Cloud adoption pushes storage virtualization
About three years ago Host.net, a collocation and managed service provider, decided it was going to fully embrace the cloud as a new suite of offerings for customers. When migrating to the new service, the company wanted to use its legacy hardware infrastructure -- mostly Dell and EMC storage servers -- with new hardware that had been purchased for the upgrade. But they didn't want to be tied down to any one vendor moving forward, in case application needs or markets changed.
Host.net officials wanted to manage these storage components in a unified control panel, with the flexibility to add additional hardware in the future, if need be. The answer they found was storage virtualization. Read more...
Microsoft goes global with System Center 2012 at MMC
Microsoft announced the global release of System Center 2012 at its 10th annual Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas this morning, and has confirmed that the server version of Windows 8 will be released as Windows Server 2012.
As with the beta, the new System Center 2012 is now available globally in standard and data center editions.
Brad Anderson, corporate vice president of the Management and Security Division, used his keynote to extoll new automation and provisioning features. Pricing structures have also been simplified down to two, he said, adding Microsoft wouldn't "tax" increases in virtualization like others in the industry. Read more...
Server virtualization pushes storage demand to new highs
In 2001, VMware delivered its first virtualization products for x86 servers, setting off what has become one of today's biggest tech trends. But the benefits of virtualization, particularly its ability to allow users to rapidly provision new workloads, are pushing demand for storage to new highs.
Just over half of all workloads in a data center are now virtualized, a milestone that was hit this year, according to Nemertes Research, which benchmarks data collected from user organizations.
Ted Ritter, an analyst at Nemertes, believes that about 78% of all workloads will eventually be virtualized. The remaining workloads will continue to run on dedicated physical servers because of security and compliance issues, or in some cases because the software vendor doesn't yet support virtualization. Read more...
Windows Server 8 plays catch-up with VMware and Unix
"The cloud is a tectonic shift," said Microsoft's corporate vice president of server and cloud Bill Laing, introducing an in-depth press preview of Windows Server 8 and mixing metaphors with abandon.
In response to this cloudy earthquake, the company is declaring Server 8 to be a cloud-based operating system, though note that this is not about Azure – Microsoft's platform as a service – but instead focused on plain Windows Server running on virtual machines, either in private clouds at corporate data centres, or in public clouds hosted by Microsoft partners.
The main justification for Microsoft's cloud-based claim is in extensive improvements to Hyper-V, the Windows virtualization platform. There are also changes to Microsoft IIS Web Server that make it better suited to multi-tenancy.
Before taking a detailed look at these, though, consider this statement from Jeffrey Snover, Microsoft's lead architect for the Windows Server division: "We don't want management GUIs to run on servers – that's a bad thing." Read more...
Despite Microsoft gains, VMware still dominates virtualization market
VMware is the primary hypervisor for 58 percent of organizations that use x86 virtualization software, with Citrix and Microsoft's Hyper-V splitting the rest of the market, a new survey finds.
Commissioned by virtualization management vendor Veeam and conducted by research group Vanson Bourne, the V-Index survey of more than 500 large businesses found that 92 percent have adopted virtualization, and deployed an average of 470 virtual machines. Although VMware is still the most widely used, it turns out multiple hypervisors in the same data center is fast becoming the norm. And with VMware's latest price increases, Microsoft and Citrix have a chance to chip into its lead.
Fully 58 percent of companies using virtualization call VMware their primary hypervisor, while 20.2 percent put Citrix at the top of the list and 18.6 percent count Hyper-V first. Read more...