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Forrester Analyst: Storage Virtualization Is Overhyped

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An interesting article at ITPro cites Forrester Research analyst Andrew Reichman claiming storage virtualization to be still a marginalized business despite being a hot topic for a few years now. Reichman told attendees of Compellent’s C-Drive customer conference in Minneapolis that just 17 percent of companies have virtualized their storage systems in some way, with another nine percent in the process of rolling out the technology, while 28 percent are interested in the idea.

“Virtualisation of storage is tepid,” Reichman said. “I would characterise it as tepid.”

Reichman said that virtualization is still seen as a little bit leading edge for some companies, and that they’re waiting for others to adopt the technology first.

“Any change is tough – storage is probably the most conservative part of data centres. People don’t want to take the chance on disrupting their data,” he said, adding companies are “kicking the tires but not really buying it.”

Read the rest of the article here.

Magazine Feud: SYS-CON’s Virtualization Journal Blogger Mud Wrestles Virtualization Review Editor

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We’re getting used to the mud slinging between virtualization vendors and their respective marketing & communication departments, which are often publicly available for all to watch through blogs etc. Now niche publishers covering the world of virtualization are getting in that particular game, too.

The protaganists in question?

In the red corner, we have Keith Ward, editor of 1105media‘s Virtualization Review. In the blue corner, James Hamilton, consultant and blogger for SYS-CON. At stake: the title of the first (only?) magazine to write exclusively on our beloved topic of virtualization.

Virtualization Magazine Vendetta

So what happened?

This post on SYS-CON claims:

“Founded in 2006, SYS-CON Media’s Virtualization Journal is the world’s first magazine devoted exclusively to what Gartner has earmarked as the single highest-impact IT trend through 2012: virtualization. And now it will be available in print, on newsstands worldwide, as the first and only print publication serving Virtualization markets.”

This sparked Keith Ward from Virtualization Review to call SYS-CON outright liars on his blog.

“I have no problem with competition. I think it’s good for Microsoft, VMware, Cisco and AT&T. It’s just as good, and healthy, for IT publications. I do have a problem, however, with publications that either a) Outright lie, or b) Are woefully ignorant, and don’t check facts before they publish something.

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That would mean that their magazine is not the only print mag in existence covering virtualization. And not the first, either. Welcome to the party, Virualization Journal folks. There’s room for others here. Just try to be more careful when you make such bold claims. Doing a little homework on the competition wouldn’t hurt, either.”

SYS-CON blogger Hamilton struck back with a vicious post calling for the firing of Ward as editor of Virtualization Review, and wonders if he’s on drugs.

“SYS-CON Media, the world’s leading i-technology media company, has been publishing Virtualization Journal for the past three years at www.virtualization.sys-con.com – long before your publishing outfit expressed its intentions to cover the virtualization market last November and long before they hired you as an employee.

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‘Allegedly debuted,’ Keith? Why don’t you get your lazy blogging butt off your basement chair and go to JavaOne for a change, one of the most important technology conferences, around for more than a decade, and see how more than 5,000 copies of Virtualization Journal out of 12,000 shipped were picked up the first day of the show! A single day’s qualified circulation of Virtualization Journal is more than you will accomplish in a year! By the way, have you ever heard of JavaOne? I haven’t seen your rag around here. How about newsstands? Which newsstand can I find your magazine on? Any?”

Hamilton goes on to make fun of an event organized by 1105 Media that had a small number of attendees.

We’re not going to pick sides here, but we certainly wish there was a little more maturity on display. Virtualization is a hot space, there’s plenty to say about it, and it’s natural that there are multiple publications about the subject competing against each other. Get off your high horses and cater to your readers as good as you can instead of bashing each other. We enjoy reading both of you and will continue to do so, but please drop the cheap, pointless accusations because it doesn’t benefit anyone.

Oh, and Keith, keep your personal life stories for your own blog 😉

Novell CTO Jeff Jaffe Outlines Strategic Roadmap (Including Virtualization)

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Novell CTO Jeff Jaffe published a blog post earlier today outlining the company’s roadmap in seven areas: policy, identity, virtualization, Linux, orchestration, compliance and collaboration. Of course, the virtualization one interested us the most:

  • In 2006, Novell shipped Xen as an integrated part of our SUSE Linux Enterprise platform. In 2007, we collaborated with Microsoft to deliver the first cross-platform solution for running Windows on Linux.
  • At BrainShare, for the first time anywhere in the world, we demonstrated live migration of Windows Server 2008. We had it running as a Xen virtual machine on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
  • Our vision for virtualization is that the p-Distro becomes the core operating system for the physical machine and hosts the v-Distros. To get here, we have work to do: performance tuning, ISV certification, systems management, security improvements and device drivers.

Read the rest here.

Yahoo Needs Your Virtualization Advice

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Over at his own blog, Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo fame needs your advice on what virtualization software to use.

He has both a Windows machine and a Linux desktop he wants to use to run other virtual machines on.
What would your advice be?

Xen, VirtualBox , Qemu , VMWare? Or something completely different?

xkoto Presents New Management Team

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Xkoto, a provider of data virtualization solutions that ensure availability and scalability for mission-critical data and applications, today announced it has strengthened its executive management team.

xkoto

Joining xkoto are John Hamilton (Senior Vice President of Sales and Services), Dermot O’Grady (Chief Financial Officer) and Charlie Ungashick (Vice President of Marketing).

“The management team we have assembled puts us in excellent position to take a major share of the data virtualization market,” said David Patrick, President and Chief Executive Officer. “We are now geared up to build on the vision of our co-founders, Albert Lee, Ariff Kassam and Jeff Heisz, who identified the need for a product that would dramatically improve application availability by virtualizing the database infrastructure.”

Prior to joining xkoto, John Hamilton was Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at Trigence, an application virtualization software company. Dermot O’Grady joins xkoto from Convoq, where as CFO he was instrumental in raising $23 million in venture capital, according to the press release.

Finally, Charlie Ungashick joined xkoto from Deltek, where he was Vice President of Field and Product Marketing and a “key contributor to its successful IPO”.

CEO David Patrick said the team is ramping sales of xkoto’s GRIDSCALE software platform.

Reading Tip: “Do Hypervisors Need A Supravisor?”

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Check out this article on IT-Analysis.com from Clive Longbottom, Head of Research at Quocirca.

After a good overview of the current virtualization market, he asks himself and readers if there is a need for a ‘supravisor’ on top of existing hypervisors, by which he means a way of providing a high-speed, ultra-transparent means of abstracting the abstraction layer, giving a fully standardized platform under which different hypervisors can operate.

Well worth the read, here’s an abstract:

“What it all points to is the likelihood that an organisation will end up with a heterogeneous virtualised environment, with 2 or more main virtualisation technologies creating issues for management, provisioning and auditing of the environment.

One of the main needs here will be for image management. A function or application that is needed has to be provisioned into the virtualised environment. The best way of doing this is from virtual images. Unfortunately, a virtual image saved on a VMware platform (often known as a virtual appliance) cannot be easily deployed under a different virtualised environment, as the images are dependent on the proprietary form of the specific virtualisation engine.”

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“This supravisor need not be massively intelligent itself—it may be that all that is required is a means of carrying out fast V2V image translations and ensuring that a management console understands what the underlying environment is before provisioning. It may be something more—something that means that a single image can be used directly on top of a standardised layer. It may be that as time goes on, a supravisor subsumes the existing virtualisation technologies already in use. The ones who could do this are the systems management vendors—the likes of IBM Tivoli, CA, HP and BMCs and Microsoft—but will they?”

Read the full article here.