How Much Insight Are We Missing from Our Environments?

How much insight are we missing from our environments? That is a question I find myself asking after being bitten by a new “bug” found in VMware vCloud Automation Center (vCAC). There seem to be many people like me who discovered their morning was wrecked when the vCloud Automation Center 6.0 tenants became inaccessible and …

OpFlex, Standards-Based Protocols, and Cisco’s Messaging Problem

On April second, Cisco introduced something that seems to make a lot of sense in its new declarative-based, ACI-led world of software-defined networking: a policy mechanism. The blog post about it was pretty straightforward: it included the obligatory nods toward the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and open-source communities, defined the differences between the traditional …

Winds of Change: What Does Horizon 6 Mean for Microsoft and Citrix?

At first glance, it looks like VMware’s recently announced Horizon 6 platform is an admission by VMware that applications, rather than desktops, do matter, and that Citrix has been on the right track all along. Certainly, XenApp has been a thorn in the side of many VMware View implementations through the years, allowing people to …

What Next for x86 Hardware Industry: The Death of the Blade Format?

The rise of server-based flash caching and other technologies like local performant storage pools, whether virtual storage appliances like the HP StoreVirtual VSA or VMware’s VSAN, marks a possible return to the days of the pizza box server in data centers across the world.

Virtualization Must Be Intuitive and Easy

With so many vendors in the virtualization marketplace, new products are released daily, and only some of them will ultimately prove to be successful. The competition for both mindshare and wallet is fierce, and this is forcing new vendors in particular to simplify new products brought into the marketplace in order to achieve success.