — including a standalone hypervisor,  virtualization manager for servers and virtualization manager for the desktop — moved into beta testing on Tuesday.

In February, the Linux leader detailed plans to release from mid 2009 to late 2010 this set of virtualization products based upon the KVM hypervisor, which is integrated directly into the Linux operating system. It is not clear if any of these products will actually ship in mid 2009, which was the original plan.

Red Hat and its rival Novell have supported Xen — the first popular open source virtualization hypervsior — fo several years. Novell continues to support Xen while Red Hat is opting to migrate its user base over time to KVM. The Raleigh, NC company said it will continue to support the Xen technology in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 for the foreseeable future but identified KVM as the hypervisor of choice for future versions of its leading Linux.  Red Hat broadcast its intent when it acquired Qumranet, the first major commercial desktop virtualization company that embraced KVM.

On Tuesday, Xen sponsor Citrix — which acquired the open source XenSource company two years ago — announced shipment of XenServer 5.5. Citrix partners closely with Microsoft and like the XenSource company it acquired has worked to enable significant interoperability between Xen and Microsoft’s Hyper-V.