Year: 2012

IBM’s big data platform, based on open source project Apache Hadoop, moves towards commercial distributions choosing to support Cloudera, as Oracle did in January for its Big Data Appliance.

The announcement comes with the acquisition of Vivismo, a private held company based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that provides a federated discovery and navigation software able to expand big data analysis to traditional legacy applications and their data repositories.

Cloudera is one of the primary and first commercial distributions of Hadoop but there are others available from Hortonworks, MapR, and EMC Greenplum. The fact that Cloudera got the nod from two industry giants is noteworthy given the number of choices out there and may in fact make Cloudera first among equals in the commercial Hadoop field.

Writes Barbara Darrow in her article on Gigaom.

On April 25 Citrix announced its financial results for first quarter of fiscal 2012, ended March 31, 2012.

The company announced $589M in total revenue, with $243M in cash flow, up 53% year-on-year.

Compared to Q1 2011 both new license sales and license updates & maintenance (an unified classification that combines Technical Services and License Updates, previously presented as separated voices) increased 19%.

Professional services grew 33% and online SaaS revenue increased 21%.

Read more

Last week Unidesk has released version 1.6 of its layering solution.

Unidesk solution transparently segments a VDI gold master into multiple, isolated containers that administrators can use to deploy applications, patches, drivers, etc., preserving, for any update, the customizations made by individual users.

The new features introduced in this release:

Integrated Citrix XenDesktop Support

Read more

During Microsoft Management Summit 2012 Veeam announced the Veeam Management Pack (MP) 10-Pack, a free monitoring solution that allows VMware environments monitoring through System Center 2012 Operations Manager console.

For new MP costumers that use System Center 2012 or plan to implement it soon, Veeam offers a free perpetual 10-socket license that comes with a full year of maintenance and support.

This solution meets the growing need for companies to manage heterogeneous virtual data centers using a single console, as Hotlink does with SuperVISOR and vCenter, and suggests that Veeam is ready to bet on the idea that Hyper-V will continue to gain market share in the future.

We also suggest to read this in-depth article by David Marshall.

Yesterday VMware announced the acquisition of Cetas, a Californian startup focused on Big Data technologies.

Cetas offers an analytics platform, called Instant Intelligence, that works atop Apache Hadoop and is driven by “elastic” Data Classification and Machine learning algorithms with a strong orientation for Online/consumer business context and uses cases.

Cetas’s solution is designed to run on virtual resources and is offered with a cloud deployment as an alternative to on-premise implementation.

The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed but this last move, that follows the acquisitions of GemStone, WaveMaker, Socialcast and SlideRocket, fits in the global VMware’s strategy which has a renewed focus on applications and end users.

Yesterday Iain Mulholland, Director of VMware Security Response Center, posted a VMware Security Note on Power of Partnership and VMware Security & Compliance official blogs.

Mulholland announced the public posting, on April 23, of a single file, containing VMware ESX source code and commentary from the period between 2003 and 2004.

The company has not officially reported which products could be compromised from this code leak or who might be the origin of the publication.

Due to ESX complexity what is clear is that the level of risk is directly related to what kind of information are contained in the published code.

If the code leaked was more service console level, versus the hypervisor or virtual machine manager (VMM) level code, then this is probably no big deal. However, if the code contains some of the more proprietary stuff, then it is a potential security risk — as well as a competitive risk if someone like Oracle, Red Hat, or Microsoft can capitalize on it.

Said Chris Ward, vice president of consulting and Integration at Greenpages, as crn.com reports.

Read more

Coinciding with the release of Windows Server “8” Beta, Microsoft Remote Desktop Services documentation team has written a set of Test Lab Guides intended for the evaluation and deployment of Remote Desktop Services provided by the new Windows platform.

Following you can find direct links to resources:

Read more

On April 17 Virsto Software has announced that is shipping Virsto 2.5 for Windows Server Hyper-V.

With this release Hyper-V gains a 100% software storage abstraction layer with advanced storage capabilities becoming a storage hypervisor.

What Virsto has set as its goal is to improving storage utilization and performance providing VM storage self-provisioning, automated storage space reclamation and “high-performance” thin provisioning.

In the press release Virsto Software claims a potential 90% increase in existing physical storage utilization and up to a 99% acceleration in virtual machine provisioning and management saving up to 70% in storage costs.

Read more

This month Microsoft introduced a couple of add-ons to Windows Software Assurance.

The most notable is the introduction of a new Windows license called Companion Device License (CDL) for Windows 8, this license works alongside Software Assurance to support Bring Your Own PC scenarios.

What is perplexing is the fact that this type of license covers all the personal (non-licensed) devices that an employee could bring to work with the purpose of access to a Windows desktop that the company has fully licensed.

• Companion Device License: For customers who want to provide full flexibility for how employees access their corporate desktop across devices, we are introducing a new Companion Device License for Windows SA customers. For users of Windows Software Assurance licensed PCs this optional add-on will provide rights to access a corporate desktop either through VDI or Windows To Go on up to four personally owned devices.

Read more

Yesterday Solarwinds announced the release of a new version of its IT Management Software, Solarwinds Virtualization Manager.

Inherited from the acquisition of Hyper9 this product has been developed and now introduce, in this release, Hyper-V support allowing the management of heterogeneous virtual data center from a single console.

Virtualization Manager offers integrated VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V capacity planning, performance monitoring, VM sprawl control, configuration management and chargeback automation and integrates with SolarWinds Storage Manager for a deeper analysis of the storages.

Read more