VMWare

Dell buying EMC for $67B

In what is the high water market of pure tech acquisitions, Dell has announced that it will be buying EMC in a…

What’s up with EMC’s cloud?

The week in cloud was busy, busy what with VMware snapping up AirWatch and IBM dumping servers. But, what, exactly, is EMC’s public cloud deal?

What is SignalFuse and why should we care?

Stealthy Silicon Valley startup is in the market for engineers who know distributed systems, data science and statistics. But it’s heritage — co-founders are Karthik Rau formerly of VMware and Phillip Liu out of Facebook — is what piques curiosity.

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger to speak at Structure 2013

Just announced: Pat Gelsinger, who participated in several major computing shifts at Intel, EMC and now VMware, will be speaking at Structure in San Francisco, June 19-20. We’ll talk about VMware’s vision of a software-defined data center and its place in the changing IT ecosystem.

OpenStack gets real

The OpenStack Foundation is official as of Wednesday with a new 24-person board, $10 million in funding, 5,600 members, and a mandate to promote flexible open-source cloud infrastructure. Question: Will the foundation echo the success of Eclipse or the failure of OpenOffice?

Startup SimpliVity pitches super-appliance for data centers

Why should mid-market companies deploy multiple data center appliances if one can do the job? That’s the rationale behind SimpliVity’s new OmniCube appliance that merges storage, server, deduplication, and other tasks into one 2U box and can be federated across sites.

Rackspace rebrands with open cloud mantra

With its OpenStack cloud now ready for its closeup, Rackspace is rebranding itself to emphasize open cloud as opposed to its hosting roots. Company CMO Suaad Sait said the company will continue to stress “fanatical support” as a key differentiator.

OpenStack faces the terrible twos

The OpenStack cloud computing project turns two this week. That means the open-source project — which fancies itself the Linux of the cloud — is entering a critical stage of its development process. The opportunity is huge, but the challenges are too.

Is multi-language PaaS really better? Not necessarily

As major PaaSes like Microsoft Azure, VMware Cloud Foundry and Salesforce.com’s Heroku race to embrace multiple languages, a few like Apprenda say that’s exactly the wrong approach. Language-specific PaaSes are better able to exploit a company’s native applications and features, says Apprenda CEO Sinclair Schuler.

Virtualization wars heat up (again)

With Microsoft Hyper-V 3 coming down the pike, and Red Hat revving its KVM push, VMware executives continue to tout vSphere as the best way to virtualize everything — including the mission-critical databases and ERP systems that power businesses of all sizes.

Schneider snags Viridity to see how many watts servers suck

Schneider Electric filled in some checkboxes in its overall data center infrastructure management (DCIM) stack with the acquisition of Viridity’s EnergyCenter technology. EnergyCenter will bring Schneider a fuller picture of the energy cost and resource utilization of information technology gear.

VMware tries to expand virtual networks with VXLAN

VMware this morning announced VXLAN, the company’s attempt to allow virtual machines to span geographical data centers as part of the same LAN. Herrod said it will create “software-based networks that can be created on-demand, enabling enterprises to leverage capacity wherever it’s available.”

Look, it’s VMware’s mobile play!

VMware, long synonymous with servers, today began its encroachment into mobile devices with a new product and two new projects aimed at getting enterprise access onto mobile phones and tablets. The products offer consumer-like web services while giving corporations control over access.

VMware Buys Shavlik To Help Small Biz Simplify

VMware has acquired IT management provider Shavlik Technologies in an attempt to simplify for small- and medium-sized business the process of managing their machines. Shavlik brings an interesting set of new capabilities to VMware, including the ability to manage physical machines and a SaaS delivery model.

Would VMware Ever Sell Itself Free of Virtualization?

Cloud pundit Simon Wardley expressed on his blog today his now two-year-old theory that VMware could end up selling off its flagship virtualization business to focus on its platform business. It’s a far-fetched idea, for sure, but Wardley’s idea isn’t without merit.

VMware Soups Up vCloud, Still Has PaaS Plans

VMware’s announced that the first three vCloud Datacenter partners are now online and that a new tool for managing hybrid VMware clouds is available. These types of capabilities will bring enterprise users into the cloud fold, perhaps leading to even cloudier ambitions in the future.

Meet Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon’s PaaS Play

Amazon Web Services, which built and popularized cloud computing with its Elastic Compute Cloud and Simple Storage Service has moved up the stack from infrastructure to providing Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, its brand new Platform-as-a-Service play. With Beanstalk, Amazon hopes to outgrow the competition.

Is AWS Stealing VMware Users, Improving Their Lives or Both?

I asked last week why VMware users would migrate to the cloud using Amazon’s VM Import feature instead of choosing a VMware vCloud partner such as BlueLock or Terremark. After seeing what some interested parties have to say, I’m starting to think interoperability isn’t the goal.

Dec. 6: What We’re Reading About the Cloud

It truly was a busy day in cloud computing, with AWS announcing its DNS service and Cisco forging a partnership with BMC Software, as well as comments on private clouds vs. public clouds, and news that Acadia might be fading into a formal VCE entity.

Ironic? Benioff and Maritz Talk Cloud Lock-In

Marc Benioff, Paul Maritz and Andy Jassy shared the stage at Web 2.0 to talk about the democratizing effect of the cloud: a fair word choice when discussing the underlying value proposition for cloud computing, but not necessarily when discussing their respective roles in it.

OpSource Boosts Memory to Lure Enterprises to Cloud

The OpSource cloud is built atop VMware, and a switch to vSPhere 4 means customers can now deploy eight-core, 64GB. Large instances are critical for cloud providers targeting enterprises and complex applications, and OpSource is among a small number of providers offering this much performance.

VMware’s Q3: Has Growth Really Peaked?

The talk around the web today is about how, despite huge revenue and income gains in the third quarter, VMware cannot sustain this type of growth. Such analysis, however, ignores several realities regarding the state of cloud computing and VMware’s place in the market.

Oct. 12: What We’re Reading About Infrastructure

Europe is experiencing a case of VMworld. The big news: VMware announced a self-service portal for vCenter Director, and CSC is integrating vFabric into its Trusted Cloud offering. Elsewhere, it’s good news for the IT heavyweights, as Oracle and IBM unite on Java, and Intel improves its revenue.

Mobilize 2010: Virtualization on the Go

To virtualize or not, seems to be the question for most operators and handset manufacturers, according to our mobile virtualization panel at our Mobilize 2010 event. The panel appeared divided, wondering what the use case is that will lead to the widespread of virtualization on handsets.

Infographic: Virtualization & State of Cloud Computing

A survey of data center and IT management professional conducted by Zenoss, a software company, reveals some surprising facts about virtualization and cloud computing. Here are the the findings of the survey, plus an infographic outlining the state of cloud computing.

Give Your Phone a Split Personality

ARM’s new Eagle processor core is pretty darn exciting. Who wouldn’t want five times the performance at the same power consumption as today’s chips? But the core also supports virtualization on a chip, which could soon change the way you handle your phone.

Pimp Your PaaS — The Race to Something Different

While there is, and will continue to be a significant amount of spending to tinker with and repackage enterprise applications into virtual machines for cloud migration, I believe the long term stickiness the major vendors seek is a compelling PaaS offering. The question is, who’ll win?

Jamcracker and Eucalyptus Team for Self-Service

Jamcracker and Eucalyptus announced at VMWorld today that they are partnering on an integration aimed at enabling users to self-provision their private and hybrid clouds. This announcement comes hot on the heels of last weeks announcement of a technology partnership between Eucalyptus, newScale and rPath.

How VMware Plans to Control the Cloud

One area where VMware did not disappoint this week is breadth of vision. In just a handful of years, the company has gone from the defacto hypervisor provider to an all-encompassing software infrastructure vendor for virtualization and cloud computing. The volume of announcements can be overwhelming.

What We’re Reading About the Cloud on Aug. 31

Today’s post is brought to you by the letter “V.” With everyone who’s anyone hanging out in San Francisco for VMworld, we’re taking any of those left behind there virtually with our links. So read on for Project Redwood, a new platform and some case studies.

VMware Goes Beyond Data Centers to Control the Cloud

Today VMware unveiled new products, new partnerships, and two acqusitions to help it become not just the operating system for the data center, but the means of assuring the flow of enterprise bits between data centers — or what many actually define as the cloud.

Aria, VMware Integrate to Enable vCloud Monetization

Subscription and billing vendor Aria Systems, today announced the Aria Cloud Revenue Adapter for VMware (s vmw) vCloud Director. Designed for service providers offering cloud services to end users, the new product automates service activation, usage tracking, billing and collections.

Curtain Raiser: At VMworld, Cloud Will Be Center Stage

Things are about to get noisy in the cloud computing world during VMworld, VMware’s user conference, held this week. For VMware, it represents a chance to show off its market position in virtualization and detail its cloud computing efforts as it moves beyond the hypervisor.

What We’re Reading About the Cloud

Did you know that led by VMWare Cloud Computing stocks are flying high on stock market? Netezza is blowing the doors with its financial performance and Juniper is streamlining the content delivery business. And CSC is serious about enterprise-grade cloud services.

VMware’s Cloudy Ambitions: Can It Repeat Hypervisor Success?

Anticipated new products should advance VMware’s already-aggressive strategy to transition its dominant virtualization market share position into a full-scale takeover of the cloud. But with formidable competition on its heels, whether or not VMware can capitalize on its large footprint remains to be seen.

What We’re Reading About the Cloud: August 20

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.

How Cloud Computing Impacts the Cash Needs of Startups

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.

Mo' Money: Life Is Good for Cloud Vendors

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.

The Cloud Collaboration Wars Ramp Up

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.

Where Are the Network Virtual Appliances?

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?

Eyeing the Cloud, VMware Looks to Double Down On Virtualization Efficiency

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.

IBM Chalks Up a Win in Email Wars

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.

Does Your Smartphone Need a Split Personality?

VMware believes smartphones will be the next frontier in virtualization, as people want to use the same phone for work and play. But should handset makers focus on device virtualization or can such work-life balance on a handset be achieved via the cloud?

For VMWare Growth Is Vanishing

Virtualization pioneer VMware (s VMW) reported first-quarter 2009 earnings that were great, but the days of super growth are over. Revenues were…

VMware's Cloud OS Is Compelling, But Closed

VMware (s vmw) today rolled out its cloud computing operating system software, vSphere 4. The offering brings together VMware’s suite of dynamic…

VMware Brings Virtualization To Smartphones

Demonstrating the power of mobile phones today, VMware announced plans today to bring its virtualization capabilities to the mobile phone. V…

VMWare Releases Fusion 2.0

Yesterday, VMWare released Fusion 2.0 as a major update to their virtualization software. It’s a free, downloadable upgrade for any VMWare Fusion…

Cisco to Support VMware?

There’s buzz around Silicon Valley that there will be a big announcement made at VMworld next week in Las Vegas. I think Cisco Systems will announce support of VMware virtual machines on their networking hardware. And if I’m right, it will have numerous ramifications, not only for the two companies, but the networking industry overall.

Team Fusion Starts a Blog

If you’re taken with VMware’s Fusion (for operating system virtualization on the Mac platform), as I am, then you’ll probably be glad…

Pano Logic Takes $12M

The money spigot for virtualization is still flowing, with Goldman Sachs & Co. leading a $12-million round of funding for Menlo Park,…

The GigaOM Interview: Dr. Mendel Rosenblum, Chief Scientist, VMWare

Right before the Christmas holidays I got a chance to catch up with Dr. Mendel Rosenblum, VMWare’s chief scientist and one of the company’s five co-founders. Rosenblum is also an associate professor of computer science at Stanford University. Given that VMWare was in a quiet period prior to the release of its quarterly results, my conversation with Rosenblum was quite general. But he did share with me, among other things, the story of how VMWare got started and his outlook for virtualization in 2008. Here are excerpts from the interview.

Get VMware Fusion for $39

Derik at MacUser points out that VMware is driving hard to the net in regards to the virtualization battle with Parallels. If…