News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, or if you’ve been completely distracted by the speculation about an impending acquisition of Sun Microsystems by IBM, you know Sun yesterday announced its Open Cloud Platform. In the 8-minute video below, found on DataCenterKnowledge, Lew Tucker (CTO Cloud Computing & Developer Platforms at Sun) outlines some of the details:
This post is slightly off our usual virtualization track, as it dwells into the emerging H2A conversion industry (Human-To-Avatar). Last week I attended the excellent Plugg event on innovation and entrepreneurship in Brussels (which happens to be organized by our editor-in-chief Robin Wauters). Now that his annual event is over, you can enjoy more frequent posts over here again. Robin pointed me to a mysterious booth on his exhibition floor. Dirk Callaerts, the president of Eyetronics gave me a short explanation of their amazing virtualization technology. I even got myself virtualized in a similar way as Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Angelina Jolie and Nicole Kidman. Major movie stars use these scans to get their face applied to stand-ins and stunt men. But also because the insurance companies require them to get virtualized, so that expensive movies can be finished, in the unfortunate event something happens to the leading actors.
For those who do not live on a film set, there are many application for this technology too. Think about the gaming industry or online communities. This seems a fun booth to add to the next VMworld exhibitor floor, so scanned virtualization gurus can boost the likeliness of their avatar in the ‘virtual pavilion’ or on their blog. Another market for these scans is to produce miniature physical copies of your virtual self. V2P anybody?. The cosmetics industry already knows vanity is a great revenue driver…
Now that I got my face virtualized, I am able to send stand-ins for those dangerous tech interviews in the heated hypervisor battle fields around the world 🙂
Hyper9 announced today the general availability of Hyper9, a product that leverages Internet and virtualization management technologies to manage change, configuration and performance issues in a modern, efficient way.
Built for VI administrators by VI administrators, Hyper9 is a simple, yet powerful enterprise-class product that is ideally suited for managing virtual server infrastructures. It enables monitoring, troubleshooting and reporting on virtual infrastructures like nothing else in the marketplace. It accomplishes this without agents, tree views, spreadsheets, or multiple tools.
Among the key product features are:
In addition to the Hyper9 product being made available at the web site, the H9Labs Search Plug-in for VI Client is also ready for download. This software was developed by a well known developer in the VMware community, Hyper9’s own Andrew Kutz, who was recently named a vExpert by VMware. H9Labs’ Search Plug-in gives the VMware VI Client 2.5 auto-complete search capability from inside the guest across your virtual infrastructure.
Skytap today announced it completed a $7 million Series B round of funding from Ignition Partners, Madrona Venture Group and Washington Research Foundation. The funds will be used to bolster the company’s product development, sales and marketing efforts.
Skytap’s rapidly growing list of customers utilize its cloud-based virtual lab solution to augment or replace dynamic, high cost IT environments such as those used for application development and testing, IT prototyping, product demonstrations and technical training. By allowing users to scale resources on-demand and pay only for time and resources utilized, customers can immediately reduce costs, increase productivity and improve responsiveness to business demands.
Since emerging from stealth less than one year ago, Skytap has achieved strong customer traction and third-party recognition for its innovative virtual lab offering.
CORAID today announced the immediate availability of the EtherDrive Storage Area Network Host Bus Adapter (HBA) that enables VMware ESX 3.5 with AoE technology to deliver affordable, fast EtherDrive SAN solutions to virtualization environments. VMware provides Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program members with tools to develop products that are complementary to VMware virtualization software and help deliver high-value solutions to our joint customers.
CORAID’s EtherDrive SAN Host Bus Adapter for VMware ESX 3.5 helps customers easily embrace VMware virtualization storage with the flexibility and cost savings of AoE-based SAN to ESX hosts. The availability of the new SAN HBA builds on the company’s success in the virtualization market for building innovative, affordable virtualization storage.
With more than 900 members worldwide, the VMware TAP program works with best-of-breed technology partners to provide them a comprehensive set of VMware technical and marketing services, support, tools and expertise to deliver enhanced value to joint customers.
It’s all over Techmeme: the Wall Street Journal and the NY Times report that IBM is in talks with Sun Microsystems to acquire the fledgling technology giant. Larry Dignan over at ZDnet says it makes sense, Dana Garder over at … also ZDnet calls it a red herring. Om Malik says it would make more sense for Cisco Systems to buy Sun, CNET’s Matt Asay says a deal would be good for open source. Meanwhile, Sun’s stock soars.
But Computerworld may have the best commentary we’ve read about the rumored acquisition. Lucas Mearian writes:
“If it purchased Sun, IBM would bolster its storage customer base and eliminate competition, but such a move would also create significant storage product overlap. Rather than boosting its existing product sales, IBM would likely gain more in the form of intellectual property and human resources talent.
While Sun and IBM both sell in the high-end storage market, IBM holds three times the market share of Sun.
Neither Sun nor IBM does well in the midrange storage market, and enterprise-class systems is an area some believe is tanking as a result of an uptick in more-modular, flexible storage platforms based on high-capacity, lower-performance disk drives and commodity hardware.”
To be continued beyond any shred of doubt.