Acquisitions by VMware and RSA Changing the Landscape

There were two announcements over the last few days that struck me as quite important to the virtualization community. While some may question this statement, the long reaching effects of these purchases will impact virtualization and cloud computing in not so distant future. In fact, these purchases could add a whole new layer to vSphere as we know it today. Which for VMware is a good thing. They need to continue to innovate to stay ahead of the pack. The purchases I talk about are:
VMware purchasing/taking over control of EMC Mozy
RSA purchasing NetWitness

VMware View Client and Citirix Receiver for iPad – truly free of charge?

VMware View users along with Citirix XenDesktop and Quest vWorkspace have an iPad client for their respective solutions. Personal device use may seem appealing in reducing the demands on IT support – but to fully comply with the license agreements can incur additional license charges, and those charges are difficult to manage. Despite the advertising blurb attached to the free clients, the headaches for finance and IT are not over yet.

ITaaS: Managing Software Costs within Hybrid Clouds

Managing licensing and utilization costs is a mess today in the physical world. Introducing elastic scaling of workloads into a hybrid private/public cloud introduces new uncertainties and new software licensing metering and compliance issues. This is particularly true in the case of enterprise applications which are licensed by the enterprise from the software vendor and then deployed on an as needed basis on Iaas or PaaS clouds.

Microsoft’s new Client Access License snubs desktop virtualization

A change to the Microsoft Client Access License (CAL) bundle is a rare event – the last time it happened was about 10 years ago; so any change to the CAL bundle has to be seen as a significant indicator of Microsoft’s core values. Or so you would think. Assuming that is right, last week’s announcement at the Microsoft Management Summit of changes to the Core and Enterprise CAL bundles need careful analysis. Changes to the CAL are a strategic driver towards new product adoption and represents a clear indication of Microsoft’s long-term goals and aspirations. With that in mind we can infer from this latest change how Microsoft views desktop virtualization.

Multiple Hybrid Clouds Kludged Together? — Cloud Architecture

With the diversity of cloud’s available today, data being sent from one to another could appear to be a hodge-podge of security. As one colleague put it recently when I asked what he was expecting to maintain integrity of data in motion between clouds:
“… what kind of kludge can things end up being when you have multiple connections to multiple hybrid clouds all doing different things” — Steve Beaver
So how does data transfer between the clouds? Is it a kludge? or can it be done using a uniform security policy, procedures, and protocols while maintaining Integrity and Confidentiality and auditability?