Virtualisation

Internet tools are just starting to be applied to industrial tasks such as maintaining equipment and optimizing operations, but the wealth of data being produced by industrial systems could make this a major focus of development in the coming years.

Although the platform as a service (PaaS) market is smaller than both IaaS and SaaS segments of the Cloud computing industry, research firm Forrester says this technology could be one of the most important cloud-based services for businesses moving forward.

It's a lucky day for ARN's two winners of the State of the IT Channel survey related competition.

Red Hat made its first $1 billion commercializing Linux. Now, it hopes to make even more doing the same for OpenStack.

European cloud providers think the U.S. spy scandal will result in more enterprises choosing local alternatives over the likes of Amazon Web Services and Rackspace, which, on the other hand, are adamant that they aren't taking part in programs such as Prism.

The cloud 'security strategy' involves adopting security solutions that seamlessly span physical, virtual and private/hybrid/public cloud environments while simplifying operational and management complexities. Roundtable attendees got down to business, discussion the 'practical steps' and issues and opportunities involved in securing the cloud environment. Jennifer O'Brien reports.

The datacentre of the future is shaped by a number of forces including commoditisation, virtualisation, integration and innovation. A group of industry experts sat down to discuss the key factors shaping the evolution of the datacentre of the future and its impact on the channel.

Virtualisation is dominant in the enterprise market today, but how is it faring in the SMB space? ARN brought together a collection of channel players and vendors to discuss the opportunities and challenges for virtualisation technology in the smaller end of town.

ARN recently held a roundtable on selling virtualisation to SMBs. Attached are highlights from the recent event.

While the case for server virtualisation in the SMB market is intensifying, many partners around the table were less convinced about short-term take-up of desktop virtualisation.

Among several BYOD strategies Starz has tried over the past five years, dual persona smartphones -- offering employees a business and personal interface -- took off like a lead balloon.

A private Cloud looks and acts like a public Cloud, giving your corporation all the speed, agility and cost savings promised by Cloud technology, only it's single-tenant, and that tenant is you, right? Well, that's the goal, but it's not quite the reality yet for most enterprises.

According to Piston Cloud Computing's CTO, the rate at which his customer's pilot projects turn into production private clouds is pretty typical of most OpenStack-based providers – and it's pretty low.

OpenStack -- co-founded by Rackspace and NASA in 2010 -- certainly has the buzz, what with partnerships with AT&T, HP and IBM, to name a few, all of which have promised to use OpenStack as the base for their private cloud offerings.

Cloud vendors are delivering boatloads of new tools to help enterprise IT build, buy, manage, monitor, tweak and track Cloud services. These tools are designed to help IT execs free up their budgets and their staff so both can be used towards more strategic, line of business projects.

Jim Whitehurst says it's not just Red Hat's products, but its philosophy that place it at the forefront of cloud computing

Intel completed its multibillion-dollar acquisition of McAfee almost a year and a half ago, and this week McAfee co-President Mike DeCesare spoke with Network World senior editor Ellen Messmer about what the merger of Intel's chip-making capabilities and McAfee's security expertise is expected to bring down the road.

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst is coming up on his five-year anniversary at the helm, following his arrival in December 2007. Under Whitehurst's leadership, Red Hat's revenue has grown from US$523 million in its fiscal 2008 to more than $1.1 billion in its fiscal 2012, without deviating from its core strategy of open-source infrastructure software.

It has been about eight months since Michael Bosnar replaced Sean Walsh as AppSense A/NZ managing director. HAFIZAH OSMAN spoke to him about some of the challenges the company has faced and the company’s expansion strategies.

With the virtualisation needs of Australian and New Zealand companies continually expanding, VMware Australia has stepped up to meet ITS ever growing expectations through the cloud. ARN spoke to VMware Australia Vice-President and Managing Director, Duncan Bennet, about his recent promotion, making virtualisation work and the journey to the cloud.

Vendors are rebuilding the mainframe with converged infrastructure, collapsed kit or integrated compute platforms -- whatever you want to call it. And customers are loving it.

For decades the leading network companies have been tightly coupling their software to complex, custom-built chips. Besides leaving IT buyers with a staggering array of appliances, the reliance on custom silicon has chilled industry startup activity. But with software defined networking, that is beginning to change.

Too often, New Year's resolutions to get into better shape are derailed because of a lack of realistic planning. The same thing happens in the security sphere.

Software-defined networking (SDN) has the potential to transform the telecom industry by improving the ability of carriers (both wired and wireless) to flexibly deliver bandwidth "on demand." It is critical that carriers improve both their network flexibility (improved customer value) and reduce their high operational costs as over-the-top providers (e.g., Google, Amazon, Skype, etc.) challenge the carriers' ability to grow their revenues and impact their margins.

Thin-client maker Pano Logic, headed by former Wyse CEO John Kish, has gone out of business ... without so much as a public word to the customers it has left high and dry, or anyone else who might be wondering why.

Monitoring virtual servers for availability, performance, health, and workload capacity has never been easy, but Operations Manager goes a long way toward that goal

HP 3PAR StoreServe 7400 combines high scalability, high performance, and a big bag of tricks for easing storage management

VMware takes virtualization higher and deeper with rich storage automation and more advanced virtual networking tools

Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V brings advanced virtualization features to small shops, but VMware still reigns at the high end

Thin clients can't be cracked or hacked; they don't have fans or disks to fail; they don't need to be patched nearly as often as Windows; they don't draw much power; and they don't cost a whole lot of money to buy or maintain.