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Release: IBM Smart Business Desktop on the IBM Cloud

September 1, 2009 by Robin Wauters 3 Comments

IBM today announced the availability of the industry’s first public desktop cloud.

The new IBM Smart Business Desktop on the IBM Cloud subscription service helps clients virtualize desktop computing resources, and provide a logical, rather than a physical, method of access to data, computing power, storage capacity and other resources. This service requires no up front capital or one time expense and will provide the highest levels of security, resiliency, reliability, and quality for virtual desktops. The service offers flexible delivery models, including three standard cloud-based offerings, dedicated infrastructure, and customer premise solutions, while providing the necessary safeguards to minimize the risk of data theft and loss, centralize data protection, and eliminate unauthorized access.

Through key technology and business partnerships with Citrix, Desktone, VMware and Wyse, along with IBM tools for customer assessment and strategic planning, IBM is helping financial organizations, public sector and academic institutions around the world address PC replacement dilemmas, deliver resilience and reliability for critical information, and resolve Internet access parity problems, all at competitive subscription service pricing.

Supported by government funding, the Hispanic Information and Telecommunications Network is partnering with IBM on a grass roots project called CBO Connect to provide desktop computing to over 200 sites nationwide. The CBO Connect is a coalition of community based organizations consisting of non-profits, schools and libraries where visitors have access to 21st century classrooms that offer desktop cloud computing, interactive video conferencing for distance learning, video distribution system with digital signage, and other classroom and administrative services.

The IBM Smart Business Desktop on the IBM Cloud service will be available in the Americas and Europe starting October 2009.

Research: Hardware Server Sales Slump as IT Pros Bet On Virtualization and Consolidation

September 1, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

TheInfoPro, an independent research company, today released new real-time data from its pending Server Study (final results due in October, Q3 2009) indicating that more than 50% of new servers being installed in 2009 will host virtualization, and future progressive growth indicates 80% by 2012.

Announced at VMworld 2009, TheInfoPro’s Server Study has conducted interviews with 195 IT pros wherein initial spending data indicates that 22% expect increases this year in server spending, but an additional 34% of the group indicates they’ll experience decreases. The IT pros range from Fortune 1000 (F1000) organizations to midsize enterprises (MSEs) in North America and Europe, and the interviews were completed between June and August 2009.

TheInfoPro Server Study also captures data about the rise of desktop virtualization, offers highlights on spending in each area of server management by vendor, and gives an in-depth look at VMware’s benefits and challenges in the current IT marketplace. For more information, visit TheInfoPro at booth #1322 or call the contact number below for a real-time briefing.

TheInfoPro’s network of IT pros stated that virtualization and consolidation is a critical lifeline to optimizing the current capacity of their existing physical servers. Virtualization deployments will continue to expand in the coming months, with 70% of the respondents citing it as critical to meeting their business objectives. Though hardware spending continues to show little growth, more than 50% of respondents do expect to resume hardware acquisition once the economy stabilizes. For now, Hewlett-Packard is positioned as a strong vendor in future choice of spending and faces the lowest vulnerability to customer switching when compared to competing vendors.

In software, despite the revenue-dampening effect of enterprise licensing, Microsoft remained steady in its category, with 22% of respondents indicating they would spend more throughout the remainder of 2009. VMware and Red Hat remain strong in their respective categories, with 41% and 30% spending more in 2009, respectively.

VMworld 2009 keynote – day one

September 1, 2009 by Lode Vermeiren 1 Comment

From VMworld 2009, this is the day 1 keynote.

VMworld 2009 has officially kicked off. The first keynote didn’t bring much real news. As usually, the keynote consisted of mostly marketing speak, customer testimonials and demos by sponsors and partners. New developments usually are announced during the CTO keynote, which is coming tomorrow.

Here’s a quick play-by-play recap of the keynote. You can check out the archived and live video streams at the VMworld website.

The keynote room is filling up. Goodbye sleep, hello keynote!

Bloggers ready for the #VMworld keynote

Tod Nielsen, COO takes the stage. Last year, 960 companies out of the Fortune 1000 were using VMware. Nielsen wants to get this up to 1000. At PartnerExchange (VMware’s North American partner event) he held up a sign with the 40 companies that weren’t already using VMware, promising a free VMworld pass to partners who signed up any of those companies.

In the last couple of months, 10 out of those 40 companies became vSphere users. This means there are 30 of the Fortune 1000 companies left that are not using VMware.

President & CEO Paul Maritz takes the stage.

There are 12488 attendees at VMworld this year. Or, as the marketing people would say: nearly 15K attendees.

VMworld regulars already know the drill. 70 % of IT costs are spent just to “keep the lights on”. Moving to a more agile environment can lower this maintenance cost.

Everybody’s talking about the ‘cloud’ that will magically solve all of their IT problems. But there are lots of different definitions of what the cloud actually means.
“Customers want to get to the mythical ‘cloud’ world where everything is simple, works together, is stable, secure, …”

This promised land is not here yet. Virtualization can enable it though.

The key is the encapsulation that’s inherent in virtualization, to add new functionality in a non-disruptive way.

The next step is bringing this workloads to external clouds. Later today there will be a press briefing + press release about the new cloud initiatives. (Check Virtualization.com for more news on this announcement as it happens.)

The foundation for this cloud is the platform called vSphere. vSphere is a bigger release in terms of man-years that went into it than any of the Windows releases Paul was involved with at MS in the 90s
(Paul Maritz is a Microsoft veteran)

“vSphere evolved from a “product”, VMware Infrastructure, to a real platform that plugs in to the complete datacenter.”

“The automation and policies helps “Continously defragging the datacenter.” The datacenter becomes a giant computer (the software mainframe)”

A single vSphere cluster can easily (in Maritz’s words) support the complete transaction workload of the Visa network.

Paul’s going over the different components that make up the vSphere platform. Most VMware users will probably know this slide by heart about now.

Now on to the sponsor lovefest. First Tom Brey, sr Technical Staff Manager Power Management from IBM is invited on stage.

VMware and IBM collaborate not only on hardware compatibility (like any other HW partner), but on management and power metering.

Every IBM server contains power meters/sensors. This can be measured and optimized from within vCenter.

The more data we have on power usage, the more we can optimize it. Using this data we can easily measure Performance Per Watt, to see if it’s better to turn off servers (DPM) and let the others run warmer, or distribute the load over several servers.

Brey demoes a server running 8 memtest VMs. As VMs are powered on, the energy consumption is updated in the vSphere client. What’s interesting is that the energy usage is calculated on a per-VM basis.

The energy consumption is updated live. The energy consumption is displayed on a per-VM basis. (See the colored bars at the far right of the graph.)

Demo with the new and old generation of x3650 servers. The new Nehalem-based M2 servers have half the idle power of the previous generation, and support
more VMs per server.

Moving on. A new set of task-oriented management products is being added to the vCenter family of products. Paul Maritz spends a few minutes reviewing the set of vCenter add-ons coming up in the coming months. (CapacityIQ, Chareback, …)

After the full vSphere suite, Maritz moves on to “vSphere essentials”, an edition of vSphere tailored to SMB customers. This “IT in a box” solution is complemented with the new “VMware Go” service announced yesterday.

Maritz is now describing vSphere essentials, the “IT in a box” version of SMB customers. New announcement yesterday: VMware Go.

Of course, he’s not telling there is now way to upgrade the Essentials license to standard if you grow beyond three hosts. Maritz also said Essentials brings “things like Fault Tolerance to SMBs at an attractive price.” This is not correct, as VMotion, Fault Tolerance and other goodies aren’t included in Essentials.

VMware vCloud intro. Enabling mobility between internal virtual datacenters and external clouds through standard APIs and common mgmt tools
The vCloud initiative so far has +1000 service providers signed up.
New announcement: vCloud Express is a new class of self-service services provided by partners.
Another demo of Terremark’s self service portal. Self service signup with just a credit card.
(Note: VMware is an investor in Terremark – and is thus in a way competing with its own partners.)

Amazon EC2 users already know this kind of service for a few years.

Formal announcement of the VMware vCloup API, with connections to inventory, billing, … The vCloud APIs were submitted to DMTF to create an open, standard API.

“Moving on to VMware View. Once again, the story of the “user centric” system instead of the “device centric” environment.”

Steve Dupree from HP ESS, Director of platform virtualization, taking the stage.

In other words, like every year, every sponsor gets his 5 minutes on stage.
HP created a reference VDI infrastructure. Storage is based on LeftHand, a storage company acquired by HP at the beginning of this year.

Funny exchange:
PM: How many customers have you got so far?
SD: We’re just finishing this implementation and putting it out in our services organization.

In other words, zero customers so far…

Tech preview of VMware View with PCoIP demo. This is what Eschenbach was talking about yesterday .

“Maritz referencing “Eating one’s own dog food”, a term he coined and in his words his “only contribution to the IT industry”. Maritz frequently refers to his Microsoft past in his presentations. He’s also known to have said he was responsible for the explosion of the number of servers during the 1990’s (Windows NT and beyond), and is now working on reducing the number of servers (at VMware).

THe keynote was finished with an overview of the SpringSource acquisition.

And that concludes the keynote… Not much news so far. There’s a cloud announcement coming up in a few hours.

Check back tomorrow for more live keynote blogging. In the meantime, follow Virtualization.com on Twitter. Follow @lode for “backstage” news, and @vmlive for live updates.

VMware To Debut New Products: VMware Go and vCenter Product Family

August 31, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VMware is launching two new products at VMworld, its annual conference, tomorrow.

The first is a suite of VMware’s existing virtualization solutions, called the VMware vCenter Product Family. The suite is built on top of VMware’s vSphere 4 to help enterprises create and maintain dynamic and flexible IT infrastructures.

VMware says that they have received an overwhelmingly positive response the latest generation of vSphere 4, with approximately 75 percent of customers planning to upgrade to VMware vSphere 4 within the next six months.

VMware’s second product launch is targeted towards small to medium sized businesses. VMware Go is a free beta service that makes it simple for clients to get started with virtualizing their applications. A web-based service, VMware Go will lets companies run multiple operating systems and applications on a single server, helping SMBs to spend less money on hardware, energy and server administration.

Via Between the lines.

CloudStorm European Tour launches from Brussels to showcase “real” Cloud Computing Solutions

August 28, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

CloudStorm, a European focused cloud computing event has announced that Brussels’ will be the inaugural venue of its tour around major European cities. The event, funded equally by its 10 participants, provides a showcase of cloud computing solutions covering a wide range of areas including application development and deployment, infrastructure, storage, video management and SAAS from leading European technology vendors.

Participants, who have just 10 minutes each to present their cloud based offering to the audience, follow a highly interactive “un-conference” format to encourage audience participation with a no-holds bared question and answer section at the end. The sponsors, in alphabetical order, include:

A-Server, a specialist in cloud computing platforms for service providers.
B-Virtual, an emerging leader in cloud storage solutions.
Calamares, Video Management Systems as a cloud compatible service.
ContactOffice, one of the first cloud-based collaboration providers.
Microsoft Azure, a platform for a wide range of internet services.
SaaSforce, a cloud based software-as-a-service distributor.
Sun Microsystems, a technology provider for public clouds
REP42, a provider of a mobile cloud services platform.
WDC CloudSphere, a European cloud computing service for medium enterprises.

In October, London will be the second stop for the tour with further events planned for later in the year in Paris and Munich with the same core sponsors plus additional regional cloud computing specialists. Patrick De Schutter, CEO of ContactOffice explains, “We are pleased to be involved with CloudStorm and look forward to helping to showcase real world examples of how Cloud computing can help improve a wide range of business and IT activities for a diverse set of customers.”

Attendance to CloudStorm is entirely free but the small venue means that places are limited.

Parallels Debuts Switch to Mac Bundle

August 26, 2009 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Parallels today unveiled a complete solution designed to simplify the process of “switching” from a PC to Mac. Parallels Desktop Switch to Mac Edition empowers users to effortlessly make the move to Mac without the risk of losing familiar and important data and applications on their Microsoft Windows-based PCs.

The product combines a set of easy-to-use tools and interactive tutorials with Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac to help “Switchers” understand how to operate Mac OS X, transfer all PC data and applications, and seamlessly run their Windows applications on their new Macs.

Switching from PC to Mac is on the rise: analyst reports on operating system market share show that Mac OS X market growth comes at the expense of Windows’ market share. While the overall PC industry saw declines of 3% for the quarter ending in June 2009, Apple sales were up 4% year over year. According to Apple’s Q309 report, half of the Macs sold were to customers who had never owned a Mac before.

Parallels Desktop Switch to Mac Edition is an industry-first solution that addresses the challenges facing prospective PC-to-Mac Switchers:

Learning Mac OS X — The Switch to Mac learning tools are designed to specifically address any questions or concerns associated with the transition from Windows to Mac. More than two hours of interactive video tutorials help users learn the new interface and functionality of the Mac platform step-by-step, starting with the Mac equivalent of tasks performed on Windows. A quick reference card identifies the most common Windows and Mac command/function differences and puts the correct keystrokes at users’ fingertips.
Making the Move — Also important to new Mac users is getting files and media from their old computer to their Mac. Parallels recognizes that many people need help with this process, and developed a “plug and click” method that moves the entire PC (licensed operating system, applications, files and data) to the new Mac. This includes the Parallels High Speed USB Transfer Cable that connects the two machines and the Enhanced Parallels Transporter: simple, wizard-driven software that walks the user through the move in a few easy clicks. The seamless Mac user experience now starts on the PC side.
Running Windows and Mac side-by-side — Parallels Desktop Switch to Mac Edition includes Parallels Desktop for Mac 4.0, the number one Mac system utility, currently used by more than two million people to run Windows side-by-side with Mac applications. This award-winning virtualization software provides a fully integrated seamless experience, offering users the greatest stability and performance available for running Windows on a Mac, as recognized in 3^rd party industry benchmarks³. Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac incorporates a range of security, backup and power saving features to give Mac users the easiest way to run Windows on a Mac.

Parallels Desktop 4.0 Switch to Mac Edition is available from today at Apple stores, at Apple.com and through other preferred retail partners in English, German and French. The suggested retail price (SRP) of the product is $99.99.