Virtualisation: Interviews

In March, Western Digital agreed to buy Hitachi Global Storage Technologies> (HGST), the disk drive subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd., in a stock and cash transaction valued at $US4.3 billion. HGST CEO Steve Milligan will join WD as president at the closing of the deal, expected in the fourth quarter.

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.

VMware director of global partner strategy and operations, Douglas Smith, and local vice-president, Paul Harapin, were keynote speakers at the vendor’s recent A/NZ Partner Exchange. The pair caught up with NADIA CAMERON to discuss how it plans to strengthen the bond between the vendor and its channel base, as well as how competencies, acquisitions and vendor alliances are affecting the partner community.

EMC recently held its annual Inform conference in Sydney. Keynote speaker, EMC President for Australia and New Zealand, David Webster, sat down with Matthew Sainsbury to discuss the event, market issues and its vendor partnerships.

Brian Gallagher , president of EMC 's Symmetrix & Virtualization Product Group, sat down with Computerworld at EMC's annual user conference, EMC World, to talk about the company's new VPLEX synchronous data replication product . Gallagher explained what differentiates it from rival products and EMC's existing offerings, such as Symmetric Remote Data Facility [SRDF] replication technology and Invista storage virtualization software.

These days, cloud computing may be the hottest topic in IT industry as many firms are planning to unleash cloud service or already starting to deploy cloud service.

While Cisco Systems branches out into consumer electronics, video, mobile data and other areas, one of its biggest areas of focus today is enterprise data centers. The dominant LAN provider thinks the transformation of data centers through virtualization calls for new kinds of connections and a broader role for network technology and intelligence. John McCool oversees this push as senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's Data Center, Switching and Services group. IDG News Service talked with McCool recently about the company's own role and its partnerships with other vendors in this arena.

VMware is not just any IT company — the winner of the 2009 ARN Software Vendor of the Year has a partner community that runs through the entire channel.

Like a formula one driver at the top of his game, HP has shown remarkable consistency as the company negotiated the bends, curves and hairpins of the market over the past year.

Westcon Group’s first dedicated chief technology officer, Bill Hurley, was initially appointed CIO 12 months ago and is now tasked with overseeing the distributor’s IT organisation while identifying future technologies and capabilities to invest in globally. He caught up with NADIA CAMERON during a recent visit to Sydney to discuss his background, the status of Westcon’s vendor line-up and his emerging IT agenda.

What was your first job?

Microsoft this week launched its cloud computing environment, Windows Azure, which is the foundation of the Azure Services Platform for developing applications extending from the cloud to PCs, datacenters, phones, and the Web. Microsoft's goal is to let Windows developers transition from Windows client development to Windows cloud development, using familiar tools, both those from Microsoft and other sources such as Eclipse. Developers would continue to develop apps on their desktops, but the Azure platform would handle the app deployment in the cloud.

VMware’s product roadmap and strategic vision is changing rapidly. What can we expect to see from a channel perspective going forward?

McAfee is hunkering down to integrate the security technologies it has bought over the past several months into its varied line of security software and appliances. Two trends in the company's activities are developing parallel products for deployment as software on endpoints and as network-based appliances. This week, for instance, the company is announcing that NAC software can be installed on its IntruShield IPS appliance to give customers the option of enforcing NAC policies in the network, not just on the endpoint. The company is bringing management of these platforms under control of its ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) in an effort to centralize control of network security. Network World Senior Editor Tim Greene spoke with McAfee CEO Dave DeWalt about these efforts as well as other issues facing the company.

Microsoft has been busy this year, rolling out Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 in a push to expand its presence in the corporate data center. To be successful, the company must overcome an economic environment that appears increasingly difficult as well as tough competition from rivals Oracle and VMware, among others

What is the current state of the virtual desktop market?

Paul Maritz became the president and CEO of VMware in July, after the EMC-owned company's board of directors fired co-founder and CEO Diane Greene. Maritz is now competing in the hot virtualization market against his former employer Microsoft, where he worked from 1986 to 2000 and led many of the company's major software initiatives. EMC executives put him in charge of VMware just a few months after EMC acquired Pi Corporation, a company Maritz founded. Maritz was in Las Vegas this week for VMware's annual VMworld conference, and sat down with Jon Brodkin to talk about company strategy.

Bob Kelly, Microsoft's corporate vice president in charge of infrastructure server marketing, gave the morning keynote speech at Monday's "Get Virtualization" event in the US. The event had 1,000 attendees and kicks off a series of worldwide shows that may eventually have 175,000 attendees total. Kelly spoke to Computerworld about his company's virtualization efforts; excerpts from that interview follow.

Paul Cormier is Red Hat's executive VP and head of Red Hat products and technologies divisions. His experienced thumb is firmly planted in many Red Hat pies; including engineering, product management and product marketing. The company credits the introduction of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to Cormier's leadership and experience in enterprise technology. Cormier has returned Down Under on another visit to Red Hat's research and development team in Brisbane, and took some time out to chat with Computerworld about the anticipated boom in virtualisation, cloud computing, Microsoft's open source initiatives, CentOS, JBoss Application Server 5.0, how open source software can aid the current economic downturn, and of course, the growing role of Linux and RHEL in the enterprise.

Diane Greene is the president, CEO and co-founder of VMware, a pioneer of x86 server virtualization and one of the most innovative companies to hit the IT world in the past decade. Greene was in Boston last week with her VMware team, briefing analysts on new technologies that haven't been made public yet. She took some time out to speak with Network World's Jon Brodkin about a range of topics.