Virtual Future in our Virtual Designs

Is it time to plan for the virtual future in our virtual designs? Happy New Year and welcome to 2013!! What a year 2012 turned out to be for virtualization and/or cloud computing in general. Microsoft Hyper-V, RedHat and VMware have all made quite a few enhancements with the hypervisor and we have finally gotten to a point where we really have some good competition between hypervisors, but also the competition boundaries are being expanded to include much more than just the hypervisor itself as we start to focus on the ecosystem as a whole.

Are you using or considering implementation of a storage hypervisor?

Depending upon what your or somebody else’s definition of a storage hypervisor is, you may or may not be using one or realize it.

If your view of a storage hypervisor is a storage IO optimization technology to address performance and other issues with virtual machines (VMs) and their hypervisors, such as Virsto or ScaleIO along with others, you might be calling those storage hypervisors as opposed to middleware, management tools, drivers, plug-in, shims, accelerators, or optimizers.

Nivio – Has Someone got Desktop-As-A-Service for Small Business Right?

Nivio have announced a DaaS solution aimed at SME space. Offering access to Microsoft Windows on any device, rentable applications, and data storage in the cloud, it sounds as if Nivio’s service could be just the ticket for the tablet wielding small business user. What are Nivio doing that is different? Will this model be successful? What, if anything, can be learned by other DaaS providers, and what in turn needs to be learned by Nivio?