VMware is pushing an aggressive cloud computing strategy, but questions remain as to how successful the vendor can be in its quest to become the dominant player at every layer of the cloud stack. The challenge will be repeating its early hypervisor dominance by getting a first-mover advantage in advanced virtualization and cloud deployments. Other vendors, such as Microsoft, Citrix, and Red Hat, now provide additional cloud capabilities, and cloud-management solutions mean organizations need not even choose a virtualization vendor to complete their cloud transitions. These report examines VMware’s advantages in the cloud computing sector, its competitors, and why, in the end, the company may be a leader, but should not expect to dominate. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Heading into the weekend we’ve got a variety of posts from someone consuming 2.7 terabytes of data — yes– terabytes on their home connection, while we get a vote of confidence in Cassandra (and Mogo DB) and Oracle trash talks VMware. Have a great weekend. Read more »
Cloud computing has been a key enabling factor in the latest generation of web startups, letting them start with small amounts of capital and scale quickly in response to demand. From a startup’s perspective, cloud is more of a pricing innovation more than a technological innovation. Read more »
There is a resurgence of activity around virtual desktops — where enterprises take desktop compute environments and make them configurable, deployable and manageable from a central location. Since it’s so hot, we look at companies that will challenge Citrix and VMware in this emerging sector. Read more »
The second quarter of 2010 belonged to the little guys and the new guys. Almost across the board, from processors to virtualization to cloud services, relatively small vendors and startups had the market cornered on innovation and mindshare. And where there’s tinder in the forms of customer demand, products, funding and a greater societal movement toward environmentalism, something is bound to catch fire. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Server virtualization created cloud computing, and while most assume that it is a fundamental enabler of the cloud, it is only a crutch we need until cloud-based application platforms mature to the point where applications will be built and deployed without reference to hardware or OSes. Read more »
Microsoft says it is going to start selling a Windows Azure–powered appliance that will help companies establish private clouds and migrate. The appliances that have been tested by eBay will be sold via a handful of partners that include partners Dell, HP and Fujitsu. Read more »
Eucalyptus Systems, a Santa Barbara, Calif.-based start-up that is developing cloud computing management platform based on the open source Eucalyptus says that it has raised $20 million in a new round of funding. With this infusion, Eucalyptus has raised a total of $25.5 million. Read more »
Last year, the Structure conference confirmed my beliefs that the community had moved beyond asking what cloud computing is, and was moving toward asking how users can best leverage it. This year, I learned even ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
VMware CEO Paul Maritz said on Wednesday at the GigaOM Network’s Structure conference that the cloud at the infrastructure level “is the new hardware.” So what, exactly, does he mean by that? Read more »
Internal clouds are real and they’re here, but many efforts are still in their early days. The problem is that transitioning to a cloud-enabled environment can involve large degrees of technical, cultural and budgetary evolution, and it is of utmost importance that organizations deploy the right solution.
With this in mind, customers need to consider many things, and we profiled numerous solutions and companies to create a guide for deploying the right cloud solution to the right enterprise. We examined cloud application platforms, hypervisor-based clouds, internal infrastructure-as-a-service clouds, and high-performance computing clouds, in addition to looking at hybrid cloud solutions and underlying server architecture. Companies profiled include Appistry, Red Hat, Microsoft, VMware and CA Technologies, among others. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
VMware is among those companies duking it out with incumbents such as Microsoft and Oracle thanks to cloud computing. VMware CEO Paul Maritz will join me onstage at our upcoming Structure conference to talk about, among other things, his vision for the future of cloud computing. Read more »
While at some point, dynamically moving VMs inside a single data center or between two data centers will be a seamless process, it’s not now. In the meantime, however, there are numerous opportunities for startups to offer solutions that will help make such seamlessness a reality. Read more »
VMware, the company that took the hypervisor mainstream and still controls the virtualization of some 80 percent of servers worldwide, is indulging in some retail therapy as it seeks to change its image from the provider of commodity hypervisors to become a concierge of the cloud. Read more »
VMware is continuing its acquisition spree as it looks to raise its profile in the platform-as-a-service market, and sources tell me its latest target is EngineYard, the Ruby on Rails platform that’s raised $37 million from the likes of Amazon and Benchmark. Read more »
If you’ve been following the data center hardware space for the past year, you might be under the impression that integrated stacks are the future of IT. After all, Oracle’s purchase of Sun Microsystems was all about integration, and HP and Cisco appear locked in a ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Google has tweaked its App Engine platform as a service to make it palatable for business customers. Today at its developer conference Google launched App Engine for Business, but Google still has a ways to go before it can offer a truly competitive platform. Read more »
Put simply, life is good for cloud-computing and big-data vendors because there’s plenty of money to be made. Whether it’s from VCs, big-IT suitors or (gasp) customers, someone wants to invest in your vision. The great part is that you don’t even have to be a ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Put simply, life is good for cloud computing and big data vendors because there’s plenty of money to be made. Whether it’s from VCs, big IT suitors or (gasp) customers, someone wants to invest in your vision. Want evidence? This week offered plenty. Read more »
Much already has been written about this week’s VMforce announcement, but my question is who’s the biggest winner in this partnership — Salesforce.com or VMware? And of Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and the entire SaaS-based CRM community, who all seem to have taken hard hits, who’s the ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Much has already been written about this week’s VMforce announcement, but my biggest question still hasn’t been answered: Who’s the biggest winner in this partnership -– Salesforce.com or VMware? And who’s the biggest loser? Read more »
As much as we hear about virtualization, it can be surprising to get actual numbers on deployments and realize how low they remain — just 18-19 percent of workloads on enterprise x86 servers have actually been virtualized, according to new data released by Lazard Capital Markets. Read more »
SpringSource, a division of VMware, purchased an open-source cloud messaging company today behind the RabbitMQ software. The purchase of Rabbit Technologies Ltd. is another effort by VMware to become the operating system for enterprise clouds and add value to its commoditized hypervisor. Read more »
Pat Gelsinger is stirring things up EMC with a plan to virtualize and federate storage so data and compute can be linked together to keep constantly changing information up to date despite networks that are built for gigabytes rather than petabytes. Read more »
Following a string of acquisitions, new product development and vendor chest pounding this year, the cloud collaboration wars are shaping up to be a key competitive battleground. Cloud collaboration has now expanded well beyond the core of e-mail communications, giving users have more choices than ever. Read more »
An event more than a year in the making, Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud-computing offering is finally available to the public. The software giant announced Azure in October 2008, made the service available as a limited Community Technology Preview (CTP) project shortly thereafter, and has been releasing pricing and product details at a regular clip in the meantime. Preview customers have been experimenting for free with a limited version of Azure, but as of April 1, 2010, all existing CTP customers who have not upgraded to the official version will have their accounts deleted. As the cliché goes, general availability is where the rubber meets the road for Microsoft and its vaunted cloud platform: If it can leverage its existing customer base and convince potential users to trust an oft-criticized software vendor with an entirely new delivery model, Microsoft could become a major force among cloud providers. While Windows Azure is a more-than-capable offering, trust could be an issue for a large number of developers and businesses that don’t believe Microsoft will deliver the openness so valued in the cloud world. Here’s a look at what Azure is, what it costs, and how it fits into (and will differentiate itself in) the market. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
In President Obama’s budget announced yesterday, the feds may have opened a window of opportunity for cloud computing companies large and small hoping for some government largess. The federal budget hopes to increase spending on IT in 2011 by 1.2 percent to $79.4 billion. Read more »
Microsoft today finally opened up its cloud platform, Windows Azure, for business. Today the rubber meets the road — and we will soon see how Azure does against larger players such as Amazon and Rackspace, as well as how it affects Microsoft’s margins and other businesses. Read more »
While servers and applications have gone virtual, migrating into cloud computing environments, networking technologies remain bound to physical hardware and data center racks. As server virtualization moves into the enterprise and cloud data centers, when will networking follow with virtual appliances? Read more »
Much has been made of the supposedly declining fortunes of virtualization giant VMware, which faces increasing competition from free virtualization platforms bundled into operating systems, including Windows Server. So I paid the company a visit to get the lowdown on how it’s fighting back. Read more »
The growing ubiquity of the Internet is having a major influence on the video and software industries, which are using it to enable delivery of their products online.
Advanced infrastructures are required to deliver those contents efficiently. The Internet has been built on a best-effort model, but ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
IBM’s deal to move all of Panasonic’s employees to its LotusLive hosted email and collaboration service is a blow to Microsoft, whose Exchange product is being shown the door. Expect more enterprise email shuffles in the year ahead. Read more »
