When and Where to Use NAND Flash SSD for Virtual Servers

Keeping in mind that the best server and storage IO is the one that you do not have to do, then second best is that which has the least impact combined with best benefit to an application. This is where SSD, including DRAM- and NAND-flash-based solutions, comes into the conversation for storage performance optimization.

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.”

Big Data Security Tools

On the May 30th Virtualization Security Podcast, Michael Webster (@vcdxnz001) joined us Live from HP Discover to discuss what we found at the show and other similar tools around the industry. The big data security news was a loosely coupled product named HAVEn which is derived from several products: Hadoop, Autonomy, Vertica, Enterprise Security, and any number of Apps. HAVEn’s main goal is to provide a platform on top of which HP and others can produce big data applications using Autonomy for unstructured data, Vertica for structured data, Enterprise Security for data governance and hadoop. HP has already built several security tools upon HAVEn, and I expect more. Even so, HAVEn is not the only tools to provide this functionality, but it may be the only one to include data governance in from the beginning.

A Look at the HP Moonshot 1500

Last week HP announced their “second generation” HP Moonshot 1500 enclosure and Intel Atom S1260-based Proliant Moonshot systems, a high-density computing solution targeted at hyperscale computing workloads. They’re billing it as the first “software defined server” and claiming that it can save 89 percent of energy, 80 percent space, and 77 percent of the cost of their DL380 servers.

VDI Stall: VDI Appliances solve the hardware problem so, what next?

We’ve discussed the fact that VDI appliance makers were making good progress simplifying adoption of a virtual desktop infrastructure. An appliance-based route to market can be seen as win-win: being designed both to reduce cost and complexity of implementation (for the customer) and shorten sales cycles (for the vendor). So goes the theory. To understand this theory further one VDI appliance vendor, Pivot3, commissioned Dimensional Research to survey global IT in order to get real-world insight into the state of VDI.

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.