News: Once More into the Breach, My Friends: Oracle v. Google

In a follow-up to my Oracle v. Google Java spat post—in which I reported that the appeals court has ruled in favour of Oracle, casting doubt on the whole automation industry and the use of Java APIs—it seems that Google has decided to take this to the US Supreme Court. The argument it has submitted …

News: Oracle Buys GreenBytes — Once More on the Road to Obscurity

On May 16, 2014, Oracle entered into an agreement to acquire GreenBytes, a provider of ZFS technology, for an undisclosed price. In addition to expertise in areas related to ZFS, GreenBytes has developed a deduplication, replication, and virtualization overlay for it. (Rather bizarrely, in a tussle with the then-giant in 2009, GreenBytes accused Sun of …

News: Oracle v. Google — Why Is This Important?

On the 9th of May, 2014, something happened in the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that could have massive ramifications for our fledgling cloud orchestration industry. Circuit judges with no knowledge about the software industry and how that industry works made a judgement that could pull the rug out from under the …

Oracle and VMware Update Desktop Virtualization Platforms

Oracle and VMware have both been busy with their respective desktop-focused type II hypervisors, with each vendor releasing updates in the last month. Focus on Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8 and Windows server 2012 is inevitable, but that aside both vendors continue to drive their respective products in clearly defined directions with no real regard for competition. Oracle’s updates to VirtualBox have added significantly to its appeal, but leave it trailing behind VMware Workstation in both its finish and feature count. While VMware has done much to optimize Workstation to work with the forthcoming Windows 8, many of the other updates that VMware has released could be thought of as gilding the lily, offering features such as Thumbnail Actions that allow virtual machine power state to be controlled from the taskbar.

2012: The Year of Software Defined Networking

The start of VMworld 2012 and the biggest Virtualization conference of the year is less than two weeks away and the surge of marketing emails have started to arrive about all the new and exciting offerings that the venders and 3rd party companies are planning on showing off at VMworld. This is one of the things I enjoy the most about attending these conferences, seeing what’s new and to see the direction of the trends in virtualization. At last year’s show, VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas, the trend that I saw was the advancements in storage and storage virtualization. My prediction at the end of VMworld 2011 was that 2012 would be the year for the network virtualization and or software defined networking.