VMware has acquired one more company: Shavlik. This acquisition did not come as much of a surprise to me but is an interesting purchase for VMware. There are quite a few Security as a Service vendors that would make sense for VMware to purchase and Shavlik is one of them. The difference between the other vendors and Shavlik is that VMware has a existing track record with Shavlik as Shavlik is integral in two of VMware’s existing products: VMware Go and VMware Update Manager. Shavlik provides a very important patch management system for these existing products and is one line of defense in the security space. Are there other plans for Shavlik? Or this is a way to lock in one set of tools?
TVP Category Archives
Is Gluster the answer to Scalable Cloud Storage and the Amazon Outage?
Amazon failed because of simultaneous failure of its EBS in two Availability zones. If you were dependent on one of these (or mirrored across the two) you lost access to the filesystem from your Instances. It may be sensible to move to the use of the S3 mechanism (or some portable abstraction over it) for new applications, but if you have an existing application that expects to see a filesystem in the traditional way, Gluster can provide a distributed cloud-agnostic shared filesystem with multi-way replication (including asynchronous replication).
Cloud Applications are 3-5 years Out: Underlying Layers are Evolving
These announcements and ideas paint a better direction for cloud development and creation than there existed even one week ago. These announcements also concentrate on the data, not the computer engine(s) within the cloud. It has alwys been about the data.
VMware’s CloudFoundry and Red Hat’s OpenShift – Compare and Contrast
Over the last few weeks, VMware (as we indicated in an earlier post) and Red Hat have initiated two very similar initiatives known respectively as CloudFoundry and OpenShift. These are Platform as a Service (PaaS) plays, being developed for the longer term, primarily looking to encourage the development of (and thereafter to provide infrastructure for) applications specificallysuited to the the cloud. In this article we compare and contrast the two offerings and discuss their significance for the PaaS market as a whole.
Federated Clouds? Possible?
Mike DiPetrillo’s post entitled VMware is Building Clouds sparked some interesting thoughts and discussion about what it means to have federated clouds and how do you define such federation? Is federated required to make ‘cloud’ ubiquitous or are we already there? But is the discussion really about federated clouds or simplistic data object movement between the VMs or about cloud management?
Cloud SLAs Are Worthless But Does this Matter?
A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is an excellent expectations-managing mechanism, but it’s important to manage your own expectations of what an SLA can realistically accomplish. Just those three words “Service” “Level” and “Agreement” is often an attention turn-off I know: SLAs are to infrastructure bods what documentation is to developers. Yet, when considering taking up cloud and utility services many consider that the SLAs offered aren’t reliable, if they exist at all. So the SLA becomes the blocker – ‘If I move services out of my data centre, how will I guarantee availability and performance’.