I receive a notice of partnerships or alliances between and among companies almost every business day. Unless they are of an unexpected or very strategic nature, I seldom comment on them. Why is that? Read the rest of this entry »

SWsoft* has just issued an announcement that it has changed its name to Parallels. It is not at all uncommon for a company having a successful product, such as Parallels, a virtual machine software product, to take on the name of that product in the hopes of building stronger awareness for their entire product portfolio. Although making moves of this nature can be risky, it may be a good move in this case. Read the rest of this entry »

I came into my office this morning at 5 AM ET with the hopes of posting an entry here and then getting on with other business. I found that Comcast digital voice and internet service were both down. Read the rest of this entry »

The folks at Virtual Iron have just announced that they’ve added some important new features to an already very powerful virtualization environment. In addition to their previous focus on consolidation, agility, optimization and availability, Virtual Iron 4.2 adds features designed to improve network performance, increase platform support and expand the product’s capabilities into the area of virtual storage. Read the rest of this entry »

I just had the opportunity to chat with Joseph Cohen, CTO, and Autumn Radtke, Director of Business Development, of Aqua Connect about the company’s product, Aqua Connect Terminal Server. At this point, this product is the only access virtualization product for Apple’s Mac OS X of which I’m aware. (I know. Now that I’ve written that, many more in this market segment will call, send Emails or appear at my door).

As Apple’s Mac OS is increasingly seen in organization’s datacenters, allowing people to access applications hosted in this environment to be accessed remotely while still offering the “user experience” that Mac users expect will become increasingly important as well.

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Many suppliers of virtualization technology tell IT executives that all of their problems can be solved through the use of their technology. What they don’t often say is what they really mean is that everything will go well if the organization does the following things:

• Virtualizes everything using that supplier’s virtualization technology,
• Manages it with that supplier’s management tools,
• And doesn’t have needs for features or functions that the supplier’s products currently don’t support.

Nearly all organizations deploying virtualization are working with hybrid environments. What does it really mean to have a virtualized environment. Read the rest of this entry »

I just read something published by my friends at Virtual Iron. Their new CEO, Ed Walsh, formally of EMC, presented at the Storage Decisions Conference in San Francisco. It struck me as quite insightful. Read the rest of this entry »

Here are some thoughts from a conversation I had with the good folks at Datasynapse a while ago. I came across my notes and thought that it might be interesting reading.

It has become clear that most organizations simply have no time for application failure. Their IT infrastructure simply must be up and available when it is needed. Datasynapse would assert that application virtualization can address this issue while keeping hardware, software and staff-related costs in line. I think that if the technology is properly utilized, they’re right.

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Marathon Technologies Corporation, a provider of automated, fault tolerant-class availability solutions for virtual and physical environments, just launced everRun CDP. This software extends the capability Marathon’s everRun^TM family of availability software by allowing data stored in remote locations to be protected. Marathon told me that its goal was to dramatically reduce or completely eliminate downtime that can be attributed to system, storage or network connection failures. The product provides added protection from catastrophic failure by capturing and replicating application data across any distance, in real-time. Read the rest of this entry »

After having the opportunity to try out an HTC Advantage (see the post HTC X7501) found a away to acquire one of these interesting devices. In so doing, I retired a long-loved Treo 650. Here are a few quick impressions of living with a device that is a telephone, a camera, an internet tablet, a GPS and a MP3 player all in one. Read the rest of this entry »