OpenShift — Pricing and Comparison to AWS

On June 26th,Red Hat announced a new version of OpenShift, and pricing for a future production offering (some time this year). You still can’t buy it but if you were able to buy it you’d know exactly how much it could cost – at least if you could work out what a “gear” is. Pricing allows us to start to compare it more meaningfully with other offerings. However rather than comparing with another PaaS offering, we think most people will be actually considering IaaS as an alternative, so we are going to do that comparison instead.

Citrix Acquires Podio – Forget Desktops, Users – Build Your Own Apps

Citrix acquire Podio – Podio’s focus is to provide a platform for small/medium sized organisations to get up and running with standard business function applications offered from Podio’s own App Store. Does this mark the a Citrix foray to better accomodate mobility and consumerisation while stepping outside the microsoft windows desktop delivery environment.

RSA Conference Recap and Bitdefender SVE

The 3/8 Virtualization Security Podcast held a discussion on the happenings as the 2012 RSA Conference in San Francisco as well as a discussion of the features of Bitdefender’s entry into the virtualization and cloud space with their SVE product. RSA Conference high lights not just those security tools for the virtualization and cloud spaces but the entire industry and each year there is always a common theme. Was there one this year? Was there any surprises at the conference?

2012 Data Protection Concerns

Data Protection is still an issue with many small businesses and smaller enterprises who virtualize; Specifically around the Data Protection Process and eventually where to store the data. When I speak to people they are struggling with whether or not to place the data on tape, blu-ray, into the cloud, or other disks. Medium and Large Enterprises already have such policies in place, but like everything else, when they virtualized the policies may have fallen by the road side and now need to be recovered, dusted off, and put into practice. The choice of where the data will ultimately reside when disaster strikes is an ongoing discussion in the virtualization community. Ultimately, Data Protection is just that, protecting the data from loss, destruction, and allowing for quick recovery.

Why would a Developer choose VMware?

It is interesting to see Edward’s comment that according to EMC/VMware, widespread production deployment of Cloud Apps is 3-5 years off. If that is the case the VMware CloudFoundry initiative should be focused on cutting-edge development rather than porting existing apps, and in much the same way that Microsoft has always courted developers, CloudFoundry should be the latest cool thing for developer productivity. It’s interesting to talk about this stuff in the abstract, and at the strategic level, but sometimes it’s worth understanding what happens when you need to make the decisions for yourself.