Entries filed under “Virtualization”

Puppet Labs Announces its Inclusion in VMware’s Cloud Services

By William | Published May 22, 2013

Puppet Labs, a leading provider of IT automation software, has agreed to a strategic partnership with VMware to push the enterprise data center to the cloud seamlessly.

Together with VMware, we’re transforming customers’ IT capabilities and enabling them to get the speed and scale benefits promised by cloud computing,” said Luke Kanies, founder and CEO, Puppet Labs. “When combined with our solutions for on-premise infrastructure and applications, Puppet Labs gives customers the IT automation tools they need to succeed in hybrid cloud environments.”

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Venyu Cloud Suite Garners Top IT Honors

By William | Published May 20, 2013

The Network Products Guide has given Venyu two prizes in the “Hot Companies and Best Product Awards” for its innovative cloud IT services.

We’re committed to providing our customers with the added peace-of-mind that their critical business data is retrievable and available, whenever necessary. Backed by the power of the cloud, our customers continue to drive new levels of efficiency and reliability across their business with Venyu,” said Scott Thompson, chief executive officer at Venyu. “We’re honored to be recognized by our peers and the thought leaders at Network Products Guide for our innovation in SaaS and cloud computing.”

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Big Data Big Boys EMC Positioned for the Future

By William | Published May 19, 2013

Over at The Nation, Nophakhun Limsamarnphun writes that EMC understands the enormity of endless data and what can and will be done with it.

To take advantage of this emerging trend, Joe Tucci, chairman and CEO of EMC whose revenues topped US$21.7 billion last year, told the EMC World 2013 conference in Las Vegas early this month that it’s necessary for EMC to deliver efficiency, control, choice and agility to its customers. The world is entering a new era of so-called third-generation IT platform that can support billions of mobile device users, cloud computers, and social media, according to Tucci.

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The Future of Brick-and-Mortar Retail Lies in Big Data and the Cloud

By William | Published May 11, 2013

Over at Wired, Vish Ganapathy reports that Big-box retailers are using Big Data analytics hosted in clouds to learn more about their customers and to compete with the e-commerce segment.

Cloud computing involves a new way of thinking about data. In a cloud, a single server can host many virtual servers, slashing hardware costs. The virtual servers can scale on demand depending on the need for computer capacity. That’s very useful for retailers, whose businesses are notoriously seasonal. Automatically expanding capacity on Black Friday, for example, can reduce lines at checkout counters and ensure quick service.

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Video: The Sofware-defined Datacenter & RDMA in Virtual Environments

By Rich Brueckner | Published April 30, 2013

In this video from the 2013 Open Fabrics Developer Workshop, VMware’s Josh Simons presents: The Sofware-defined Datacenter.

The software-defined datacenter vision took the industry by storm in 2012. It represents a prescriptive model that brings the benefits of virtualization to the rest of the datacenter. Expect to see the move towards a software-defined datacenter accelerate in 2013. Networking and infrastructure security represent some of the stickiest issues when it comes to the drive to a more agile data center. And because of this strong customer interest in SDDCs, you’ll also see more networking vendors and startups modify their roadmaps to steer towards a software-defined networking strategy.

Read the Full Story or Download the Slides (PDF).

In this follow-up presentation, Bhavesh Davda from VMware gives a talk on RDMA in Virtual Environments.

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Video: The Improvement of the Cloud Computing ERPs

By Rich Brueckner | Published March 25, 2013

In this video, Dr. Zenon Michaelides from the University of Liverpool Management School describes how Cloud Computing enables a paradigm shift in the way we have been interacting with systems. This presentation focuses on achieving visibility in cloud-based enterprise resources planning (ERP) systems. It reviews how cloud-based ERP systems are being widely adopted and extensively used in decision support. Furthermore, we discuss how cloud-based ERP systems enable SMEs to collaborate and be more competitive in the extended enterprise.

Also posted in Cloud, Clouds in Research and Academia, Migrating to the Cloud | Leave a comment

Is VMware Facing the Innovator’s Dillema?

By Rich Brueckner | Published March 1, 2013

Over at the Forrester Blog, James Staten writes that VMware recent attacks on AWS shows that company is facing the Innovator’s Dillema.

This week at the VMware Partner Exchange, CEO Pat Gelsinger and his executive staff decided to demonize Amazon Web Services and their public cloud brethren in a very short sighted defensive move that frankly betrays the fact that they don’t understand the disruption they are facing. Pat, you and your market have the Innovator’s Dilemma and the enemy isn’t public cloud but private clouds.

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How MIT’s StarCluster Powers Virtualization for Cloud HPC

By Rich Brueckner | Published January 30, 2013

Over at Admin HPC, Gavin W. Burris writes that virtualization has become a viable option for researchers with a need for cluster computing power thanks in part to StarCluster, MIT’s open-source toolkit for launching, controlling, and orchestrating clusters of virtual servers within the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. StarCluster provides a number of images pre-rolled and ready to go, as well as a command line tool for wrangling them into functional computing power.

The cloud has become a key resource in the support of HPC. Given the proper use case, cloud offerings are an affordable fit for a variety of different workflows. A key tool in any systems programmer’s arsenal should be the StarCluster toolkit, which provides a powerful interface for harnessing these cloud resources in an effective manner. The toolkit builds from the well-established model of HPC clustering with Linux, providing a clear path to transferring existing skills and code to the cloud.

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Video: Virtualized Infiniband based on SR-IOV – Enabling HPC in the Cloud

By Rich Brueckner | Published January 24, 2013

In this video from the Mellanox booth at SC12, Hoot Thompson from NASA Center for Climate Simulation presents: Virtualized Infiniband based on SR-IOV – Enabling HPC in the Cloud.

So what is SR-IOV? The short answer is that SR-IOV is a specification that allows a PCIe device to appear to be multiple separate physical PCIe devices. The SR-IOV specification was created and is maintained by the PCI SIG, with the idea that a standard specification will help promote interoperability.

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Brendan Gregg on Virtualization Performance: Zones, KVM, Xen

By Rich Brueckner | Published January 13, 2013

Brendan Gregg from Joyent has written an in-depth post on performance characteristics of three virtualization technologies: Zones, Xen, and KVM. According to Gregg, Zones add no overhead, whereas Xen and KVM do, which could limit network throughput to a quarter of what it could be.

By default we encourage customers to deploy on Zones, for reasons of performance, observability, and simplicity (debuggability). This may mean compiling their applications for SmartOS (our illumos-based OS which hosts the Zones) if they aren’t already in the repo. In cases where they absolutely must have Linux or Windows, and the applications can’t run elsewhere, then it’s Hardware Virtualization (KVM).

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