virtualisation - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• VMware gives some partners the cold shoulder

  VMware has asked at least two companies who planned to setup booth displays at its Partner Exchange conference next week not to attend the show.

• In Pictures: 10 things we love about Windows Server 2012 R2

  In Windows Server 2012 R2, Microsoft has released a compelling operating system update that’s targeted directly at its virtualisation and Cloud competition. Here are 10 things we like about Windows Server 2012 R2.

• Lincoln University looks to expand BYOD capabilities

  Lincoln University will look to expand bring-your-own-device (BYOD) options, and work to expand capabilities to the staff in 2014.

• In Pictures: 12 new updates in VMware vSphere 5.5

  VMware boosts performance, scalability, and usability with enhancements that stretch from the hypervisor to the management stack

• Wanted: Champions of the Cloud mobile era

  Exactly a year after taking on the top role at VMware, Pat Gelsinger says the period of disruption has become greater, and warns, the “fastest will win”. The four trends of social, mobile, Cloud and Big Data are affecting consumer and business IT, says Gelsinger.
  

• 'Defy Convention': VMworld 2013 in photos

  Dateline San Francisco: VMware's 10th annual congress attracts over 21,000 attendees.

• In Pictures: Hot products from VMworld 2013

  Click through to see all the latest from the show in San Francisco.

• John Drayton is new VMware country manager

  Wellington-based role to focus on public sector and financial services.

• In Pictures: Citrix wins VDI faceoff

  VMware, Microsoft score high in test of hosted virtual desktop infrastructure

• Is mobile virtualisation ready for your business?

  New ideas in IT go through a long distillation process. Someone invents the idea, vendors talk about new product concepts, analysts weigh in on the value. Eventually, a new category of hardware or software materializes, but rarely in a fully formed state. With mobile virtualization, the pedigree is sound: Most organizations use some form of server virtualization in their data centers.

• No 'wait and see' for the cloud

  IT organisations can not adopt a “wait and see” attitude when it comes to the cloud.
  John Brand, vice president, and principal analyst, CIO Group at Forrester, observes that in the past, “organisations had the opportunity to sit back and evaluate [technology] and in many cases they decided to wait before adopting.”
  “But the level of interest and activity in the cloud from the business was something that took IT by surprise,” says Brand, as he releases the results of the latest Asia Pacific Cloud Index.
  The annual survey, conducted by Forrester for VMware, finds cloud adoption continues to accelerate across the region – with 64 percent of Asia Pacific organisations already using or planning cloud initiatives – an increase from 59 percent in 2010 and 22 percent in 2009.
  New Zealand and Australia continue to lead the region in cloud adoption, with 67 percent using cloud technologies, up from 60 percent in 2010.
  “We were expecting this kind of industry penetration to take around five plus years. It has happened within three years,” says Brand at the annual vForum in Sydney.
  In terms of adoption plans, private clouds still far outweigh public clouds, and 41 percent of respondents plan to deploy both public and private clouds, up from 38 percent in 2010.
  “Continued interest in both private and public clouds suggests barriers to adoption are considered challenges, not show stoppers,” says Brand.
  Cost savings remain the primary driver for cloud adoption – cited by 55 percent of respondents. But more respondents from New Zealand and Australia, along with Korea, view the cloud as a strategic initiative compared with their counterparts across the region, which cite cost savings as a major driver.
  Duncan Bennet, managing director, VMware Australia and New Zealand, say these findings suggest the majority of enterprises across both sides of the Tasman are ahead of the game when it comes to cloud computing, and are moving past technology concerns to impact on the business.
  Concern around data privacy and control has likewise replaced security as the main barrier to cloud adoption, particularly in ANZ, Singapore and Malaysia.
  The survey also finds ANZ organisations leading the way in virtualisation – 76 percent of organisations willing to consider virtualising their most business critical applications, an increase from 75 percent in 2010.
  Rogue IT
  Todd Neilson, co-president, application platform at VMware, says cloud computing has empowered the users to bypass the control of IT. “With cloud computing, users are saying if IT can’t respond to my needs, I am going to go elsewhere,” says Neilson.
  He cites the experience of a CIO of a US financial organisation who wanted to find out how much “rogue IT” was in use and pulled out the expense report for Amazon Services in the month of December.
  “I was emotionally prepared for the number to be $20,000 to $30,000,” Neilson quotes the CIO as saying, but the figure he got was for $400,000.
  He says a challenge for CIOs across the globe is trying to find out how to transform IT as a service.
  “We are at the end of the Windows era, we are on a post PC-era,” says Neilson.
  He says that during a recent meeting with CEOs in Silicon Valley, nearly everyone had a laptop or an iPad. In this environment, he says, “IT needs to be a universal services broker and connect to the variety of devices.”

• The new start ups

  It is called “the garage effect” and it is a nod to the humble origins of some of the giant companies in Silicon Valley.
  David Hunter, chief technology officer, platform security at VMware, predicts the rise of the ‘garage effect’ for people working in today’s cloud and virtualised environments.

• Virtualisation: Building blocks to achieve benefits

  This week I was invited to attend a gathering at Collabworks, an organisation focused on the virtual enterprise. Collabworks believes that the kinds of savings and efficiencies that virtualisation has brought to IT can be brought to entire companies by reorganising workplaces along the lines of what has happened in IT (virtualisation to remove dependencies, focus on service outputs rather than processes, and use of specialized external resources rather than internal employees). As IT only accounts for around three percent of total corporate costs, if Collabworks' theory is right, there's clearly great opportunity for enterprises.

• Assessing the impact of application virtualisation

  Server virtualisation gets most of the glory, but it's application virtualisation that may ultimately have a more significant impact on enterprise IT architectures, supporting new modes of business and smoothing the path to the new services-oriented online structure known as the cloud.

• CIOs say desktop virtualisation remains risky: Ovum

  Research firm Ovum has released a new report into the perception CIOs have of desktop virtualisation and an immature market poses risks when trying to procure the most appropriate technology.