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News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing

Centrix Software: Organizations Are Lacking Visibility On IT Efficiency

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Centrix Software today announced the results of a survey of IT professionals that looked at the ability of organizations to measure and monitor application usage and consumption, and how IT spend drives business value.

According to the survey, knowing how frequently an application is being used from a company’s IT infrastructure is a challenge for most IT managers: 54 per cent of respondents could give this information but with some difficulty, while 22 per cent found this extremely difficult or impossible to achieve. Only 24 per cent of respondents found it easy to provide this information on application usage.

Similarly, the ability to measure the true cost of application delivery across an organization’s entire estate is an issue for IT professionals, particularly in larger companies, with more than three quarters of respondents stating it would be difficult for them to achieve this.

Of the respondents, 31 per cent said that they would find it extremely difficult or impossible to measure their costs; 45 per cent said it was somewhat difficult; only 24 per cent of those surveyed said it would be easy to provide this information.

Centrix Software’s IT intelligence solutions, Centrix WorkSpace Discovery and WorkSpace iQ, enable organizations to capture vital information around the technologies that are installed and being used across large enterprise environments.

Centrix Discovery is available as a free download and provides a view on all the applications and devices in use within a company’s network.  It can be used to assess where software licensing can be rationalized and to identify good candidates for new platforms such as virtualization.  Centrix iQ provides a deeper level of reporting on application consumption and device use and enables IT to define and apply costs against services and applications, to support chargeback modeling, business service development and financial reporting.

EMC Shuts Down Cloud Storage Service Atmos Online

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Looks like EMC plans to shut down its Atmos Online cloud storage service immediately, according to its website (see below).

EMC said its hosted storage service will be phased out immediately, and it is offering no guarantee that any current users storing data on it will be able to retrieve it in the future.

Dear Atmos Online Customers,

We are no longer planning to support production usage of Atmos Online.  Going forward, Atmos Online will remain available strictly as a development environment to foster adoption of Atmos technology and Atmos cloud services offered by our continuously expanding range of Service Provider partners who offer production services.  We will no longer be offering paid subscription or support for Atmos Online services.  Any existing production accounts will not be billed either for past or future usage.   We will also no longer provide any SLA or other availability commitment.  As a result, we strongly encourage that you migrate any critical data or production workloads currently served via Atmos Online to one of our partners offering Atmos based services.  An updated list of partners is available here.

Beginning this week, you will see changes to the service consistent with this approach.  In the short term, these changes will neither affect your existing accounts nor your existing data.  You are welcome to continue leveraging Atmos Online for development purposes as needed.  These changes also do not affect our commitment to your success.  If you have any concerns about these changes or appropriate migration strategies and support, please feel free to contact us at [email protected].

Thank you for your cooperation and ongoing interest in the Atmos family of products and services.

Sincerely,

The EMC Cloud Infrastructure Services Team

Research: European Businesses Get Serious About Virtualization, Cloud Strategies

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European enterprises are beginning to embrace the business opportunities offered by virtualizing assets and accessing applications through the cloud, according to new research, commissioned by Brocade.

The research shows that 60 percent of enterprises expect to have started the planning and migration to a distributed — or cloud — computing model within the next two years. Key business drivers for doing so are to reduce cost (30 percent), improve business efficiency (21 percent) and enhance business agility (16 percent).

The findings appear to confirm recent research by analyst firm IDC, which identified that cloud IT services are currently worth GBP 10.7bn globally, a figure that is estimated to grow to around GBP 27bn by 2013.

For enterprise organizations, investment in the majority of cases is in the development of a private cloud infrastructure due, in part, to concerns over security. Over a third of respondents cited security as the most significant barrier to cloud adoption, closely followed by the complexities of virtualizing data centers, network infrastructure and bandwidth.

The research also analyzed the small-to-medium enterprise (SME) space, and while enterprises are embracing the cloud and the business advantages it brings, SMEs appear to be slightly slower to adopt with only 42 percent predicting a move to the cloud within the next two years; unsurprisingly, 63 percent of these plan to opt for a hosted solution.

Other key research findings include:

— More than a quarter of large organizations are planning to migrate a cloud model within the next two years; 11 percent within one year

— A quarter of organizations stated that the ability to consolidate the number of data centers was also a critical driver

— The availability of bandwidth was also a deciding factor amongst 14 percent of respondents

Parallels CEO Serguei Beloussov And Others Kick Off Seed Fund Runa Capital

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A new Russian venture capital fund, Runa Capital has been launched by Serguei Beloussov, chairman of Parallels and Acronis, and Alexander Galitsky, founder of Almaz Capital Partners.  The fund will offer about $30 million in seed financing to software and internet early stage companies.

Runa Capital will invest in rapid growth sectors including  cloud computing, machine learning, virtualization, mobile and internet applications.

Runa Capital’s mission is to provide capital, expertise and strategic leverage that will elevate talented Russian tech teams into globally competitive businesses.

Runa Capital investment activities will be supported by Runapark business incubator. The incubator will provide the environment where promising Russian startups will become world class technology companies.

Runa Capital list of venture partners include some well-known high-tech entrepreneurs and investors: Andreas Gauger and Achim Weiss, co-founders of the world’s largest hosting provider 1&1,  Ilya Zubarev, co-founder of Rolsen and Acronis, Igor Borovikov, founder of the largest Russian software distributor Softline,  Charles Ryan, ?hairman of UFG Asset Management, and Igor Daniloff, founder of ‘Doctor Web’ antivirus company.

Citrix Poaches SAP’s Chief Virtualization Evangelist

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Citrix has hired away Roland Wartenberg from his long time employer, SAP,  where he worked for the past 13 years (via VMblog).

In 2003, Wartenberg joined the adaptive computing team within SAP in Walldorf, where he had the chance to actively define and drive SAP’s virtualization strategy.

In 2006, he moved back to Palo Alto with the help of SAP where he continued to work on virtualization and cloud computing for the company – giving him the opportunity to start what has become the widely popular SAP Virtualization Week event series.  He served SAP as the Chief Virtualization Strategist at SAP Labs, Green IT Evangelist and is finishing out his fantastic career as its Chief Virtualization Evangelist.

Dell To Acquire Scalent Systems

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Dell announced it has signed an agreement to acquire Scalent, a private company that provides software that makes data center infrastructure dynamic, easily scalable and highly efficient.

Dell will integrate Scalent technology into its Advanced Infrastructure Manager (AIM) solution.

Subject to customary closing conditions, Dell expects to complete the acquisition in its second fiscal quarter.

Dell AIM simplifies data center management by enabling a single administrator to dynamically allocate compute, storage and network resources for physical and virtual application workloads. This solution enables dynamic deployment and repurposing of infrastructure without the need for physical server, cable or storage area network changes. The solution has built-in high-availability, helping organizations manage infrastructure failures without service disruption. Dell AIM works with industry-standard servers, Ethernet switches and Fibre Channel switches, allowing customers to transition quickly to a highly-dynamic data center using existing infrastructure investments. This open architecture enables customers to leverage their existing infrastructure, dramatically lowering the cost of implementation relative to other industry solutions.

Dell’s new solutions and flexible services free customers to capitalize on the “Virtual Era” of the technology industry and realize new levels of efficiency, with a goal of reducing data management costs by up to 50 percent and making room in budgets for the strategic investments they need to make now. Dell’s Virtual Integrated System brings together an end-to-end solution of state-of-the-art servers, storage, networking, software and management tools to work as one dynamically configurable entity that is open and pragmatic. The result is rapid deployment and responsive infrastructure that helps businesses respond to customers’ and employees’ changing needs. Dell’s solution is a distinct alternative to the closed nature of competitors’ proprietary and vertically integrated stacks.