The attendance stats coming out of the seventh annual VMworld conference, which wrapped up Thursday in San Francisco, are stunning: more than 17,000 conference goers attended more than 15,000 labs and consumed 102,000 sodas and 27,000 pastries (my contribution to this last one was more restrained this year, thanks for asking). And unseasonable temps in the high 90s!
But the numbers I began to wonder about after VMware unveiled its grand vision for a "new infrastructure" and "IT-as-a-Service" aren't as easy to pin down. (Get the details on these technologies from our sister pub, Virtualization Review. Excellent coverage of this year's conference by Bruce Hoard, Rick Vanover and others.)
Derrick Harris, senior curator in the Infrastructure group at industry analyst firm GigaOM Pro, actually posed the question on my mind in the title of a recently published strategy research paper: "VMware’s Cloudy Ambitions: Can It Repeat Hypervisor Success? More
Posted by John K. Waters on September 4, 20100 comments
The sixth annual VMworld user conference is underway this week in the "city by the bay," and this year's event was accompanied by the usual flurry of product announcements. My inbox is stuffed with vendor messages about new product and service offerings. But if I did a keyword search using "virtualization," I'd surface only about half of them. The keyword this year is "cloud."
It's not surprising that cloud computing would take center stage at this year's event. Competition in the virtualization space has been racing up the stack since the commoditization of the hypervisor.
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Posted by John K. Waters on August 31, 20100 comments
Hewlett Packard is making an aggressive move into the cloud this week with a new all-in-one, turn-key solution for deploying private clouds. Unveiled today at the annual VMworld user conference in San Francisco, HP's CloudStart is designed to get your behind-the-firewall cloud up and running in 30 day.
That's a bold claim, but it works, Paul Muller, VP of HP's Software and Solutions organization, told me last week, because it's built on HP's Converged Infrastructure, a combination of hardware, software and services joined under a common management platform. HP unveiled this set of associated services last year to address what it called "IT sprawl."
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Posted by John K. Waters on August 30, 20100 comments
News that Oracle might be dumping OpenSolaris sparked a lively response from the blogosphere this week. The OpenSolaris community is PO'd, to be sure, but for the most part, the bloggers were sober and serious on this topic -- for the most part.
The news broke when Athens, GA-based software engineer and OpenSolaris contributor Steve Stallion published an internal Oracle memo on his Iconoclastic Tendencies blog. The memo lays out Oracle's plans for the open source OS, which include ending open source developers' daily access to builds of Solaris binaries after version 2010.05.
The memo reads, in part: "All of Oracle’s efforts on binary distributions of Solaris technology will be focused on Solaris 11. We will not release any other binary distributions, such as nightly or bi-weekly builds of Solaris binaries, or an OpenSolaris 2010.05 or later distribution. We will determine a simple, cost-effective means of getting enterprise users of prior OpenSolaris binary releases to migrate to S11 Express."
Stallion's comment on this plan is downright poignant: "I can only maintain that the software we worked on was for the betterment of all, not for any one company's bottom line," he writes. "This is truly a perversion of the open source spirit."
Not surprisingly, his post drew numerous comments with many points of view on this issue. I have not been reading Mr. Stallion's blog, but it's on my list now.
Most of the blogging on this news grew out of the memo Stallion published.(The internal Oracle memo was also posted on the OpenSolaris Forum.) The best of these, in my view, is Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols' post on his Cyber Cynic blog: "Oracle Dumps OpenSolaris." I'm a fan of this blog for its insights and unapologetic crankiness. In his recent post Vaughan-Nichols responds directly to Stallion's post: "…[W]elcome to the Larry Ellison school of open-source thought," he writes. "As I'd been trying to tell OpenSolaris developers all along, the god-king CEO of Oracle doesn't give a damn about any open source that doesn't directly benefit Oracle. The moment Oracle acquired Sun, OpenSolaris' fate was sealed."
Great post. Tons of links. Comments piling up.
It's also worthwhile to take a step back and revisit some of the expectations earlier this year about the fate of OpenSolaris. Dana Blankenhorn, who blogs for ZDNet on Linux and Open Source, wrote back in March in a post entitled "Oracle taking back OpenSolaris" that "there's no long such a thing as Open Solaris, and I think anyone who bought Sun’s promises on building an open alternative to Linux just got punked."
Of course, more than a few people in the OpenSolaris community saw all this coming. (You're not paranoid if Big O really is planning to kill your beloved open source project.) About 350 of them got together to start a new project, dubbed Illumos, which launched officially on August 3. The project aims to create a fully open version of OpenSolaris independent of Oracle.
Evan Powell, CEO of Nexenta, a sponsor of the Illumos project, declared in an August 13 post that his company was ready for Oracle's decision. "We've been planning for this contingency for a long time," he wrote. "We have the team to continue to support customers and partners and to continue our development."
Also check out open-source-maven-at-large Simon Phipps' post on the ComputerWorld UK blog; Phipps sees the Illumos Project as neither a fork of OpenSolaris nor another OpenSolaris distro. "It is in fact a project to create a fully open-source-licensed version of the Solaris operating system and networking consolidation -- the closest Solaris comes to a 'kernel project,'" he wrote. "It's a downstream open source project, happy to contribute upstream but resolutely independent. As such it is a thoroughly good thing and a breath of fresh air."
Phipps is a keen observer of open source trends; I recommend his Wild Webmink blog.
And finally, it's a bit tangential, but you might want to check out Adam Leventhal's announcement in his blog that he is leaving Oracle. Leventhal is a longtime member of the Solaris Kernel Group and will continue to blog at http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl.
Posted by John K. Waters on August 20, 20101 comments
No one was really surprised today when Hewlett-Packard announced that it would be acquiring application security solutions provider Fortify Software. Rumors have been bouncing around the Valley for months.
"This was a real contender for the worst kept secret in Silicon Valley throughout the summer," says Fortify's chief scientist (and co-founder) Dr. Brian Chess.
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Posted by John K. Waters on August 17, 20101 comments
I stopped by the Googleplex on Friday to check out the MoveOn.org-sponsored protest of the proposed Google-Verizon network neutrality framework. About a hundred people showed up, by my very rough count, with "Save the Internet" and "Don't Be Evil" signs. (I'm betting that more than a few people at Google are getting sick of the company's slogan about now.) MoveOn delivered a petition signed by more than 300,000 people opposed to the framework, which the group characterized as a bid to "give giant corporations control of the Internet." MoveOn published some nice pix of the event on its website.Very civil demonstration.
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Posted by John K. Waters on August 16, 20102 comments
As you've probably heard by now, yesterday Oracle filed a lawsuit against Google saying that the Internet search giant infringed on seven patents associated with the Java Platform in developing its Android mobile operating system (Oracle acquired the rights to Java when it bought Sun Microsystems in January). The analysts I talked with this morning say the the simple filing of the lawsuit could risk the future of Java as a development platform -- and not just in the mobile arena.
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Posted by John K. Waters on August 13, 201015 comments
One of the things I love about my beat is the relative rarity of personal scandals. I cringe whenever I see a politician's personal peccadillos paraded before the public, and I'd hate it if I ever had to lead the procession. But Silicon Valley is not without its dramas, and this week we had a whopper. I'm referring, of course, to former Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark V. Hurd's resignation.
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Posted by John K. Waters on August 13, 20100 comments
When I heard that Novel was set to unveil version 2.0 of its Mono Tools for Visual Studio, I was looking forward to chatting about the release with the manic Miguel de Icaza, original leader of the open-source Mono project, vice of Novell's Developer Platform group and super-fun interviewee. But Miguel was welcoming his first daughter into the world (¡felicitaciones!), so Mono product manager Joseph Hill pitched in for the briefing.
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Posted by John K. Waters on August 9, 20100 comments