To recap the story so far, I’m prototyping an application and deploying it to various PAAS environments. I am not getting any special help from any of the vendors in this exercise – you can think of me as a “secret shopper” for PaaS, although I don’t hide my identity. I am approaching each platform on its own merits, and in these posts I am recounting and contrasting my experiences and reaching some general conclusions about the PaaS market.
TVP Strategy Archives
Collaborations abound at VMworld 2011
If there was one thing I saw and heard about at VMworld, was the number of third party collaborations that were taking place. While not explicitly stated by VMware at VMworld, the show floor had many different collaborations that were taking place. This level of collaboration shows a level of maturity within the virtualization and cloud vendor ecosystems. A maturity, that shows that the vendors understand the benefits of leveraging other companies to lower their overall costs while producing better and more attractive products. Some of the collaborations I saw where purely the resale of products, while others were integrations between products.
Quick Recap of VMworld 2011
My pilgrimage from VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas has come to an end. In my humble opinion, this has been the week for the storage side of things with some amazing and interesting new stuff that has been released or is about to be released. There has been some really cool stuff that is working with SSD and storage.
News: vCloud Around the World: VMware Global Cloud
VMware announced a loosely coupled group of vCloud providers that will use vCloud Connector to loosely couple their clouds, so that VMs can move from vCloud to vCloud without requiring you to renegotiate pricing, capability, and functionality with multiple cloud vendors, just your local one. This announcement is intriguing in that it is a move to push the cloud into the global space, but also fraught with peril if not done correctly.
Citrix VDI-in-a-Box vs XenDesktop – does size matter?
The challenge for Citrix is to position their VDI portfolio effectively. At the very least there should be a standardised license plan and migration path from (or to) the grid and non-grid solutions. There is potential to remove the reduced functionality versions of XenDesktop. Most importantly – to have a license model that allows organisations to make a choice of technology that fits their need, not their size. Can Citrix FlexCast be truly flexible if it ignores the value that having a grid technology can bring not only to the SMB market – but to any sized enterprise?
The Start of VMworld 2011
VMworld 2011 has finally arrived as the expected crowd of about 20,000 arrived in Las Vegas for the event. The temperature is a broiling 110* and sunny. Today is Monday August 29, and the official start of the conference, but the vExperts had the opportunity to attend a special briefing, before the show, that focused on VMware’s vision for the future. Following the briefing, there was a couple of options for the evening from the vDodgeball game to the warm-up party. I attended the vmunderground warm-up party as a service (WuPaaS.Next) at the Nine Fine Irishmen Pub. These guys have been throwing the pre-party for the last few VMworlds and what started as a tweet-up as turned into a major event in itself. So popular, in fact, that all the tickets were gone in seconds. Big thanks to Theron Conrey, Sean Clark, Rich Brambley and Brain Knudtson for making this happen. The turkey legs they served were fabulous.