Earlier this week Cisco announced its intention to acquire Whiptail, its 6th acquisition for 2013. The addition to the Unified Computing (UCS) line made sense, as it continues to support their vision to be the infrastructure that clouds run on. To achieve this vision, Cisco will need to make some strategic acquisitions to keep them on track. Even at its current $12 billion evaluation, Citrix would be a great buy. The synergies between the two companies have already been proven with joint development and sales efforts in the field. Let me speculate on what could happen with the products if Cisco picked Citrix up.
TVP Category Archives
News: Cisco Intends to Acquire SSD Pioneer WHIPTAIL
Cisco announced today their intent to acquire Whippany, NJ based WHIPTAIL, a manufacturer of Solid-State Disk (SSD) storage.
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.
How DevOps Can Help Automate the Pain Away
I spent two days at PuppetConf 2013 in San Francisco this week, and the common themes were automate everything, monitor everything, provide feedback early in the process, and focus on culture. All four of those topics aligned with the DevOps movement, with the goal of faster and more reliable deliveries. Companies that can deliver software more frequently with fewer issues have a competitive advantage over those who can’t.
Recap of PuppetConf 2013 in San Francisco
I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to attend PuppetConf 2013. When I walked into the first keynote session, I was shocked by the size of the audience. Over 1300 people were packed into the ballroom. Another 3700 had signed up to watch the event streaming online. Last year there were 800 people at the conference and only 300 the year before. Obviously, both Puppet and DevOps are hot topics these days.
Continuous Operations for Zero Downtime Deployments
The old way of delivering software was to bundle up the software and ship it, sell the software off the shelf, or allow customers to download and install it. In the “shipping model”, it was the buyer’s responsibility to install the software, manage the uptime, patch, monitor, and manage capacity. Sometimes the buyer would perform all of those tasks themselves, or sometimes they would hire a third party to handle it for them. In either case, the buyer of the software had total control over if and when the software was updated and at what time a planned outage would occur in order to perform the patches or upgrades.