Industry News

Have you reached the saturation point yet on the cloud? The endless cacophony of cloud messages seems to have transformed into white noise, where trying to distinguish and differentiate among competitive cloud offerings can leave one in either a state of decision-making paralysis or trusting that familiar vendors know what they're talking about without, perhaps, the full measure of due diligence that is appropriate. Enter dinCloud, which plans to break through the droning blather and show how its approach to cloud is different.

While I was visiting Juniper in early December, I got a chance to sit down with the QFabric folks to discuss some of issues with QFabric and what I saw as a proprietary—with all the badness that word implies—product set in search of a reason. While QFabric is proprietary because of how the components are interconnected, I came away with the impression that the overall design and capacity looks extremely powerful. I think the upsides of the QFabric product set far outweigh the downsides. Give a month's time between visiting Juniper and now, I'd say that all my ballyhoo about being proprietary was a non-issue. My bad.

Last week I joined a dozen or so fellow bloggers and storage industry gadflies for a storage field day at HP's Fort Collins, Colo., facility. Much like the more ecumenical Gestalt IT Tech Field Days run by our own Stephen Foskett, HP Tech Days let vendors show off their shiny new products while the street-wise delegates asked tough questions and took no marketing speak for an answer.

While virtualization and cloud computing pretty much dominate the IT world, security and compliance with IT standards are neither trivial concerns, nor going away anytime soon. But in some ways, security is easier to accomplish in virtual systems than in physical

Originally unveiled last May and scheduled to ship in 2011, EMC's PCIe/flash-based server cache technology, code-named Project Lightning, is now available under the name of VFCache. The enterprise storage giant has been the leader in enterprise flash drive capacity since entering this market in 2008, shipping more than 24 petabytes in 2011, an eight times increase in customer shipments since 2009, says Mark Sorenson, senior VP and general manager of EMC's Flash Business Unit.

HP has enhanced its Discovery and Dependency Mapping Advanced (DDMA) product with Content Pack 10, which gives the software the ability to discover more public and private cloud service providers. In particular, this version adds support for Amazon Web Services (AWS), such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service, and Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) Volumes and Snapshots, as well as private cloud services using vCloud. In addition, the company also improved mainframe discovery by including iSeries discovery by Eview, along with enhancements to the Eview/390z Mainframe discovery Package. Finally the company has added additional functionality as well as integration with other infrastructure applications.

Thinking back on the 1987 movie "Spaceballs," I picture a comical Dark Helmet standing on the bridge of his ship. In my mind, he holds a smartphone and contemplates the latest buzz on mobile network speeds, fresh from the International Telecommunications Union. As he ponders the 100-Mbps data speeds soon to be delivered by his preferred carrier, he utters the order, "Prepare for ludicrous speed," and the ship IMT-Advanced warps off to hyperspace at an impossibly crazy velocity. Speeds in the mobile data world are about to get quite exciting.

News that Cisco Systems may release proprietary networking products implementing software-defined networking (SDN) technology, but not necessarily based on the emerging OpenFlow protocol, has executives at rival HP complaining about another Cisco vendor lock-in play. During a news event at HP Thursday, at which the company announced OpenFlow capability available for 16 HP networking product lines, executives were asked to comment on a news report from the Cisco Live event going on this week in London.

As big data stores continue to grow and require additional management, enterprises are faced with the task of managing their explosive data growth while also trying to find the best way to analyze that data. According to the recent InformationWeek "Database Discontent" report, a top item on IT departments' 2012 to-do list is handling big data in a way that allows for change over time.

Startup Scale Computing delivers scale-out, unified storage for the mid-market, meaning users can access SAN/NAS resources from the same, scalable pool of disk storage. Scale Computing is by no means alone in doing this, but the company goes beyond just delivering storage in a box to delivering a data center in a storage box. And that is very interesting.

The Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) Technical Committee recently formed by OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), the not-for-profit open standards consortium, along with several IT vendors and consumer groups, will be good for facilitating cloud portability, industry observers say. The goal of TOSCA is to enable deploying cloud applications without vendor lock-in, while maintaining application requirements for security, governance and compliance.

CommVault Systems has enhanced Version 9 of its Simpana data management software, which it first announced in October 2010. Major new features in the software include OnePass, which will back up server data, archive it and report on it simultaneously. The company said the process could take less than half the time of separate processes.

Cisco Systems is introducing new switches with 40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) capabilities, which are the coming new standards for switching speeds on networks. The 40GbE capacity is now available on its Catalyst 6500 switching line for campus networks, while 100GbE is available on the Nexus 7000 line for data center and service provider networks. The company also announced two new fixed-configuration platforms providing high-density 10GbE switching, which is the fastest growing category of switches today.

I must admit I was one of those folks who was intrigued by the idea of I/O virtualization. I led sessions at conferences exploring the various ways one could connect servers and peripherals to each other. The very idea that I could share expensive resources like RAID controllers and network connections from a shared pool seemed like a path to the flexibility I always wanted. Apparently, most of you disagreed, as at least one I/O virtualization pioneer, Virtensys, bit the dust this week.

Oracle plans to integrate RightNow's customer experience software into its existing software portfolio to improve customer satisfaction and to turn consumers into advocates for a company's brand. In an hour-long webcast on Tuesday, Oracle executives explained how RightNow tools used by approximately 2,000 companies on their websites, in contact centers and through social media will supplement existing Oracle platforms for marketing, e-commerce, business intelligence, supply chain

Government agencies need to overcome funding uncertainties and other major barriers in order to realize savings from virtualizing their servers and desktops, according to a new study by MeriTalk. The report, "Virtualization Vacuum: The 2012 Government Virtualization Study," surveyed government IT decision makers. One of the key findings is that 82% of federal and 77% of state and local IT professionals say their agencies have already implemented some server virtualization at an estimated savings of 19% of their IT budgets, which translates to $15 billion across government.

Brocade introduced a new application delivery controller that enables service providers to manage application delivery in a way that servers or endpoint devices no longer can. A key feature of the Brocade ADX 12.4 is what the company calls an OpenScript Engine, which enables enterprise service providers to build customized versions of network applications using the open-source Perl programming language to deliver networking capabilities unique to their needs.

IBM and NEC are collaborating on high-performance OpenFlow deployments. OpenFlow, developed at Stanford University, has enjoyed acceptance in university networks because an OpenFlow network can run alongside the campus production network without impacting it. In 2011, OpenFlow broke out of its education niche into the mainstream with announcements from Big Switch, Fulcrum and NEC. IBM's and NEC's announcement is a proof point that OpenFlow has a role in enterprise IT and can be used in high-performance applications.

BMC Software, a developer of business service management (BSM) software with more than 15,000 customers, has acquired Numara Software, a provider of integrated IT management solutions for the midmarket, with over 13,000 customers, for an undisclosed sum.

As use of IT grows in enterprises, so, too, do demands on networks to deliver more capacity and speed and to be able to prioritize traffic. Video gets priority over a simple email, but a VoIP call gets priority over video if the video in question is something frivolous on YouTube. The need to manage the growth and increasing complexity of networks is driving demand for network performance management technology that can monitor traffic, identify possible bottlenecks and intervene to clear bottlenecks up.