vSphere Upgrade Saga: vCenter 5.5

It has been a while since I added to my vSphere Upgrade Saga, but everything has been running smoothly. Now it is time to upgrade to vSphere 5.5, not because I have to, but because something within SSO broke, and the fix is to use SSO for vCenter 5.5. This leads me to upgrade to …

Cloud Foundry: Life Is Too Short

Pivotal’s public cloud version of Cloud Foundry really struggles with the loose integration of third-party services. To appeal to ISVs and others with real-world complexity in their applications, Pivotal needs to identify a coherent product and concentrate on delivering something that works. I tried assiduously to use it and ultimately failed. In case you think …

Network Virtualization: Not Just for the Service Provider

Many network virtualization products appear to be aimed at the top 10,000 customers worldwide, accounting for their price as well as their published product direction. While this is a limited and myopic view, many claim it is for the best, their reason being that network virtualization is only really needed by the very large networks. The more I think about this approach, the more I believe it is incorrect. Let us be frank here. Most networking today, within many different organizational sizes, is a hodgepodge of technologies designed to solve the same problem(s) over and over: how to get data quickly from point A to point B with minimum disruption to service.

News: HyTrust Acquires HighCloud Security

We have written before about HyTrust and its growing ecosystem of partners, but now HyTrust has acquired HighCloud Security, a provider of encryption and key management for the virtual and IaaS environments. HyTrust provides control and visibility into actions by virtualization administrators within a VMware vSphere or vCloud environment. With the acquisition of HighCloud Security, HyTrust now adds data privacy to its suite of tools. Initially, HighCloud Security’s encryption and key management will be separate products, but there are many ways in which the technologies can be combined. The purchase changes HyTrust’s unique stance in the industry.