John Drayton is new VMware country manager
Wellington-based role to focus on public sector and financial services.
Wellington-based role to focus on public sector and financial services.
VMware, Microsoft score high in test of hosted virtual desktop infrastructure
About a year ago, a few of the larger virtualisation software vendors, such as VMware and CA Technologies, started campaigning against a phenomena that they called virtual stall.
Kingston University near London has announced ambitious plans to "prepare for life without the desktop", virtualising its entire base of PCs, the first major project on this scale in the UK education sector.
Citrix claims it's driven down costs to the point that next year it will be cheaper to deploy virtual desktops than traditional desktops.
LAS VEGAS: While VMware users harbor little doubt about the cost savings and productivity gains brought by virtualising their networks, security concerns still exist on many fronts, whether it's figuring out how to meet regulatory compliance with auditors, or evaluating cloud services.
There's growing consensus that traditional approaches to network security -- the firewall and intrusion-prevention appliances, the host-based antivirus software -- simply do not work well in virtualized environments for which they were never designed.
Big Switch Networks, a startup just emerging from stealth mode, is said to be building a new platform that will bring the benefits of virtualisation and cloud architecture to enterprise networks. To help see that vision through, the company recently announced it has secured $13.75 million in a Series A financing round led by Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures.
Big Switch Networks was co-founded last year by CEO Guido Appenzeller and Vice President of Sales and Marketing Kyle Forster. Along with the new funding, the company added a list of heavy hitters to its board of directors, including Mark Leslie, former CEO of Veritas; Bill Meehan, leader of McKinsey and Co.'s West Coast and private equity practices and director emeritus; Shirish Sathaye, partner at Khosla Ventures and former vice president of engineering and CTO of Fore Systems and Alteon WebSystems; and Mike Volpi, a partner at Index Ventures and former senior vice president/general manager of the Routing Technology Group at Cisco.
Big Switch Networks' perspective states that advances over the last few years in compute virtualisation have left enterprise networking behind, and that it was now time for networking to have its very own VMware. While many believe networking has become boring and commoditized, Big Switch Networks wants to make enterprise networking exciting again. To help them achieve that goal, the company is relying on the newfound ability to program enterprise networking gear with the OpenFlow communications protocol, a project that Appenzeller was involved in developing while at Stanford University.
Much as how server, desktop, or storage virtualization creates an abstraction layer to alleviate the need for specific hardware, Big Switch Networks plans on leveraging the OpenFlow standard for its own networking virtualisation. The company's website states the following:
Prior to [OpenFlow], we've simply never had a programmatic way to reach deep enough in to enterprise-grade networking devices to do what we need to do. Configuring a network, to us, is modifying the inputs used in network algorithms imprinted deep in embedded hardware and software. Programming a network, which is what we need to do, implies relying on these algorithms most of the time but over-riding them every once in a while. A simple case in point: our virtual networks don't need spanning tree.
Rather than creating a new paradigm, Big Switch Networks believes there is an opportunity to slip in a virtualization layer underneath the existing one. The company further states: "As new applications, new departments or new classes of traffic emerge, we believe that a networking team should have the choice of whether to manage that via the familiar tools of the underlying physical network or via those same familiar tools applied to a virtual network on top."
As an explanation, the company defines network virtualization by calling out three fundamental principles:
Organisations are looking to make the most of opportunities associated with the National Broadband Network (NBN), with Gartner Executive Program’s annual CIO agenda survey showing that networking, voice and data communications are a higher technology priority in Australia and New Zealand than globally.
CIOs have a tough year ahead with the consumerisation of IT and virtualisation set to force IT leaders to rewrite their business plans, four vendors have claimed.
Analysts across the board agree that 2011 will be the year when LTE, WiMAX and simpler flat network architectures will define networking in the enterprise.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has built a private cloud in three months, choosing Citrix’s XenServer virtualisation hypervisor over the incumbent VMware ESX.
McAfee has developed an antivirus product or virtulised environments. The company has partnered with Citrix to provide a means of protecting virtual machines in the same way that it can handle physical ones.
Microsoft is still refusing to showcase Hyper-V at VMworld in protest of VMware rules that Microsoft believes are designed to limit competition, but that doesn't mean the Microsoft hype machine will abstain from anti-VMware marketing.
VMware has upgraded its application management software Hyperic claiming to offer a way for administrators to fix application problems more quickly.