Bladewatch.com

CIO

Mon, April 13, 2009 — CIO — CIO Roxanne Reynolds-Lair of The Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising wanted to bring both Macs and Windows to her college’s students, administrative employees and teachers. She bought a MacBook Pro and tested new-fangled desktop virtualization software that allows her to run both Windows and OS X on a single machine.

Then she looked at software licensing, which is struggling to catch up to the emerging virtual desktop world. Shaking her head, Reynolds-Lair shelved the desktop virtualization project. “It doesn’t make sense,” she says. “It’s really not ready yet.”

An interesting article talking about licensing in desktop virtualization, something I’ve written about before, do check it out, it’s a good read.

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NetApp

LOS GATOS, California — March 18, 2009 — Vhayu Technologies, the leading provider of enterprise tick data solutions, today announced membership in the NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) Partner Program. Financial services providers use tick data, an amalgamation of price and volume data, to derive real-time analysis of the equities, futures, and options markets. Vhayu is collaborating with NetApp to tightly integrate NetApp® storage solutions into a Vhayu Velocity environment. With this partnership, customers will be able to cost effectively store and easily share tick data volumes in the multiterabyte range.

Vhayu’s Velocity suite of products for the financial services industry contains high-performance market data solutions for the capture and high-speed analysis of massive amounts of streaming and historical data. A critical piece of Vhayu’s solution is the ability to use fast and reliable shared storage to access historical archives of trading data. Through Vhayu’s membership in the NetApp Partner Program, customers benefit from NetApp’s unified storage solution, which is second to none in allowing storage access by using multiple protocols—including FC, iSCSI, NFS, and CIFS—in a single architecture.

“NetApp and Vhayu engineers recently completed an extensive project to demonstrate the suitability of NetApp storage for Vhayu Velocity implementations,” said John Coulter, vice president of Corporate Strategy at Vhayu. “Overall, we found that NetApp FC SAN storage systems provided excellent performance when configured with the Vhayu applications. Together, the solution offers customers a proven option for the storage of historical data and archive access.”

Very cool, anything NetApp and Vhayu can do to aid in the support, performance and scalability of the Vhayu application has to be a good thing. I know it’s a very powerful tool, the guys I spoke to about it that used it, loved it, that NetApp and Vhayu have a solution has to be a good thing for the end user community in terms of choice and best practice.

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VMblog

NetApp today announced new storage and data management advances for VMware View to help customers deploy and operate virtual desktop environments faster and more efficiently. NetApp also announced that it is now a VMware Authorized Consultant (VAC) partner and can help customers better design, implement, and optimize their VMware® environments. Together, these announcements underline NetApp’s commitment to helping customers adopt desktop virtualization through technological innovation, collaboration, and support.

NetApp’s new Rapid Cloning Utility 2.0 simplifies the way administrators clone VMware virtual machines and datastores, providing greater ease through automation. Rapid Cloning Utility is a free plug-in for the VMware vCenter^TM suite of management products that integrates core NetApp® technologies with VMware management tools to provide multiple storage efficiency and performance enhancements. Now customers can significantly reduce the amount of time IT personnel must spend to provision multiple virtual desktops by using a simple graphical interface to create new virtual machines nearly instantly. In conjunction with NetApp FlexClone®, a single image can be replicated hundreds of times in minutes while using almost no additional storage capacity. NetApp offers fully automated provisioning tools for VMware environments that extend savings value into storage infrastructures.

Do check out this article talking about Netapp and VMware, I’ve been a fan of NetApp since I used their filers, combining a blade virtualization solution with NetApp sitting in front virtualizing the storage could be an energy efficient and effective solution. Using their cloning technology could be a great enabler to deploying and provisioning desktops, I’ll need to check it out.

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Forbes and Apple

If someone broke into Steve Jobs’ office and replaced his desk with, say, the hood of a 1974 Cadillac El Dorado, would it matter? Yes, because the Apple chief would see it and bad things would happen.

Bad things also might happen if Jobs discovered that Apple ( AAPL – news – people ) was using Compaq computer servers rather than its own. Unless you’re an Apple obsessive, you probably didn’t know this: Apple makes rack-mounted servers. The sleek aluminum XServe looks like a Dell ( DELL – news – people ) that has been captured by Vulcans, dipped in metal and completely rebuilt. Or–if you’ve never seen a rack-mounted server–it looks like a pizza-box-sized version of Apple’s tiny, metal-clad Shuffle equipped with blinking lights and buttons.

An article about Apple’s new XServe based on the new Intel processors, very cool, it could be an ideal solution for your business, it’s always cool to see what’s on offer regardless, I’m off to check it out.

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Techtarget

VMware administrators say that Sun Microsystems’ xVM VirtualBox is a cheap and viable alternative to VMware Workstation for testing and configuring VMware virtual machines and appliances.

This week’s release of VirtualBox 2.2 cements that impression, with support for the Distributed Managment Task Force’s Open Virtualization Format, or OVF, as one of its supported formats.

“It’s a big deal,” said Rick Vanover, a systems administrator at Belron US, a vehicle glass repair and replacement company in Columbus, Ohio. Vanover has used VirtualBox to test client-side applications for more than a year. He said that with previous versions of VirtualBox, “the big sticking point was that you could open up a [VMware] VMDK [Virtual Machine Disk Format], but it was one way.” In other words, it was possible to open up virtual machines in multiple formats, but you couldn’t easily export them.

An article talking about VirtualBox and VMware, an interesting read, choosing the right virtualization platform for your specific need and your business is what matters, so do try the different ones and see which is right for you.

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Microsoft

This bulletin summary lists security bulletins released for April 2009.

With the release of the bulletins for April 2009, this bulletin summary replaces the bulletin advance notification originally issued April 9, 2009. For more information about the bulletin advance notification service, see Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification.

For information about how to receive automatic notifications whenever Microsoft security bulletins are issued, visit Microsoft Technical Security Notifications.

Microsoft is hosting a webcast to address customer questions on these bulletins on April 15, 2009, at 11:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada). Register now for the April Security Bulletin Webcast. After this date, this webcast is available on-demand. For more information, see Microsoft Security Bulletin Summaries and Webcasts.

Microsoft also provides information to help customers prioritize monthly security updates with any non-security, high-priority updates that are being released on the same day as the monthly security updates. Please see the section, Other Information.

Time to apply the relevant security patches to your estate, keep in mind which patches are relevant for your systems, but do remember that the first question/step for escalating an issue is applying all the hot fixes/security updates.

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Business Wire

Dell Offers Sun Customers an Immediate Path from Legacy Datacenters to Greater Efficiencies and Investment Protection

ROUND ROCK, Texas–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Dell is making it easy for customers to migrate from proprietary server platforms and outdated legacy datacenters to more open, flexible, standards-based technology. A Dell ProConsult Infrastructure Consulting service – UNIX to Linux migration – offers existing Sun customers fast, seamless transitions to Dell PowerEdge Linux servers from UNIX-based systems. Dell PowerEdge servers are an ideal platform for current Sun and other customers to help reduce costs for mission-critical applications while helping to increasing IT efficiency.

Great news in terms of choice and functionality for the end user community. That Dell is offering assistance in migrating on to newer systems running Solaris could create opportunities and highlight their support and performance of Solaris on their new PowerEdge blade/rack servers.

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HP

HP today announced it has signed a seven-year infrastructure services contract to reduce operating costs, improve flexibility and accelerate business growth for Celesio AG, one of Europe’s leading pharmaceuticals services providers.

Under the agreement, HP will provide standardized services and hardware across Celesio’s 14-country operation. This includes managing Celesio’s data center environment, including storage and server management for approximately 4,500 servers.

Additionally, HP will manage a full range of network and voice services that connect Celesio’s employees with each other, partners, customers and vendors. HP also will standardize and manage Celesio’s employee computing environment, which includes global helpdesk, end-user support, incident and problem management, as well as asset and change management for 23,000 workplaces in more than 100 locations.

“A standardized technology infrastructure is critical since we operate in several European markets and cover the entire spectrum of pharmaceutical distribution,” said Christian Holzherr, chief financial officer and management board member responsible for Information Technology at Celesio. “HP will help us achieve more integrated business processes and efficiency improvements company-wide. HP’s proven business technology and industry expertise makes it the ideal partner to help us meet our business goals.”

I nte with interest the deal includes Managing the customer deata centers, storage and servers, it’s a significant project. It will be interesting to see what range of technologies, best practice and tools will be deployed to deliver infrastructure transformation.

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Cnet

Sun Microsystems has adopted an ambitious business model that depends upon commodity open-source downloads serving as loss leaders and gateways for hardware and services revenue. According to a report in The Register, however, profits have been hard to come by for Sun, which may have been what scuttled its merger with IBM.

Using Red Hat as a foil, The Register suggests that the way forward for Sun, which has seen its proprietary businesses commoditized, may be to commoditize itself further:

The open source distribution model cannot generate the kind of profits that Sun’s shareholders became accustomed to in the dot-com boom, where every deal started out with a Sparc/Solaris server and moved on to Oracle databases….

I can’t imagine how Sun’s software business–particularly if customers abandon Sparc platforms or Sun has to basically give Solaris support away for free to cover the costs of Sparc chip and server development–can do any better than Red Hat has done on commodity x64 iron. And in the end, the decline in Sparc prices cuts Sun’s profits, no matter how it dices and slices the categories and numbers in its presentations, just as the same economic pressures from x64 iron on the one hand and Linux and Windows on the other have done for all proprietary and RISC/Unix vendors.

There is no escaping the pinchers, other that to use the tool yourself. And that means Solaris and x64 are likely Sun’s future–and Sparc, for all its great engineering, is probably not.

We’ll have to see, Sun remains a great business, and has quite a following/reputation. I think it needs to continue the innovation of it’s platform, reach out to its core audience and see how it can facilitate their needs. I wonder if they might not do well continuing to offer their industrial strength servers and commodity low end get the customer in the door ones? At the same time though, I don’t know what value it would present to Sun in competing at the lower end of the market?

Could it not simply extend it’s reach into open source, demonstrate itself as THE open source supporting vendor, aiding in monitoring and integration tools, of support and platform innovation?

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Computer World

April 13, 2009 (Network World) A start-up led by Sun Microsystems Inc. veterans emerged from stealth mode today with high-powered data-access appliances designed to speed up Web 2.0 and cloud computing applications.

Schooner Information Technology took IBM’s newest Intel-based servers and souped them up with flash memory, 1 Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections, the Linux operating system, and a choice between the Memcached distributed memory caching system and the MySQL database.

Schooner claims to deliver eight times the performance of traditional servers, allowing data centers to consolidate onto fewer machines.

“These appliances really hit the core problems of data centers,” namely cost, complexity and data growth, says CEO and co-founder John Busch. The appliances are in beta trials with customers and will ship in the third quarter at a price of $45,000.

Schooner was founded in 2007 by Busch and CTO Thomas McWilliams. Busch was research director of computer system architecture and analysis at Sun laboratories from 1999 through 2006, where he led research in chip-multiprocessing and multitier clustered systems.

This sounds very interesting, I’ll need to read up more, anything we can do to further the performance and scalability of the server platform for Web 2.0/HPC or clould computing has to be a good thing. You can find out more info here. The fact that they are appliances might seem more appealing and evergy efficient than buying more servers when you can consolidate to a shared MYSQL/distributed caching platform

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