Data Robotics introduced their first Drobo storage array in June 2007, and it was aimed squarely at the Macintosh market. The idea behind Drobo was to simplify the often inscrutable configuration of traditional RAID storage, which often leaves even the most technically astute IT pros scratching their heads. Should your storage array be configured as RAID 0? Or RAID 0+1? Or what about RAID 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6? And do you need block-level, distributed, or interleave parity? Storage-savvy IT staff may know this information inside and out, but Data Robotics is betting that many IT shops would opt for an easier solution if they could.
Enter DroboPro, an enhanced version of Drobo aimed at SMBs. Data Robotics is positioning DroboPro as a perfect storage for branch offices--which often don't have dedicated IT staff--or small shops that have IT pros wearing multiple hats. DroboPro attempts to be the answer to both use cases by being incredibly easy to use.
The secret sauce here is Data Robotics' BeyondRAID technology, which leverages a thin virtualization abstraction layer to help automatically assign a RAID level to storage, and also allows standard SATA hard drives to be easily added by novices if additional storage is needed.
Imagine a branch office that relies on a DroboPro for network storage. As free space begins to vanish, you could ask the front desk receptionist to run across the street to OfficeMAX, buy a handful of 1TB SATA hard drives, and insert the new drives into the Drobo Pro for a quick bump in network storage capacity. All without turning off any hardware, messing with configuration settings, or sweating over what RAID level to use.
We'll be checking out the DroboPro over the next few weeks, and we'll follow up with a full review that puts this promising new storage device to the test. In the interim you can check out a photo gallery we put together of the Drobo Pro being unboxed in the Windows IT Pro editorial offices.
Install latest flash player if you can't see this gallery.
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Earlier today Adobe Systems announced that it had inked a $1.8 billion deal to acquire web traffic analysis firm Omniture.
The acquisition of Omniture will give Adobe a product and services portfolio that will span content creation, publishing, web analytics, and search optimization. The Omniture acquisition also bolsters Adobe's long-term online product strategy, which largely began when Adobe acquired Macromedia in April 2005 for a whopping $3.4 billion.
"Adobe customers are looking to us for solutions to deliver engaging experiences and more effectively monetize their content and applications online," said Shantanu Narayen, president and chief executive officer of Adobe, in a statement released prior to an Adobe press conference announcing the acquisition. "This is a game changer for both Adobe and our customers. We will enable advertisers, media companies and e-tailers to realize the full value of their digital assets."
According to Adobe, Omniture will become a new business unit with the company. Omniture CEO Josh James will head up the new division as senior vice president, and will report to Adobe president and CEO Shantanu Narayen.
Continue the conversation by following me on Twitter at @jeffjames3, or bookmark the Next Tech blog homepage.
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A fair number of VMware's announcements at VMworld have centered on new cloud offerings, including the new VMware vCloud Express service and the VMware vCloud API. The former is a new pay-as-you-go cloud infrastructure service, while the latter should help improve compatibility and interoperability of applications in the cloud. Despite these announcements, VMware is playing catch-up to Amazon, which has been providing cloud-based computing services for years.
Now the latest challenge to VMware's ambitions is the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) initiative, a community-driven, open source cloud effort that hopes to provide an alternative to proprietary offerings. Late last week I spoke with Citrix CTO Simon Crosby and Ian Pratt, the creator of Xen and founder of Xen.org, about the launch of this new Xen Cloud Platform initiative.
According to Crosby and Pratt, XCP will provide an open source virtual infrastructure that should help IT departments avoid being locked into a single vendor or proprietary cloud solution.
"The Xen Project has played a seminal role in enabling the creation and rapid adoption of virtualization," Pratt said in a prepared statement. "Today Xen is already the most widely used hypervisor in the service provider market and the community will be able to build on this momentum to develop a complete, open source, cloud-optimized Xen virtual infrastructure platform. Our goal is to empower providers to offer a rich set of services that will catalyze cloud adoption by the enterprise in a way that’s open, accessible and non-proprietary."
Crosby and Pratt compared the development of the Xen hypervisor to the engine of a car, and continued the analogy by describing the XCP initiative as the rest of the components that surround the engine. Crosby describes the analogy in further deatail on his own blog:
The project started with community-based development of the Xen hypervisor, which (in an oft repeated analogy) is the "engine" of a virtualization platform, but not the complete "car" - which has until now been a vendor's combination of Xen and additional components. Now Xen.org develops two complete cars: The Xen Client Intiative already develops a complete client hypervisor product, and the project will develop a complete cloud virtual infrastructure platform.
Windows IT Pro Technical Director Michael Otey and myself recently sat down with HP's Jeff Carlat, marketing director in HP's infrastructure software and blades division, to get an update on their latest product initiatives. According to Carlat, HP was announcing two new product offerings and a new service solution at the show, namely:
HP Insight Control Integration with VMware vCenter
Carlat noted that virtualization adoption has been growing at a substantial clip, but that managing virtualized infrastructures can still be a challenge for IT pros. "Virtualization is pervasive now, impacting everything that we're doing," says Carlat. "As the virtualization market grows, managing virtual server sprawl is becoming a more important consideration for admins." Carlat mentioned that according to industry analysis firm IDC, new virtual server installations should outnumber physical server shipments by the end of 2009.
HP's partial answer to the problem of VM proliferation is the integration of HP Insight Management Control software with VMware vCenter. Using this new capability, IT pros running HP hardware will be able to use this combined solution to monitor and manage both their physical HP servers and their virtual machines. This ability to manage both physical and virtual machines should also help VMware compete more effectively against Microsoft's System Center family and Virtual Machine Manager 2008 products, which can be used to jointly manage both physical and virtual machines.
HP announced some other developments on the virtualization management front, including the HP Virtual Client Essentials software portfolio, a revamped HP Operations Manager for virtualization, new management features for HP StorageWorks Command View Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA), and new HP Network Automation support for VMware vSwitch.
HP Virtual Desktop Reference Solution
HP also announced a new virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution that Carlat claims will cost less that $1,000 per user. "We're the first systems provider to offer such a rich VDI solution," says Carlat. "We can provide and bring together data center resources and things like servers, storage, network, and other elements to offer a true end-to-end solution." You can find more information about the new HPI VDI solution here.
HP Virtualization Services
"We've learned that most failed virtualization deployments are due to bad planning and analysis," says Carlat. "So we've decided to offer a number of consulting services to our customers, including help with planning, design, and deployment." Carlat indicated that these new service offerings would start at $18,500, and will initially available in North America.
Related Reading:
VMware CEO Paul Maritz outlined VMware's upcoming product roadmap and unveiled additional aspects of the company's cloud computing strategy during his VMworld keynote address this morning.
While none of the announcements made were particularly revolutionary, they did underscore VMware's efforts to keep several steps ahead of Microsoft and Citrix on the virtualization front. VMworld attendance has been robust, with VMware claiming that more than 12,000 attendees are attending this year's show.
We'll provide more information on some of these releases in the next day or so, but the bulk of the interest revolved around the following announcements:
VMware vCenter Product Family Updates: Two new products in the VMware vCenter product family were announced: VMware vCenter ConfigControl, and VMware vCenter CapacityIQ. The former helps maintain the compliance and configuration info of VMs, while the latter improves the ability to model and forecast capacity needs for virtual environments. These two new products join the rest of the VMware vCenter product family, which now includes:
VMware vCenter AppSpeed
VMware vCenter CapacityIQ
VMware vCenter Chargeback
VMware vCenter ConfigControl
VMware vCenter Lab Manager
VMware vCenter Lifecycle Manager
VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
VMware Go Unveiled: While the expanding vCenter family is focused primarily mid-sized and large enterprises, VMware also announced VMware Go, a free new service that intends to help SMBs more easily test, deploy, and manage the free VMware ESXi hypervisor product. The free VMware Go service is now available in beta form and can be accessed here. VMware Go should be available by the end of 2009.
VMware Partner and Market News: VMware announced a number of new initiatives with partners, including a new program that will let Intel sell VMware vSphere 4 into its own reseller channel. HP and VMware jointly announced a new virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution based on VMware View that costs less than $1,000 per user. And VMware also touted some early adoption stats for VMware vSphere 4, claiming that they've seen more than 350,000 downloads in the first 12 weeks after vSphere 4 became available.
We'll be posting more VMworld news throughout the week, so keep checking Windows IT Pro for updates from the show.
All the demos and hands-on labs at VMworld 2009 require lots of computing power, so VMware created a massive on-site data center to power all of this computing activity.
Early technical issues prevented some show attendees from working on some hand-on technical labs earlier this week, but this massive datacenter has been happily churning through workloads since then.
A small handful of vendors worked with VMware to build the datacenter, including Cisco, HP, Xsigo, EMC, NetApp, BMC Software, Chip PC, and MDS. Here are some vitals on the datacenter itself:
776 ESX Servers
37 TB RAM
6,208 processor cores
348 TB disk storage
37,248 VMs
28 server racks
528 KW electricity usage
VMware created a timelapse video showing the construction of this monster, which you can see below.
Several members of the Windows IT Pro editorial team have arrived in San Francisco for VMworld 2009. Yours truly (@jeffjames3) will be there, as well as Michele Crockett (@michelecrockett), Paul Thurrott (@thurrott), and Michael Otey.
If you're also attending VMworld, feel free to stop by the Windows IT Pro booth in the main expo hall. We're always eager to hear from readers, so send me an email or drop me a tweet if you'd like to chat at the show.
Update 2 [2:15pm MST] : Chip Cassano just confirmed that Vivek Kundra also taught an undergraduate course at UMUC as well. Here's an excerpt from Chip's email:
FYI, we’ve confirmed that Mr. Kundra taught the 3-credit, undergraduate course IFSM 498F (course description follows) for UMUC as an adjunct faculty in fall 2001.
Update 1 [12:35pm MST] : I just exchanged emails with Chip Cassano, the Director of Public Relations for the University of Maryland University College, and he confirmed that -- according to university records -- Vivek Kundra did graduate from UMUC in 2001 with an MS degree in information systems management.
Here's what Chip said in his email:
Hi Jeff--
Yes, he’s a 2001 graduate of the University with an MS in information systems management. Anything else I can do to help, let me know.
You can read my original post about Dvorak's claim in its entirety below. You can also read Dvorak's original story that started the controvery here.
- - -
According to a blog post by PC Magazine columnist John C. Dvorak, Vivek Kundra -- the federal goverment's first CIO -- may not have obtained a master's degree that he claims he did.
In the aforementioned blog post over at Dvorak Uncensored, Dvorak claims that he contacted the University of Maryland to confirm that Kundra received an MS degree in Information Technology, as indicated in Kundra's public bio. Dvorak said that he didn't find any evidence that Kundra earned a degree. Here's what Dvorak said about what he found:
The registrar has no record of it. In fact the current University of Maryland grad department doesn’t even show this degree as being commonly available to anyone. A search of his college records shows no attendance after he received his BS degree in Psychology on 12/20/98. In fact his last day of school 12/19/98 wrapped up the six years it took Kundra to obtain his undergraduate degree.
Kundra was named the first Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the United States in a ceremony at the White House on March 5th, 2009. In a press release posted in the online briefing room of the press secretary, Kundra is listed as having the following qualifications:
He [Kundra] is a graduate of the University of Virginia's Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership and holds a MS in Information Technology from the University of Maryland.
I've emailed a request for comment on Dvorak's story to the White House Press Office, and we'll update this story as new information becomes available.
Microsoft has seemed to regain its stride over the last few months, with a string of important (and positive) product and marketing developments.
Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 hit RTM, Microsoft's laptop hunter ads are working at increasing the perceived value of Windows (and simultaneously infuriating Apple execs), and the recent headlines over the FCC investigating the Apple App Store's rejection of Google Voice is finally putting some negative media attention on Microsoft competitors.
While news of the Windows 7 RTM may have the most appeal to the consumer market, the completion of Windows Server 2008 R2 was just as significant for IT pros. The final stages of any large software development project can be a incredibly stressful time for the development team, and Microsoft's massive Windows Server 2008 R2 team was no exception. Thousands of Microsoft employees from all over the globe worked long hours to bring Windows Server 2008 R2 to fruition.
Related:Microsoft's Ward Ralston Discusses Windows Server 2008 R2Karen Forster, Director of Media and Community for Advaiya, recently had the chance to sit down with Brian McNeill, the program manager lead for Windows Server, to discuss the Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM. Karen also used the opportunity to record a behind the scenes look at the Windows Server 2008 R2 ship room a week before the RTM of Server 2008 R2. Karen writes a bit about the experience in her blog:
"Apparently, this meeting was indeed the calm after the storm, and things hadn’t always been this relaxed. Reflecting on Microsoft’s impressive reliability data for WS08R2 at RTM, General Manager Iain McDonald said, 'We sucked at beta. So we’ve gone from being in a really bad place to being in a great place.'
Ah-hah! So, the process was not always smooth. But apparently, the teams rallied to deliver clean code on schedule and at a high quality bar.
Those reliability statistics McDonald was looking at were noteworthy. The Microsoft study shows that the new release significantly exceeds the reliability goal that was set for its predecessor Windows Server 2008 (WS08) at its RTM. As the graph in the video shows, WS08 R2 RC demonstrated availability of 99.9987 percent (~ 7 minutes of down time per year), which exceeds WS08’s RTM availability of 99.9978 percent (~12 minutes of down time per year)."
You can see the video on ITTV.net, but I've also embedded the video clip below:
Systems management appliance vendor Kace Systems and remote support specialist Bomgar announced that they've inked a partnership deal.
Under the terms of the agreement, Kace customers using a Kbox appliance will be able to access Bomgar's remote support products from within the Kbox management console.
"Our partnership with Bomgar is derived from a common vision – bringing innovative and robust appliance-based technology to market, which can be easily deployed and used by organizations of all sizes yielding unparalleled investment return rates," said Marty Kacin, president, CTO and co-founder of Kacein a statement announcing the partnership news. "Through this partnership, we continue to expand the suite of automation and security solutions available to our customers – providing them unmatched systems management and remote desktop control capability, all delivered within the industry’s most innovative stack of appliance offerings."
Bomgar CEO and founder Joel Bomgar also commented on the news, saying that Bomgar "recognized the value and power of the partnership immediately" and said that "Combining KACE and Bomgar’s market-leading remote management and support capabilities enables IT organizations to immediately improve productivity and service levels while reducing costs."
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