That Was the Year That Was: 2016

After the end of a year, we often pause and reflect to celebrate our successes and to try and gain closure for our failures and tragedies. For many, 2016 has been a horrible year. I am not going to talk about politics, as that is far too contentious, but the world seems a little darker today than …

4 Reasons The Calxeda Shutdown Isn’t Surprising

The board of Calxeda, the company trying to bring low-power ARM CPUs to the server market, has voted to cease operations in the wake of a failed round of financing. This is completely unsurprising to me, for a few different reasons. Virtualization is more suited to the needs of IT Calxeda’s view of the world …

Next Generation Thin Clients – Cheaper, Faster, Better

The cost of a VDI desktop dropped again last week with the release of a new low-cost thin clients that increasingly blur the boundaries between the cost of physical and virtual desktops, creating new opportunities for growth in a market segment that is struggling to reach more than 5% of enterprise desktops.

Xen port to ARM puts pressure on VMware

Stefano Stabellini, a senior software engineer at Citrix Systems, has announced a proof of concept port of the open source Xen Hypervisor for the ARM Cortex A15 processor. The project was started in early November and has already developed to the point where it is capable of booting a Linux 3.0 based virtual machine up to a shell prompt. The Xen port has progressed so rapidly due to a decision to take advantage of the virtualization features that were introduced with the ARMv7 architecture making it small and comparatively easy to develop. However, because of this it won’t be able to run on anything older than a Cortex-A15 processor.