Citrix and Quest get serious about Application Compatibility

This week we saw the announcement of two very similar acquisitions. Quest Software announced on October 24 that they were acquiring ChangeBASE and on October 26 Citrix Systems announced they were acquiring AppDNA. Both solutions provide application compatibility testing for the Windows platform.

A Look At VMstore from Tintri

One of the biggest things I took away from the VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas was the all advancements within the storage part of virtualization. For me, this was the year for storage. One product that really got my attention was the new NAS appliance, VMstore from Tintri. This 3U appliance, well 5U if you count the UPC, is a single datastore with 8.5TB of usable storage. This appliance was a collaboration of some very smart individuals from different companies like VMware, Datadomain, NetApp and Sun. They put their minds together and built this NFS appliance from the ground up with specially engineered file system to work with virtualization. What makes this VM-aware appliance different from other typical storage designs is VMstore uses VM’s and virtual disks as the abstractions instead of the conventional storage abstractions, volumes, LUN’s and files that we have all been accustomed to. Each I/O request will map directly to a virtual disk all while VMstore monitors, controls the I/O and presents disk performance statistics per VM or per VMDK.

AppSense Targets User Installed Apps

Last week AppSense CTO Harry Labana introduced AppSense Strata a free utility to give users the freedom to install their own applications in a secure sandbox without requiring admin rights. When a user attempts to install an application, Strata can intercept the installation process capturing all changes performed during the application installation and writing them into a separate application configuration database.

Virtualization Security Announcements: Architecture Concerns

There have been a large number of Announcements that have been made for VMworld Copenhagen with respect to virtualization and cloud security. This shows quite an interesting growth in the market, and that even 1 month apart there is still more to be announced within the virtual and cloud security spaces. There are three very interesting announcements that show further integration between vendors.