VMworld 2013: ViewSonic’s Android Based Thin Client, a Hidden Treasure

Amongst all the major infrastructure and cloud announcements at VMworld this year, I was looking for some interesting technology that would stand out from a EUC perspective. Released back in May, the ViewSonic SD-A225 and SD-A245 (22 and 24 inch respectively) smart display devices peaked my interest.

Rethinking Thin Clients from a Security Perspective

The recent events surrounding the treacherous activities of Edward Snowden should make most of us think long and hard about the measures we are taking to secure our corporate data. Are we giving our administrators too much access? Do we fail to audit and report on how the data is being accessed and used? Is our data just too mobile? Unfortunately the answer to all three of these is yes.

Can Microsoft succeed as a DaaS provider with Mohoro?

The recent rumors of Microsoft working on a hosted virtual desktop (DaaS) solution to add to their cloud services offering may actually end up being one of the most viable options for organizations who already rely heavily on Microsoft infrastructure to run their business. Having all of your core services being delivered from a single location and provider could ease the operational concerns of some who find running a hybrid of on-premise and hosted solutions still requiring the same amount of operational support.

OpenStack and the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC)

The future of OpenStack looks bright, and with the all the software-defined data center (SDDC) features contained in the recent release of “Grizzly” they are now ready to compete toe-to-toe with heavyweights like VMware, Nutanix, Dell, and HP. Whether they can start unseating VMware products in the enterprise remains to be seen, though. Despite the immediate SDDC advantage of OpenStack, companies and technologies like that of Nicira and Virsto, both acquired by VMware, are not to be ignored.

SDDC and the Ever Expanding Control Plane

The software defined data center has the potential to expand the control plane well outside of anyone’s control by the simple fact that we do not yet have a unified control mechanism for disparate hardware (networking, storage, and compute), for disparate hypervisors (vSphere, KVM, Xen, Hyper-V), new types of hypervisors (storage and networking), and new ideas at managing SDDC at scale.