Over the past few months I’ve seen many stories that some virtualization software startups have been getting funding from some fairly prestigious venture firms. While I’m not sure that this is really news that would be of value to an IT decision-maker, the story behind these announcements is interesting. If I review the results of Kusnetzky Group research into the size and growth of each of the virtualization technology segments, the reason for this activity becomes clear.

The revenues in each of the virtualization software segments grew over 100% between 2006 and 2007. This research, by the way, included the revenues of nearly 100 suppliers of virtualization software technology. If one looks a little bit deeper, the most growth appears to be in the areas of network virtualization, security for virtualized environments and the storage virtualization not processing virtualization as one might expect based upon all of the coverage of VMware, Citrix XenSource or Virtual Iron. Read the rest of this entry »

I had the misfortune to get involved with a sales person yesterday while trying valiantly to complete a project before the deadline. I wasn’t able to convince him that I was busy and I didn’t want to speak with him at the moment. He just kept going.

He wanted me to purchase some form of chotski, that is a small gift used for promotion or marketing of a company or its products. I was amazed at the collection of pens, pencils, coffee mugs, folios, calendars, shirts, jackets, stuffed animal toys and USB thumb drives imprinted with a company logo. Do any of these things really influence your organization’s purchasing decisions? I have strong doubts. Do people really purchase a multi-million dollar system based upon the coffee mugs various vendors have supplied? Read the rest of this entry »

Now that Citrix has completed its acquistion of XenSource, one would expect an announcement in which the company tried to put all the pieces together into an integrated story. Can you guess what the company just did? Right, presented an integrated story. Since the two companies worked together in the past and both of them had strong relationships with mutual partners, the integrated story line is better than one would think.

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Processing virtualization, in the Kusnetzky Group model of virtualization technology, is technology that operates at or below the operating system level that creates a logical or virtual environment that differs from the actual physical environment in some way.

There are a number of benefits to working in a logical or virtual environment - if the proper selection of technology is made. As with other areas of technology, if the wrong technology is selected, the results are very likely to be less than expected or desired.

This happens often enough that an IT “technical term” has emerged to describe the results of this type of decision. Read the rest of this entry »

A short while ago, I had the opportunity to speak with the good folks of Hyperic once again. The conversation originally centered on the topic of their new release, Hyperic HQ 3.2, but then went off on a very important tangent, managing resource by exception. Let’s start with a quick description of the new software release. Read the rest of this entry »

We visited Sarasota’s Big Cat Sanctuary on Saturday and could recommend it to those interested in preserving wild life. We had a chance to see a demonstration showing trained bears (brown and grizzly) and tigers (even a rare white tiger) that is presented in order to raise funds for taking care of all of the exotic animals the Sanctuary has rescued from small circuses, “have your photo taken with a …” and from private owners who purchased a bear cub or tiger kitten when it was small and then wanted to destroy the animal when it got to large for them to handle. After all, who is prepared to share a bed with a 700 lb tiger?

If you are in the area, I would most certainly recommend a visit (and a donation) to support the Rosaire’s in their mission to rescue and then provide care for large, exotic animals. I learned, for example, that they need to purchase 5,000 lbs of beef each week just to feed the tigers that are in their care. That’s certainly beyond my modest budget. 

I had a chance to speak with Stephen Pollack, Founder, CEO of PlateSpin, the other day. Since it has been a while since we had a chance to chat, I looked forward to his refreshing, rather pragmatic, approach to virtualization technology. For those of you keeping score, PlateSpin - An Interesting Spin on Workload Management chronicled our last conversation. This time the topic was Platespin Forge, a new virtualization appliance recently announced by PlateSpin. Read the rest of this entry »

Rackspace announced that the company was going to add hosting virtual servers to its list of services for those needing access to a physical server without having to acquire the server, necessary software and hire an IT administrative staff. It will be interesting to learn how successful this offering is.

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I recently spoke with Stacksafe’s Andrew Gross, Ph.D., Chief Scientist and Architect, and Jonah Paransky, Vice President of Marketing, about their product, Stacksafe™ Test Center. Here’s a summary of how the company describes its product: Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been meaning to post something about my conversation with Sun’s Steve Wilson about xVM  for a while but, other things kept getting in the way. Steve and I have spoken often in the past and I’ve always enjoyed his insight into virtualization technology as a whole, how organizations could make best use of that technology and how he can take part in a technical discussion that leaps off into humor and bad puns on a regular basis. Read the rest of this entry »