Virtualisation

Anyone remotely within the orbit of SAP lately knows that its number-one focus is the HANA in-memory database and development platform. At this week's Sapphire conference in Orlando, the vendor sought to show the progress it is making in both building out HANA's capabilities as well as attracting developers and partners to HANA.

Can the old guard in business continuity and disaster-recovery services thrive in an era when the companies are looking at new ways to process business data? SunGard Data Systems, with decades of experience in availability services, is feeling the pinch as some business clientele move data to the cloud. But SunGard says it's pushing forward with innovations that are making it a public cloud provider as well with the kind of application availability it says will be hard to match elsewhere.

Fresh off the acquisition of a company that specializes in helping customers manage resources across multiple public clouds, Dell said it is "refining" its own plans to build a public cloud based on OpenStack.

Treasurer Wayne Swan's sixth budget may well be his last. But it certainly had some highlights although most analysts agree that it didn't offer a great deal to Australian economy. The following stories offer a broad-based, ICT-centric coverage of the budget.

A recent survey by Forrester found that 7 per cent of IT executives and 9 per cent of business leaders feel they have gained a true return on investment from Big Data. That means there's a lot more business can be doing to glean insights from the massive amount of data that's potentially available to them.

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.

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.

Who is Amazon's biggest competitor in the cloud?

IBM's decision this week to base its cloud services on OpenStack may help establish this open source platform as the standard in enterprises.

As more companies adopt a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) approach to mobile, many are getting caught by hidden costs. But virtualization titan VMware has bucked that trend. VMware CIO Mark Egan explains how his company accomplished its feat.

From software defined networking challenges to killing Cius and corporate restricting moves, it was a busy year for Cisco.

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.

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.

The march toward software-defined networking will be a long slog given current investments in the installed base, but industry forces are coalescing rapidly in anticipation of the huge benefits to be reaped from this fundamental shift in the way we build and run networks.

I've just fired up VMware Fusion 5 Professional Edition on my iMac under OS X Mountain Lion and I'm really impressed.

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

Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V combines easy setup and management with new features that lower the entry barrier to highly available virtualization clusters

The Cisco CSR 1000V router is designed for enterprise network managers who want to have a little piece of their Cisco infrastructure in the cloud.