Storage Hypervisors: Worth the Hype

Just what are storage hypervisors? There are several companies that claim to have storage hypervisors. Wikipedia states that a hypervisor is “conceptually one level higher than a supervisory program”. We also know that from our normal use of hypervisors that they manage the underlying resources that a guest uses. Do these definitions work for a storage hypervisor?

Defense in Depth: Know Your Attack Surfaces

The 6/28 Virtualization Security Podcast we spoke about attacks, defense in depth, and compliance with Davi Ottenhiemer and Matt Wallace. Davi and Matt just published a book on how to defend your virtual environment against attack. Unlike other books, this approaches the problem from the point of view of well know attacks. It even gives examples of some of the more interesting attacks against any of the virtual environments, not just VMware vSphere. The discussion eventually found its way to even newer attacks and their impact on the environment.

Defense in Depth: Storage Security in a Hybrid Cloud

Storage Security is not only about Encryption, which is just one aspect of Storage Security requirements for the virtual and cloud environments. It is also about increasing defense in depth and knowledge of what is touching your storage environment. As well as providing security around those touch points and to a great extent auditing and protecting the data residing within the storage devices regardless of where the devices live: within the virtual environment or within a cloud.

News: Windows 2012 Licensing – Mircrosoft learns from VMware's mistakes?

Perhaps with the release of 2012, Microsoft have a rare moment of being a vendor that made a change to product licensing without upsetting someone. There are now only four Windows 2012 Licensing versions, and licensing is processor and client access license based. Sometimes, it doesn’t have to be hard.

Citrix Delivers Multi-tenant VDI Service

Sridhar Mullapudi, Director of Product Management at Citrix Systems, took to the Citrix Blog last Friday to announced Server VDI is here! Deliver Multi-tenant Cloud hosted VDI desktops from the Cloud giving every appearance of being particularly pleased with himself. As well he might.

VMware Sponsors the Open Networking Research Center

In my humble opinion, 2011 was the year for storage inside the virtualization space with a lot of new storage related technologies presented at VMworld 2011. There were different technologies ranging from Tier 1 SSD storage in a box that can plug right into VMware vSphere as its own datastore, to all the software storage venders that are now virtualizing their Storage Processers. Yes, for me, 2011 was the year for storage in virtualization.