Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

Don't believe me? Look here!



More at Matt's site!

This is an interesting, in fact very interesting from a strategic and tactical weakness perspective.

And we all know that Microsoft sales are driving their business. So I fear about VMware's future. I'm not sure if we'll be seeing a VMware in the next 2-3 years. Things are changing dramatically.

I will soon be helping organize,and probably do a keynote myself, an EMEA Cloud Computing initiative. Suddenly there is a lot of talk of Xen and an overwhelming interest in KVM.

Too much is changing and a bit too fast. Believe me we would have forgotten Virtualization, like we forgot for a few decades till it touched the x86. So yes, as I said previously, market relevance is where VMware had its 5 years to invest in, did they do that effectively? We'll find out for soon in the coming 2-3 years.

Source

Press

Learn more about VMsafe here.

CO2 emissions has been the sole cause of eliminating life in the past and it will take our life once again. On a mass scale unless we act. NOW!

Following shocking revelations from the past tell us tales that we are in the eye of the storm already.



Hundreds of millions of years ago, a sharp rise in CO2 led to mass extinctions. Today humans are witnessing and are responsible for that sharp rise. This is calculated with GEOCARB.



Temperature variations since the past 400,000 years.



These are changes in CO2 level since industrial revolution.

I have been talking about virtualization security for quite a while. My last speech in EMEA, Belgium 2008 specifically, at the Open Source Virtualization Conference, I mentioned this, see this picture and think about it. Think about it as a security expert, think about it as a CIO, think about it as a company lawyer and think about it as an employee!

Just give yourself a moment, look at this picture:



Now tell me what you see in it? Well lets ponder about it once again. My Real-Time consultations and observations across the globe tell me one thing. just like the iRobot movie line from the robots: " You will comply!" or even better yet: "Wanna spend you life in jail?". You will have to deal with several compliances when the IT and Business domains converge.

I have said it on several occasions. The consolidation is bound to continue. It will go on this time till we have reached an absolute state of meshed or mashup domains. There will be several disorders and there will be a lot of IP-bleed and leaks happening that may go unnoticed but some will find you and you will be found! Loo at this story of this ex-HP, ex- IBM exec who will have to go to jail for 10 years. Career totally ruined and obviously the ramifications of such indulgences of transiting employees/people is bound to create a lot of unrest within the industry.

So look at the wicked and mischevious activities that lurk in your heads and how virtualization makes it possible for you to do all the things so wickedly insane!

Now look at this picture and think again:



So you see we have loads of ground to cover with security. The market consolidation is not bound to stop. Economy will push SaaS, Clouds and other frameworks in your face. Your data will eventually be resting somewhere esle but someone or something needs to guard it. you need to understand that it is the internal threat and eventually the Globally dispersed and hard-to-locate threat that can eventually endanger and compromise your data. Your data! Can you imagine that!

Think about it or else you might have to deal with shame and disgrace of having to deal with something as unfortunate as this:

Do you want a culprit within your firewall. do you know who s/he is? There is still time, secure your data center, virtual or not! When virtual, take it in your design as a default!

Start asking yourself the following:



Welcome to the new age of mischief and hyper-aspiration

The visibility within your data center and also understanding the vulnerabilities within your data center will help you understand how to fix such issues. How can I control my Virtual Machines and alert against a typical SecurityMotion Breach? Do we have something like that. If this employee had just packed all that stuff including all other data, including confidential property and software with source code, into a virtual machines and just copied a copy of such a VM into his USB, he would have been safe. Email is dangerous but VM Steal is and can be disastrous!

People don't do it for money. If you do it for loads of money, you just get caught. People do it for all sorts of reasons and they are far more damaging for firms. Your DNA could leak out to a competitor, your LOB could go bust. Have you thought about it?

Global Economic Disruption and insecure VMs: Will terrorists attack our data centers?

The last time the 9/11 happened, it shifted and changed the world forever. In my latest issue of my Time magazine, I have heard that the global floatability (which we so fondly call globalization) is allowing a lot of younger, mischief-prone folks to go and attack the europe. I am nuts? No it is happening. While U.S and others are preparing for a " physical attack", there will be a "virtual attack". This virtual attack may result in a absolute disaster to global economy. Well you might not care about global economy, you certainly have to be assured of this: Your firm might be totally gone by then!"

So security is not just to protect yourself merely from outside baddies or inside sulkies, it is for that unmesurable blended-attack that may encompass both internal and external threats, and pose a totally new form of threat to your organization.

Beware and get a health check today!

Santa Clara, CA – July 15, 2008 – Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CTXS), the global leader in application delivery infrastructure, today announced “Project Kensho,” which will deliver Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) tools that, for the first time, allow independent software vendors (ISVs) and enterprise IT managers to easily create hypervisor-independent, portable enterprise application workloads. These tools will allow application workloads to be imported and run across Citrix XenServer™, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V™ and VMware™ ESX virtual environments.

As virtualization becomes a mainstream component of enterprise IT infrastructure, users need ways to automate and secure the lifecycle of their application workloads without being tied to a single hypervisor platform or virtual hard disk format. By implementing the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) OVF standard, Project Kensho will enable ISVs and enterprise IT staff to leverage a hypervisor-independent portable virtual machine format that packages a complete application workload as a secure, portable, pre-configured open standard virtual appliance. This will solve a multitude of interoperability issues between virtualization platforms while allowing automated provisioning and management of applications, rather than just virtual machines. Users will be able to easily install and use any OVF packaged application workload regardless of which virtualization platform they use – whether it be XenServer, Hyper-V, or ESX.

The OVF specification was originally co-authored by Citrix and VMware, with contributions from Microsoft, IBM, HP and Dell; the companies then submitted the draft to the DMTF standardization process.

“XenServer delivers the benefits of fast, free, ubiquitous and compatible virtualization, whether from Citrix, Microsoft or VMware,” said Simon Crosby, CTO of the Virtualization and Management Division, Citrix Systems. “Project Kensho highlights the Citrix commitment to interoperability for virtualization, while maximizing price/performance and richness of features at the virtual infrastructure level.”

Added Value for Microsoft Hyper-V

Project Kensho will also enable customers to leverage the interoperability benefits and compatibility between long-time partners Citrix and Microsoft to extend the Microsoft platform. For example, XenServer is enhanced with CIM-based management APIs to allow any DMTF-compliant management tool to manage XenServer, including Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager. And because the tools are based on a standards framework, customers are ensured a rich ecosystem of options for virtualization. In addition, because of the open-standard format and special licensing features in OVF, customers can seamlessly move their current VMware workloads to either XenServer or Hyper-V, enabling them to distribute virtual workloads to the platform of choice while simultaneously ensuring compliance with the underlying licensing requirements for each virtual appliance.

Project Kensho will support the vision of the Citrix Delivery Center™ product family, helping customers transform static datacenters into dynamic “delivery centers” for the best performance, security, cost savings and business agility. The tools developed through Project Kensho will be easily integrated into Citrix Workflow Studio™ based orchestrations, for example, to provide an automated, environment for managing the import and export of applications from any major virtualization platform.

Pricing and Availability

A technical preview of Project Kensho tools will be available for free download in Q3. For more information about Citrix XenServer, please visit: http://www.citrix.com/xenserver.

About XenServer

Citrix XenServer, a member of the Citrix Delivery Center product family, is an enterprise-class solution for virtualizing application workloads across any number of servers in the datacenter as a flexible aggregated pool of computing resources. With the new Platinum Edition, XenServer is the first and only solution on the market to address both virtual and physical servers, making the entire datacenter more dynamic.

About Citrix

Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CTXS) is the global leader and the most trusted name in application delivery infrastructure. More than 215,000 organizations worldwide rely on Citrix to deliver any application to users anywhere with the best performance, highest security and lowest cost. Citrix customers include 100 percent of the Fortune 100 companies and 99 percent of the Fortune Global 500, as well as hundreds of thousands of small businesses and prosumers. Citrix has approximately 8,000 partners in more than 100 countries. Annual revenue in 2007 was $1.4 billion.

For Citrix Investors

This release contains forward-looking statements which are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The forward-looking statements in this release do not constitute guarantees of future performance. Those statements involve a number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially, including risks associated with revenue growth and recognition of revenue, products, their development and distribution, product demand and pipeline, economic and competitive factors, the Company’s key strategic relationships, acquisition and related integration risks as well as other risks detailed in the Company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Citrix assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking information contained in this press release or with respect to the announcements described herein.

# # #

Citrix®, Citrix XenServer™, Citrix Delivery Center™ and Citrix Workflow Studio™ are trademarks of Citrix Systems, Inc. and/or one or more of its subsidiaries, and may be registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.

ArsTechnica thinks so.

Also: The comment of What Maritz said about Netscape are also notable. Will he try to cut off Microsoft's air supply? (He knows the guys inside-out) but there could also be a whammer surprise move: Joining hands with Microsoft to go after the x86 market. There are more players in the market. Who isn't doing virtualization these days? Storage firms, Security firms, heck even a Bank (Credit Suisse) wants a piece of it! (They are the coolest when it comes to the whole heterogeneous OR environment"

More here...

Press Release

The particle physics: Evolution, aspergerism and massless massness

Greatest things in life come and go and all you have left is memories. The LHC's attempt to look for the Higgs particle, often also called the God particle by some who are a too much into the "discovery of evolution thing", sometimes makes me wonder: We all have that in us. There is space and anti-space and then there is the air that breathes it.

VMware is exactly such a software company. The firm has solid faith and tremendous following. The employees breathe and live the Higgs field. This field was created by the folks who brought this company to where it is today.

VMware had better lived in some distant universe, untouched by folks that kept bugging their passion and telling them to say things the way it should have been told. They did a great jo at it but they also got fooled into it. The truth of the matter is exactly that. There is matter and anti-matter. The rest doesn't exist and the world doesn't need to know if it exists. It did find out and got hordes of admins excited about thsi breathtaking technology.

The host-alien love affair: OMG...I have the Higgs in me!

EMC's purchase of VMware was not just a mere mention of some software developer within EMC's ranks, as Joe Tucci would put it. If it is, then he just got lucky as given the flat revenues he's been giving his investors, he'd have to thank Diane and her team for helping him stay where he is the last five years without delivering much value to his investors. Well she saved him from getting fired and then she gets fired instead.

But all this he didn't realzie when he "got lucky" and decided to buy VMware. His luck rose as all the poster boys and girls sold EMC stuff against other hardware competitors such as IBM, HP. All smart guys, I know. But that all happened when EMC discovered that the Higgs particle was within themselves, in their bodies!

There was a chorous to get the Higgs particle out as soon as possible. They didn't realize one thing before coming to the conclusion, is that it is the very Higgs particle that keeps us alive. The search for the unknown, which VMware did was a great thing. They came up with stuff which they called: " Here, we've got the stuff that'll save the universe, and it'll also warm up your coffee as you go about it!"

VMware is that Higgs particle. It has given too much in too short a period of time. Maybe that was the dilemma. It changed too many things, too fast. That scared too many folks. Maybe it didn't even intend to grow that big. It never needed the media and all that stuff. All it needed was a

Le mort petit?

Usurpations are heady. Even the one that describes the french phrase above, they aren't meant to last this long. This one did for five long years and it still is about to have after effects. So I can fully imagine that it was just too much too handle.

I don't really think so but much will change as Diane leaves. That will mean that a lot of products will have to find a way to re-integrate into the new strategy. Cloud computing jacket, maybe? We don't know yet. EMC shoudl have been doing a lot of work, much before at hand to avoid the bigger surprise that they will be confronted with, had they taken enough work to go after the Global Data Center strategy. Do they have one? We don't know.

So it is not VMware we should worry about, I suspect that EMC (and my doomsday predictions have a lot of bigger firms will be faced with extinction at some point of time soon) will have to seriously look at its own sustainability. VMware gave it a breath of fresh air. I can already smell some foul stench emanating from the cracks...

Disclaimer: Although this shock decision may not exactly have been the style EMC should have adopted, I do agree with Greg Ness's wise words here and wish paul lots of luck convincing the internal folks that it is about the war and not about those little battles.

So what can we expect in the coming weeks:

- ESX price gets a considerable cut
- Open Sourcing of ESX will be in the offing soon, to be fully Cloud ready to attack all parties at all fronts
- Some more management shake up
- Some voluntary departures
- Strong (and more) EMC's indulgence in product strategy