At this week’s VMworld Europe 2012 conference in Barcelona VMware announced several new and updated products to expand its cloud and virtualization management offerings. VMware’s new cloud management solutions build on the the software defined datacenter platform that they presented in their vCloud Suite 5.1 announcements at the previous VMworld 2012 held in San Francisco. The management of the cloud is the next layer of the virtual IT infrastructure and VMware’s new cloud management products simplify and automate management by enabling IT to manage services across heterogeneous clouds. VMware announced four products at VMworld Europe 2012 to enable cloud management: vCloud Automation Center 5.1 – An all new addition to the VMware product line-up, vCloud Automation Center 5.1 is based on the DynamicOps product which VMware acquired in June 2012. vCloud Automation Center 5.1 enables policy-based provisioning across VMware-based private and public clouds. It supports multiple hypervisors including Hyper-V as well as Amazon Web Services. vCloud Automation Center 5.1 will be integrated with VMware’s vCloud Director 5.1 and will allow authorized administrators, developers and business users to request new cloud services and applications or to manage existing resources using a self-service portal. vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.6 – The updated vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.6 uses analytics to proactively manage VM performance, capacity and configurations. It supports Microsoft Windows OSs, SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint, as well as Oracle and custom Java applications. VMware presented research showing that the vCenter Operations Management Suite increases efficiencies and provides a 59% costs savings as opposed to running vSphere standalone without the vCenter Operation Management Suite.  vFabric Application Director 5.0 – vFabric Application Director has also been updated and it enables you to define and deploy multi-tier application...More

One of the growing trends in the industry is the move toward hosted desktop virtualization also known as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure or VDI.   VDI deployments are often used in highly secure implementations like the military and the Department of Defense. At VMworld 2012 I met with with Christian Jones, HP Thin Client product marketing manager to talk about HP’s new line of thin clients.  We started by talking about the new t310 thin client that you can see below.         The t310 has absolutely no moving parts and thanks to the embedded PCoIP support it can process data streams send from VMware View servers up to five times faster that previous generations of thin clients. For example, Christian said that tests have shown the new t310 was capable of displaying video with over 60 frames per second clearly demonstrating that the device would not be the bottleneck in a VDI implementation. The t310 only works with VMware View and its priced at $369. You can learn more about the t310 at: http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/14424_div/14424_div.PDF. Christian also showed me their new t410 line of thin clients. The t410 line comes in two flavors: a traditional thin client called the t410 Smart Zero Client and a new t410 All in One Smart Client. The Smart Zero Client that you can see below can automatically configure itself for the VMware, Citrix or Microsoft protocols. The Smart Zero client costs $269.     The t410 All in One Client possesses a built-in monitor but it is unique in that its works using Power over Ethernet (PoE) which really streamlines the device’s footprint and power utilization. The t410 All in One is priced at $429. You can see the t410 All in One below.     You can find out more about the t410 All in One at: http://www8.hp.com/us/en/hp-information/thin-client-solutions/t410.html...More

Today many companies are looking into the different cloud computing offerings provided by different vendors. Most of those vendors provide off-site services where the business has little of no control over the servers or the data. Trusting security, data integrity and performance levels to the cloud vendor. At this past VMworld 2012 I met with NEC’s Bill Michael, Director Cloud Services to discuss NEC’s new Cloud in a Vault service. NEC’s Cloud in a Vault takes a completely different tack on cloud computing by offering a private cloud that’s built entirely according to the customer’s requirements. NEC’s Cloud in a Vault is oriented toward enterprise customers like health care and financial institutions where scalability, security and compliance are of critical importance. Unlike other cloud appliances that are emerging, NEC’s Cloud in a Vault is not a prepackaged appliance. Instead, it is custom built according to the needs to the customer and the customer doesn’t need to pay out an upfront purchase price. Instead, they pay a monthly rental cost that varies according to the compute power, storage, networking, services and levels of compliance that they require. NEC’s Cloud in a Vault can be deployed either in one of NEC’s datacenters or it can be deployed on-premise. If the customer first decides to deploy at an NEC site they can later retract the deployment and move it to one of their own locations. Another unique feature is the fact that NEC uses Traveller's Insurance to actually insure the levels of SLA that are required. If there is an outage then Traveller’s Insurance will pay the business the actual costs of the outage. That’s very different for other cloud providers that might give you some discount on the cost of their service if there is some interruption of service....More

While VMware’s new enterprise oriented vCloud Suite 5.1 garnered the bulk of the media’s attention at VMworld 2012, VMware has not forgotten about SMBs. At this past VMworld 2012 I met with Russell Stockdate, Vice President and General Manager, SMB Solutions for VMware. Russell explained how VMware has just come out with two new releases targeting organization with 1000 or fewer employees: vSphere 5.1 Essentials Plus vSphere 5.1 Standard Edition with Operations Management Russell and I discussed how the SMB faces almost all of the same technical issues as large businesses and enterprises however they have a lot fewer resources to devote to virtualization with most SMBs having no more than 2 people covering virtualization. VMware’s goals with the new SMB releases are to provide enhanced business continuity, better support for mobility and improved automation. One of the big changes that enhances business continuity is the inclusion of the replication engine into both of the new releases. Replication enables DR between different sites. Plus, the new vSphere Data Protection feature provides nondisruptive backups with data deduplication.   These are both high-end features that have been moved into the new SMB releases. The new vSphere Enhanced vMotion capability improves mobility by enabling the movement of VMs and optionally their files between hosts without the requirement for shared storage. For better automated management VMware is planning to include VMware Go Pro their virtualization deployment and migration service to organization buying vSphere 5.1 Essentials and Essentials Plus....More

As part of their July 17th earning announcement VMware ended recent rumors by confirming that they will name EMC COO and ex-Intel exec Pat Gelsinger as CEO of VMware. They also announced that current CEO Paul Maritz formerly with Microsoft will take on a new role of technology strategist at EMC and will remain on the VMware board of directors. VMware also projected record quarterly revenues of approximately $1.12 billion which is up 22 % over Q2 2011. In addition, VMware announced that they expect their full-year 2012 revenues to be between $4.54 billion and $4.64 billion....More

If year’s WPC 2012 conference is any indication there’s a ton of partner interest in this year’s new Windows client and server operating system releases. This year’s WPC in Toronto boasts 16,000 attendees from around the globe. To say there’s a lot of excitement around the upcoming Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 releases would definitely be an understatement. One of the big announcements of the day happened during the keynote where Microsoft announced that both Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 were on track to be released to manufacturing in the first week of August 2012. Windows Server 2012 is expected to be generally available in September while Windows 8 is expected to be generally available in October. For more information you can check out Paul Thurrott’s article: Microsoft: Windows 8 to RTM in Early August, GA in Late October....More

Just like clockwork Microsoft has come out with the release candidates for the next generation of the Windows client and server operating systems. Earlier this year Microsoft projected that they would have the release candidates for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 available in early June and on June 1st both release candidates were publically available. In this day of ever increasing complexity and OS requirements there’s no doubt that’s the result of some excellent execution on the part of the Microsoft development teams. So what can you expect from Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012? Windows 8 The early talk about Windows 8 is all over the map ranging from “the future of computing” to “the next Vista”.  For the first time since the initial release of Windows 1.0 Microsoft is coming out with a completely new Windows UI called Metro. Metro is a tile-based UI designed for touch screen tablets and it will run alongside a more traditional Windows 7-like UI. It’s clear that the push behind this is new UI to compete against the iPad. However, many people including  Apple's CEO Tim Cook criticize Microsoft’s attempt to make a single OS work for both devices. The more traditional UI will allow it to be used on desktop and laptops. Even if its true that Windows 8 turns out to be the next Vista it’s  important to remember that while Vista was a failure in the minds of most users it was also the foundation for the super popular Windows 7.  Personally, I’m looking forward to trying Windows 8 on some of the upcoming tablet devices. Some of the most important new features in Windows 8 include: Metro touch-enabled UI New desktop Apps  for quick information including sports, travel news and Bing New Windows store to buy Windows 8 Apps Multi-monitor support Ribbon UI on Windows Explorer USB 3.0 support Windows TO GO allowing booting off USB flash drives Improved power management with application suspend Desktop hypervisor that...More

I recently met with Michael Alvarado, SAN storage product manager, of NEC about their M100 storage array which has just been released in the United States. The M100 storage array family is an entry-level storage device that provides the performance and features of enterprise class storage devices. The M100 has a user friendly web-based GUI that makes it easy to navigate and manage storage pools and RAID levels as well as setting up replication. The new M100 storage array comes in a 2U chassis it supports 2.5” or 3.5” drives and can have up to 96 mounted drives. The M100 is designed for multi-tenancy and it allows you to mix different RAID levels in the same storage pools. It supports thin provisioning as well as the ability to perform snapshots and replicate volumes on-line with no interruption of availability. The M100 has an advanced power saving design and comes with NEC’s Phoenix automatic error correction technology. The base price for a single controller model with 8 GB Fibre channel is $4742 with 3.5” drives and $4,814 with 2.5’ drives. You can learn more about NEC’s storage products at: http://www.necam.com/Storage/. In addition, you can look for coverage of NEC’s M100 storage product in an upcoming issue of Windows IT Pro magazine....More

At VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas I meet with Reza Malekzadeh, VP of Marketing and Kuyper Hoffman, Sr. Systems Engineer from Nimula to talk about the new release of Nimbula their cloud operating system. Nimbula was founded two years ago by two former Amazon executives that lead the development of Amazon’s EC2 public cloud service. With Nimbula they built on those EC2 concepts and created a cloud OS technology that delivers EC2-like services that can work either behind the firewall as a private cloud or as a public cloud service. Nimbula is targeted toward cloud providers and enterprise customers and is designed for scalability and can work with a small cluster to up to thousands of computers. Nimbula runs on multiple nodes and is designed for high availability where there is no single point of failure. Reza and Kuyper demonstrated their Nimbula Director 1.5 cloud management system which has the ability to work with geographically distributed cloud resources as well as providing an identity model that can span multiple locations. Nimbula Director 1.5 can be managed from the command line or a web-based GUI. It also provides the ability to manage multiple tenants as well as perform usage metering and chargebacks. You can learn more about Nimbula Director 1.5 and download a trial copy from: http://nimbula.com/...More