Google Chrome OS and the space in the Enterprise

Well, it has taken nearly two years since the announcement by Google to challenge Microsoft for a place at the desktop from the operating system upwards.  We all know that Google has tried to challenge Microsoft for a place at the table for cloud based applications; Google Apps.  They have had some high profile wins and made people consider cloud seriously.

Now, Google has officially unveiled Google Chome OS, its availability, pricing and supported hardware, and we believe it will seriously make people think about their desktop computing model.  Like most things entering the Enterprise IT space nowadays it will probably come in through the consumer channel and we will need to support it.

In a very bold move by Citrix they have come out and said that they will fully support the Google Chrome OS (a vision we had two years ago) to access windows based desktops and applications in the datacentre – a very smart move by Google.  VMware have also stated support for Chrome OS too.

Google, in partnership with Samsung and Acer, is pitching the laptops in a hardware, software and support package to businesses starting at $28 per user per month. The three-year contracts allow users to upgrade to new computers at the end of the term, and get replacements earlier if a device malfunctions.

While the price may be appealing to some customers, the problem of transitioning users from Windows applications to Chrome will be a roadblock, especially for customers who haven't installed any type of virtual desktop software.

But users of Citrix would have a much easier time, since the Citrix Receiver for Chrome OS technology will be very similar to what they already use to stream applications to other user devices.

VMware, which lagged behind Citrix in bringing virtual desktop functionality to the iPad, is in the same boat with Chrome OS. Google said it has a partnership with VMware to deliver similar functionality through VMware View, but Google Apps executive Rajen Sheth said it is unclear whether VMware will be ready in 2011.

"VMware is building a version of VMware View to work within the browser," Sheth says.

Using HTML5, Citrix says Citrix Receiver will create a rich user experience in the Chrome browser. Citrix engineering teams have been working on the project for six months to make it fast and secure.

At today’s Citrix Synergy key note Citrix have announced that their is a new Citrix receiver for web.  This works with any browser.

We are pretty excited by this move and it should start to shape the VDI market further and some of the constraints around licensing models.  And who better than Intrinsic to discuss this with…. Google Enterprise Partner, Citrix Gold Partner, VMware Enterprise Partner underpinned by hardware from HP and Cisco.

What's in the clouds for 2011?

Well after a fun packed Christmas holiday, I thought I should emerge from hibernation and think about what 2011 holds for the ever evolving cloud strategies.  There are many more than those highlighted below, but those below definitely come with some kudos. 

dataplex systems:

• Need for better access control and identity management
• Ongoing Compliance
• Multiple Cloud Tenants will compound and raise issues
• Be some firm standards and certifications for cloud security.

Gartner:

• By 2015, tools and automation will eliminate 25 per cent of labour hours associated with IT services.
• By 2015, 20 per cent of non-IT Global 500 companies will be cloud service providers.
• By 2014, 90 per cent of organisations will support corporate applications on personal devices.
• By 2013, 80 per cent of businesses will support a workforce using tablets.

Ovum:

• Mobility – In IT management, the mobility challenge in 2011 will be to embrace the new technology while developing a strategy that maintains a balance between user preference and productivity and corporate security and compliance.

• Data centre transformation – The role of the data centre is witnessing a dramatic shift as the cloud computing era heralds a new dawn in the delivery of IT services in 2011.
• Cloud services – Cloud computing will continue to grow steadily in 2011.

CCS Insight:

• Operators will focus on speed and quality of service rather than number of gigabytes when marketing mobile data.
• Operators will pay subsidies based on the data efficiency of a software platform, favouring BlackBerry over iOS and Android.

Nucleus Research:

• Politicians are out of touch with the realities of IT. The cloud enables white-collar workers to work anywhere, allowing smart companies to seek locales with low taxes and overhead.
• The cloud changes everything – still. Companies large and small are taking advantage of the economic and environmental advantages of developing and computing in the cloud.

HfS:

• Integrated offerings from service providers with broad capability gain market share. Distinction between BPO and ITO blurs
• Many CIOs will thrive or fail because of Cloud demand from their business function leaders

Infotrends:

• Cloud printing (or a similar term) to become the next big thing in the printing industry – we’re going to start moving beyond MPS and the hubbub around MPS – companies will begin to realise that the underlying theme is the mobility of the knowledge worker and that business processes, of which the majority still involve paper somewhere along the line, will need to adapt, evolve and maybe be totally reinvented for the next computing age

Forrester:

• You will build a private cloud, and it will fail. And this is a good thing.

• Hosted private clouds will outnumber internal clouds 3:1. The top reason empowered employees go to public cloud services is speed. They can gain access to these services in minutes. Private clouds must meet this demand and not once, but consistently.
• Community clouds will arrive, thank to compliance.
• Cloud economics gets switched on. Being cheap is good.

• Cloud standards still won’t be here — get over it.

• Cloud security will be proven but not by the providers alone. Because cloud security isn’t their responsibility —it’s shared.

Symantec starts to become VDI friendly

Symantec has announced that its endpoint security, messaging security and endpoint management solutions have been optimized for density and performance in virtual environments.

By randomiing virus definition updates and scheduled scans across the VM’s hosted on the virtualisation platform, Symantec minimizes the impact of these tasks on the hardware resources. This randomization feature is available from Symantec Endpoint Protection 11 Maintenance Release 3 making Symantec the last Security Software vendor providing a VDI friendly security solution.

The randomization feature is detailed in a white paper titled: Symantec Endpoint Protection 11.0 Securing Virtual Environments Best Practices White Paper. The paper mentions how the client policies can be set so that this randomization takes place. The settings aren’t orchestrated from a central point though, so that real randomization can’t be guaranteed, which makes the solution sub-optimal compared to what the competitors are doing at this moment.

Symantec says it will also support the VMware VMsafe API in the future just like VMware which is going to release an introspection antivirus framework by partnering with TrendMicro, and McAfee which will release solutions optimized for Citrix XenClient, XenDesktop and XenServer. Introspection means that the AV vendor provides a Virtual Appliance which calls the hypervisor’s security API in order to protect the guests running on top of it.

Source: virtualisation.info

Citrix Named HP AllianceONE Converged Infrastructure Partner of the Year

Citrix Systems, has announced that it has been awarded the HP AllianceONE Partner of the Year Award in the Desktop Virtualistion category. The recognition highlights the achievements of Citrix XenDesktop in extending the benefits of HP Converged Infrastructure to solve real business issues in the enterprise.

“As long-standing partners, Citrix and HP have collaborated closely to develop proven solutions that will help our customers transform their IT infrastructures into the dynamic, flexible, on-demand services of the future,” said Raj Dhingra, group vice president and general manager, XenDesktop product group at Citrix. “We are honored to be recognised for our efforts in this arena, and look forward to working with HP to enable our vision of a world where users can work from anywhere, anytime, using any device.”

HP is a Citrix Ready partner and the two companies have collaborated to offer enterprises a variety of software, hardware and service solutions that are jointly tested, certified and tuned to deliver optimal server performance and the best user experience. Enterprises are given the opportunity to choose from recommended configurations, architectures and services to create a solution that will meet their particular business needs and technical requirements. HP reference architectures for XenDesktop help customers build a comprehensive virtualised infrastructure based on the proven power of XenDesktop with FlexCast and HDX technologies on the HP platform.

“When considering the implementation of virtual desktops, enterprises look for best-of-breed solutions that offer them proven methods for efficiency and scalability,” said Paul Miller, Vice President, Solutions and Strategic Alliances, Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking, HP. “Citrix has been named the AllianceONE Converged Infrastructure Partner of the Year in the category of desktop virtualisation for its efforts to help us jointly provide the best end-user experience and solutions.”

Symantec Plug-in for VMware vCenter

Symantec has made announced the development of a management plugin for its Backup Exec 2010 products which integrates into VMware vCenter.

The Backup Exec Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter Server works with the core Backup Exec virtualisation features to provide a consolidated protection status view of all virtual machines within the VMware vCenter Server or VMware vSphere Client. 

Customers can view:

• The last run of backup and next scheduled backup
• The type of backup (full, incremental, differential) and backup policy

• Specific information on the backup job logs

• Potential risky policies such as unprotected virtual machines.

Source: Symantec

NetBackup 5200 Appliance Spec

There has been a flurry of comments and discussion on the NBU 5000, so we thought it would be good to put something up about the newly launched 5200 and how it compares with the 5000.  Straight to the hardware spec comparison:

So you can see the 5200 is a little beefed up over the 5000 with more storage, more memory, faster CPU's and more I/O options (FC being the big one).  But the biggest difference, and what makes the appliances tick, is the software.  The NetBackup 5200 is a full NetBackup 7.0 Media Server.  Meaning you can add it to an existing NBU environment, create dedupe pools on it for storage, replicate it to another 5200, hang tape drives off of it etc.  Just like you'd install media server software for 7.0 on your own server.  The NetBackup 5000 I previously posted about runs PureDisk software so it is more of a dedupe storage appliance than a full backup server.

The 5200 has a bunch of network ports and they can actually be bonded to form a single group for performance and fault tolerance.  This is important since NBU media servers typically accept a large number of clients from an IP network.  When bonding the 10Gig or 1Gig Ethernet ports together it does adaptive load balancing and doesn't need reconfiguration at the network switch level so backup or storage admins can drop this appliance in without pulling in the network team to muck with their switches (or you don't have to muck with the switch yourself if that's your job).

VM Stall has it hit you yet?

Many organisations are hitting a brick wall when it comes to fully deploying virtualisation in their environments. According to a recent survey, businesses are still unsure about the ability to back up and recover their virtual machines, causing many organisations to avoid virtualising their entire infrastructure and hitting the phenomenon which has become known as "VM stall."

An organisation reaches VM stall when it hits a point in its virtualisation journey where it just can't seem to get beyond a certain percentage virtualised. The average stall point seems to be somewhere around 40 percent, and this can be caused by a number of factors. However, one factor seems to be common across most organisations falling into this trap: VM stall will typically occur when a company no longer feels comfortable virtualising. This wariness usually stifles a virtualisation deployment before reaching mission- or enterprise-critical applications, leaving a virtual environment made up of more or less "low-hanging fruit" applications.

Backup and recovery software provider Veeam recently finished up a survey of around 500 CIOs from organisations across the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France. The survey looked to identify the impact of virtualisation on data protection strategies. What it found was that enterprise adoption of virtualisation is actually being hampered due to fears around the ability to successfully back up and recover virtual machines.

According to the survey, on average, approximately half of all servers are viewed by CIOs today as mission-critical, and with 42 percent penetration, virtualisation is fast approaching the mission-critical application stage.

Veeam's "VMware Data Protection Report 2010" survey included other interest findings as well, such as:

• Nearly half (44 percent) of respondents indicated that concerns around backup and recovery prevented them from virtualising certain mission-critical workloads.
• Yet at the same time, only 68 percent of production-level virtual servers are currently being backed up; and more specifically, only 29 percent of organisations back up their entire virtual estates.
• And of those servers and virtual machines that are being backed up, only 2 percent are being tested for recoverability each year.
• Nearly two-thirds of organisations experience problems every month when attempting to recover a server. These failed recoveries cost the average enterprise more than $400,000 a year.

On a positive note for Veeam and other virtualisation backup and recovery solution providers, the survey did find that attitudes among organisations are indeed changing. According to the survey results, 59 percent of businesses are now planning to deploy a virtualisation-specific solution to back up virtual servers.