TVP Category Archives

Licensing your Private Cloud

Both Microsoft and VMware have revamped their product suites and therefore their licensing once more and how you buy will dictate how you license (as always). It has taken a bit of time for all the information to percolate through to each corporate site and all the issues to be addressed. As we did before, let us look at licensing. We will look at first the old model of Hyper-V vs VMware vSphere vs Citrix Xen vs RedHat KVM. Then in a follow-on article we will look at the new cloud suite models.

Does the Cloud Need a New Programming Language?

The question of whether there is a specific cloud programming language has emerged in our internal discussions at TVP. We’ve noticed a tendency amongst “born in the cloud” companies like Cloud Physics to follow the example of Twitter and develop server-side components in the Scala programming language. Scala runs on the JVM and is supported by a significant number of PaaS, including CloudFoundry. Does this mean that enterprises moving to PaaS should now be coding in Scala?

News: Stratus Technologies Acquires Marathon Technologies

Stratus Technologies, one of the leaders in hardware fault tolerant platforms, has acquired its main competitor, Marathon Technologies in a move that consolidates the best of hardware and software fault tolerant computing systems into a single entity. Stratus’s claim to fame came from its hardware fault tolerant servers that were built in pairs, with duplicate hardware, to ensure that no single component failure will cause any system downtown. Stratus built very solid and reliable systems but on its own proprietary hardware and this acquisition now expands Stratus’s ability to provide software fault tolerance to any industry-standard physical or virtual server. This opens opportunities for new customers no matter what physical hardware the customers uses and prefers.

Oracle and VMware Update Desktop Virtualization Platforms

Oracle and VMware have both been busy with their respective desktop-focused type II hypervisors, with each vendor releasing updates in the last month. Focus on Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8 and Windows server 2012 is inevitable, but that aside both vendors continue to drive their respective products in clearly defined directions with no real regard for competition. Oracle’s updates to VirtualBox have added significantly to its appeal, but leave it trailing behind VMware Workstation in both its finish and feature count. While VMware has done much to optimize Workstation to work with the forthcoming Windows 8, many of the other updates that VMware has released could be thought of as gilding the lily, offering features such as Thumbnail Actions that allow virtual machine power state to be controlled from the taskbar.