VMworld 2010 is at its last day and VMware decided to place the second keynote today. The second keynote is usually more technical than the first one, but as virtualization.info readers know, the first keynote already was a split between vision/strategy and technology/roadmap, with both Paul Maritz, CEO, and Dr. Stephen Herrod, CTO and SVP of R&D on stage.
So today it will be interesting to see what will be presented.
Rick Jackson, CMO, is on stage to introduce the day. The theme is “innovation”. Apparently, VMware wants to use today to reinforce its image as leading innovator. To do so it invited three guest speakers to show some cutting-edge technologies.
The first one is Pranav Mistry, inventor of SixthSense.
SixthSense is a wearable gestural interface that leverages a camera and a tiny projector mounted in a pendant to augment reality on any object around users. It projects information onto surfaces, walls, and other physical objects.
A video of the prototype in use is shown. It’s almost exactly the futuristic interface seen in the Minority Report movie and even more than that. A lot of companies are working to bring to the market that interface, but Mistry’s project seems well beyond that.
CONTINUE READING ON VIRTUALIZATION.INFO…
Here we go again. As usual virtualization.info is at the VMworld conference to live cover the keynotes and any other major announcement released by VMware during the event.
Paul Maritz, CEO, is today’s keynote speaker. He will speak in front of 17,000 attendees, as Rick Jackson, CMO, confirmed on stage. Is VMworld on track to compete against the Oracle OpenWorld in terms of audience?
Before Maritz performance, VMware starts with a funny video that tries to describe what cloud computing is without using any technical jargon. The choice demonstrates how early-stage this market still is considered.
Martiz on stage.
He reports that in 2010 the number of virtual machines surpasses for the first time the number of physical servers deployed (more than 10M).
He also reports that VMware has over 25,000 partners and over 50,000 VMware Certified Professionals (VCP) worldwide.
Maritz says that VMware is committed to innovate on automation and management to decrease OpEx. Seeing that the primary focus is on automation is very positive: datacenter orchestration has been overlooked for too much time.
He also says that innovation should also focus on the way infrastructure resources should be purchased.
Now Maritz is making a case for the SpringSource acquisition (and all the others related to that): are legacy apps on new infrastructure enough?
VMware believes that the world embracing cloud computing would move on more sophisticated, next generation web applications , and this implies the need for a new application platform, made of management tools (Hyperic), open frameworks (Spring) and common services (APIs).
CONTINUE READING ON VIRTUALIZATION.INFO…
Just before the VMworld 2010 opening keynote, cloudcomputing.info received a couple of confirmations that VMware is about to rename its not-yet-launched vCloud Service Director (vCSD) in just vCloud Director. This would explain why the VMworld content catalog doesn’t show anymore the breakout sessions about vCSD.
On top of that, the company may be preparing a special bundle to launch version 1.0, including vCenter Chargeback and the new vShield Edge with it.
Our source reports that the bundle will feature the new per-VM licensing, starting with a 25 VMs pack.
The platform should be available on Sep. 1st.
Just one day before the VMware VMworld 2010 opening keynote, Citrix managed to distract the audience with a major announcement: the acquisition of VMLogix for an undisclosed sum.
VMLogix entered the virtual lab automation (VLA) market in October 2006, in competition with a really short number of companies.
In February 2009 the company signed a deal with Citrix to OEM its flagship product in the Essentials management package, which is available for XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V.
As Citrix has to enrich its virtual infrastructure to better compete against VMware, this acquisition was largely expected.
The acquisition is expected to complete during the Q3 2010. The VMLogix technology will be fully integrated in the next version of XenServer (6.0?) as well as in the just announced OpenCloud platform.
With VMware owning Akimbi (June 2006), Quest owning Surgient (July 2010) and StackSafe out of business (March 2009?), there are no more virtual lab automation startups out there, except Skytap and the just born CloudShare. But both companies only offers a hosted business model, and this restricts the range of potential bidders.
According to this, in the attempt to become more desirable acquisition targets, both Skytap and CloudShare may want to offer soon a version of its platform for on-premises deployment.
A new US startup recently left the stealth mode and officially entered the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing market: Cloupia.
The company is focused on cloud computing platform management with its flagship product Unified Infrastructure Controller (CUIC).
Cloupia was found by five people: Raju Datla, Raju Penmetsa, Bhaskar Krishnamsetty, Murali Alapati and Kevin Lim.
Three of them come from Cisco: Datla (CEO) has been Senior Manager of Software Development at the networking giant for almost five years; Penmetsa (Vice President of Technology and Strategy) has been a Technical Marketing Engineer there for almost 4 years; Lim (Director of Engineering) has been the Technical Leader of network management software and service platform development for nine years.
The two that don’t come from Cisco are Krishnamsetty (Vice President of Engineering), who has been a Director at Fidelity Investments for more than two years, and Alapati, who has worked as business development consultant for PG&E and Morgan Stanley in the last ten years.
The company doesn’t disclose if it’s privately funded or not, but looking at its management team it may easily be a Cisco spin-off.
Cloupia executives worked at Cisco for a significant amount of time and at a particular time, so it’s worth to highlight that this company may have an understanding of the Unified Computing System (UCS) internals and strategy that is superior to most competitors.
CONTINUE READING…
VMware’s VMworld 2010 is just two weeks away and, like always, virtualization.info will publish a live report from the keynote stage.
From his Twitter account, Steve Herrod, CTO and Senior Vice President of R&D, hinted that this year there will be more announcements than ever, so there will be a lot to cover.
But the keynotes are not the only must-see presentations to watch this year. The VMworld’s agenda offers a higher than ever number of interesting break out sessions, and, surprisingly, many of them are about the VMware’s products roadmaps.
In mid July virtualization.info published an early recommendation list but a number of key sessions were published only after the article. So here’s the updated, definitive list of 22 sessions (23 if you are a partner) that readers are encouraged to attend (roadmap sessions have an asterisk):
CONTINUE READING ON VIRTUALIZATION.INFO…
These days the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing market is getting more and more crowded with vendors that offer on-premises management solutions.
One of them is Attribo, an Indian startup that left the stealth mode in late 2009.
Attribo was founded in October 2008 by Vinod Shintre. Srivibhavan Balaram joined Shintre as co-founder in July 2010.
Shintre (Chief Architect) comes from defineE, an Indian solution provider that he founded and managed as CEO for six years.
Balamar (Director) previous companies include Business Objects (and SAP, after the acquisition), were he was a founder Vice President and Head of India Development Center.
The company, which is privately funded, is not yet exposing all details about its structure, so the rest of the management team is unknown.
The company develops a solution called Cloud Control Center (3C).
3C is a web-based management console which allows customers to operate 3rd party public IaaS clouds. It offers a number of common features in this class of products:
CONTINUE READING…
At the end of July a new startup entered the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing market: Skydera.
The startup, incubated at the Founder Institute, is focused on cloud management.
It was founded in late 2009 by Lecole Cole, currently covering the CEO role.
Cole has been the Director of Systems Engineering at WindSpring for two years, and the Engineering Lead at Tele Atlas for one year before that.
Despite the public launch, the company is not yet fully exposed, so the rest of the management team is unknown.
Skydera’s platform, currently in beta, supports the four major public IaaS cloud providers: Amazon (all AWS regions supported), Rackspace, GoGrid, and Slicehost.
It’s also able to manage private clouds but the company doesn’t specify which hypervisors are supported.
As many competing products in this increasingly crowded market segment, Skydera technology offers pretty all the features you would expect from a cloud management solution:
CONTINUE READING…
In April 2008 Google launched its public Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud computing infrastructure called App Engine (GAE).
At that time the platform only supported Python language.
Exactly one year later, Google added a second supported language: Java.
Now the company is working to expand the GAE capabilities even more: SDTime reports in fact that Google plans to introduce support for Ruby on Rails, Clojure and Scala.
These languages already work inside GAE but only on the App Engine Java Virtual Machine (JVM), but Fred Sauer, Developer Advocate at Google, said that they may run natively.
This may impact other public PaaS providers like Heroku, which offers cloud hosting for Ruby applications and which recently secured a $10M funding in its Round B.
Hyper9, which recently lost his founder and CTO, just announced a new add-on for its management product Virtual Environment Optimization (VEO) 2.5
The product continues to evolve: it started as a search engine for virtual infrastructure and then morphed into what seems an articulated management framework with a pluggable architecture.
According to the public documentation, Hyper9 has the ambitious project to release a plug-in for pretty much every need a virtualization administrator may have: from capacity planning to change management, from performance monitoring to chargeback.
CONTINUE READING ON VIRTUALIZATION.INFO…
