Coopetition: Citrix +/- VMware Products and People

In the virtualization marketplace, when a vendor expands its core business and attempts to grab a piece of the new market from an existing incumbent, the vendors view each other as competitors. In 2007, when Citrix purchased XenSource, VMware vSphere clearly became the enemy, and Citrix envisioned that XenServer + XenApp/XenDesktop would take over the …

Dell Fluid Cache for SAN

Back in mid-2011, Dell acquired RNA Networks, a small startup out of Portland, Oregon. At the time Dell purchased it, RNA had a product, MVX, that employed three different ways to pool memory across multiple servers in order to accelerate workloads. One was a way to pool memory as a storage cache in order to …

Where Will VDI Be in Five Years’ Time?

VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) has long been predicted to be a growth area. This year, the technology has started to edge towards adoption in newer segments, segments in which it has not had significant traction in the past. But will this continue to be the case? Is VDI the computing environment of the future, or …

Get Off the Hypervisor and Get Into the Cloud

Off of the hypervisor and get into the cloud: In my last couple of post I wanted to express my thoughts about the future of cloud computing. In the first post, I shared what appears to be a bright outlook of the future for people working in the cloud space with the soaring demand for skilled engineers and not enough quality people to fill those roles. In my second post, I presented a couple of key skill areas that currently seem to have the most demand but I want to share my thoughts, or more to the point, concern that this “gap” of skilled engineers in only going to increase unless we can help guide people off of the hypervisor and into the cloud.

VMware vSphere Flash Read Cache

  I’ve written in the near past about a number of different products that are helping enterprises use flash as a cache to accelerate their traditional storage workloads. One product that is helping to push the whole market forward, if only by raising awareness of the options in this space, is VMware’s own vSphere Flash …