CumuLogic Provides Database as a Service for On-Premises Cloud Foundry

Last week, CumuLogic launched a preview edition of its Database Service Broker for Cloud Foundry, a self-service managed SQL and NoSQL database service platform. Database Service Broker provides functionality equivalent to public Database as a Service (DBaaS) platforms such as Amazon Relational Database Service (for SQL) and Amazon DynamoDB (NoSQL), but with the database hosted …

Citrix Workspace Services Promises Next Step Toward Virtual Workspace

At its annual Synergy Conference in LA’s Anaheim Convention Center on Tuesday, Citrix announced Citrix Workspace Services (CWS), its new flagship product. CWS is a management platform for controlling the creation, management, and delivery of distributed virtual workspace services across multiple public and private clouds. According to Citrix’s marketing message, CWS will design, build, and deliver amazing …

Death to Active Directory? Is the Windows Domain Still Relevant in the Modern IT World?

In a meeting recently, I was quite taken aback to hear a reason given for not moving to 2012 R2 forest functional level—a reason to which I hadn’t previously been privy. The stated reason was, “in a few years, the Windows domain won’t be relevant anymore.” As someone who cut his IT teeth on Windows …

Is SDDC a Product or a Mindset?

My response to Stephen Foskett’s tweet of a post about the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) Symposium led to an interesting conversation about the nature of the SDDC—what it is, what it is not, and why we should care. The software-defined data center is considered by some to be an instrument of vendor lock-in, vaporware, or …

The SolidFire Storage System: Reducing Complexity at Scale

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to get to know SolidFire and its Storage System product, an all-flash array designed for on-premises use but with some attractive cloud functionality. At first glance, the array looks like many of those in the all-flash space. It’s built out of discrete nodes; uses 10 Gbps networking …

Happy Birthday, Citrix — Now, Get Back to Work

Citrix is twenty-five this year. It’s done pretty well; not everyone can say that they created a market-defining end user computing platform that is used by every major organization in the world—and a few other places as well. So Happy Birthday, guys, and please take the rest of the day off. Just make sure you’re …