VMworld 2013: ViewSonic’s Android Based Thin Client, a Hidden Treasure

Amongst all the major infrastructure and cloud announcements at VMworld this year, I was looking for some interesting technology that would stand out from a EUC perspective. Released back in May, the ViewSonic SD-A225 and SD-A245 (22 and 24 inch respectively) smart display devices peaked my interest.

The Software Defined Data Center

The Software Defined Data Center: That was pretty much the biggest takeaway from this year’s VMworld in San Francisco. VMware made announcements about the new vSan that will be coming out soon and will enhance the software defined storage aspect and also the announcement about the NSX platform that addresses one of the final hurdles, network virtualization, to pave the path to finally have a completely software defined datacenter.

Nutanix OS 3.5: Deduplication, New GUI, SRM, Hyper-V Support

Nutanix, one of the fastest growing IT infrastructure startups around, shows no signs of slowing down with their release of Nutanix OS 3.5. For those not familiar with Nutanix, they offer a truly converged virtualized infrastructure. This generally consists of four nodes in two rack units of space, where each node has CPU, RAM, traditional fixed disk, SSD, and Fusion-IO flash built in. Their secret sauce is really NDFS, the Nutanix Distributed File System, built by the same folks that created Google’s File System, as well as a unified, hypervisor-agnostic management interface.

Next Generation Data Protection: HotLink DR Express

The next generation of data protection is not just about backup or replication into and out of the cloud, but about inexpensive recovery directly into a cloud in a hypervisor agnostic manner. Recovery is the key to backup and while we spend many hours ensuring that our backups happen in a timely manner, we spend very little time testing those backups and ensuring that recovery can happen at any time for any workload, not just those that are mission critical. Next generation data protection must also be extremely simple to use, setup, and configure. Is your data protection tool a next generation tool or lost in the past somewhere?

HP Releases New Thin Client amidst a Growing Market

HP announced the newest addition to the top of their thin client device line. The t820 series focuses on delivering the highest level of performing thin clients, targeting users that historically have not been able to use thin clients in the past. In a press release on August 19th, “There is new and growing demand in today’s market for quad-core processing and multimedia graphics on thin clients,” said Jeff Groudan, marketing director, Thin Clients, HP. “With the HP t820, we’ve delivered a more advanced thin client solution to give companies the speed and performance required for their most demanding applications.”

My Take on the Small Business Virtualization Market

My colleague, Edward, wrote a post on Small Business Virtualization and I wanted to write a followup on my take of the small business market. For me, when I think of small business, I am really thinking of the mom and pop business that you can find everywhere. In fact, according to the United States Census Bureau post on small business sizes most only have a few employees and would not have a datacenter or server farms. Here is the breakdown of the numbers.