At the beginning of January, CIO Magazine published Crystal Ball: The IT Outlook for 2007 by Shawna McAlearney. The article, based on interviews with analysts from Ovum and other research firms, was very bullish on the potential of application virtualization. "Ovum analysts," McAlearney writes, "predict that the next wave of dynamic computing will take shape around application virtualization, which they say will simplify and reduce the cost of provisioning applications to desktops and laptops, as well as reduce the management burdens associated with application installations, conflicts and security."

One of the barriers to introducing dynamic computing is the up-front investment required to implement it. Trigence addresses this problem head-on. Trigence Capsules allow an organization to re-use existing, configured applications within the new environment created to support dynamic computing. In other words, organizations can create the service-oriented architecture without the need to rewrite applications and replace technologies. The use of application encapsulation to manage applications as part of a dynamic utility computing model allows enterprises to get the most out of what they already have. Businesses can attain a more rapid return on lower investments and the total cost of ownership (TCO) is drastically lower than other alternatives.

Posted by [Donn Rochette] at [04:57 PM] to Thought Capsules | Permalink

 

As we proceed boldly into a brave new world, one dominated by virtualized infrastructure of one form or another, some things remain consistent. As hardware capacity expands in significant proportion, applications aren't quite keeping pace at filling the capacity. Servers are already significantly under-utilized. Virtualization provides a viable means to better utilize hardware capacity by allowing multiple OS instances to exist on the same physical server.

By now we've all heard about the benefits of consolidation. This is a good thing. The value and the benefits of consolidation are real, and there are several alternatives to choose from as the technology matures. Hardware virtualization, as offered by VMWare and Xen, provides the flexibility to run multiple OSs. Paravirtualization offers slight improvement in performance compared to full hardware virtualization at the cost of significant complexity. OS virtualization such as Solaris Zones and SWsoft Virtuozzo provide flexibility with greatly improved performance. Native virtualization is similar to full hardware virtualization as it supports multiple disparate guest OSs and is based on virtualization support provided by advances in CPU technology. There's a solution here for your unique needs.

As your infrastructure becomes virtualized - storage, server and network - your flexibility and usage increases. This is a good thing... but what about the applications? Do the configuration management struggles that exist related to applications today go away in the context of a virtualized infrastructure? They don't - and this is where application virtualization comes in.

Enter Trigence Application Capsules, which are consistent with a common theme. Even with all of the server virtualization options available, companies still have the same problem with applications as they did in an all-physical server world. Existing management tools need to evolve along with your virtualized infrastructure. By extending the benefits of virtualization to the application, Application Capsules are an evolutionary component to the application configuration management morass. Trigence Application Capsules are not a new management tool: they are an adjunct to your tools, an extension of the reach of your existing tools.

Posted by [Donn Rochette] at [01:59 PM] to Thought Capsules | Permalink

 

There is big Linux news today as Novell has formally announced the release of SUSE Linux Enterprise 10: Novell Delivers Next-Generation Platform for the Open Enterprise. Both Server and Desktop versions were launched.

Posted by [Trigence] at [05:55 PM] to Industry News | Permalink

 

The founder of Virtual Iron, Alex Vasilevsky, wrote a post on the company weblog the other day called, "Paravirtualization is a Dead-End Approach." Without getting into an analysis of his post, the whole performance debate seems to be a very short term issue.

The longer term problem that must be solved is that any server virtualization approach leaves the enterprise with a more complex environment to manage. The real win from virtualization will come not from replicating overly complicated physical servers virtually but from the separation of the application from its underlying infrastructure.

Posted by [David Roth] at [04:55 PM] to Thought Capsules | Permalink

 

Alessandro Perilli of Virtualization.info also posted a Virtualization Industry Roadmap back in April 2006. It is skewed a little towards the big players and the Virtual Machine approach to virtualization, but that's where most of the buzz has been so far so that's appropriate. As the story of application virtualization is better defined, a broader range of virtualization approaches will certainly appear in the roadmap.

Posted by [Trigence] at [09:42 AM] to Industry News | Permalink

 

Virtualization.info is a great weblog that keeps track of all of the news in the world of virtualization. There's been so much news, however, blogger Alessandro Perilli often seems to lack the time to make commentary on all the news he points out. It's too bad, because on Sunday he posted a very interesting opinion on the potential for a few recent acquisitions to dominate the market for years: The virtualization market towards monopoly?

Posted by [Trigence] at [09:12 AM] to Industry News | Permalink

 

In the past couple of days, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz posted a two part riddle (part 1, part 2) about the newly-hired CIO of an important Wall Street company that brought a photo of the roof of her company's building to her first meeting with the CEO. The reason why she did that (which you can read about in part 2) is increasingly becoming a critical issue in data center computing. Here's a riddle of our own: how does Trigence address the same issue the Wall Streeter raised?

Posted by [Trigence] at [01:37 PM] to Industry News | Permalink

 

eWeek's Jeffrey Burt did a yeoman's job in pinning down a common understanding of virtualization in his 'Virtualization Vertigo' article a few weeks back. He pointed out, among other things, that server and storage virtualization vendors have recently been joined by I/O virtualization solutions. Add what AMD and Intel are planning on the processor level and the waters are getting very murky, very quickly.

Microsoft muddied the water in a big way two weeks ago when they announced their intention to buy Softricity, the desktop player in the 'virtual application' space. It seems the enterprise stack from top to bottom is now the target of virtualization solutions. As eWeek's Burt says, "as the benefits of virtualization - from greater data center flexibility to lower hardware, power and cooling costs - become more apparent, vendors are jumping in."

Trigence is all about increasing flexibility and reducing cost through virtualizing and moving applications. Unlike Microsoft/Softricity, our solution targets enterprise servers rather than the desktop. And unlike MS, we think the solution for 'greater data center flexibility' is not to stream applications to desktops, but rather move them between and among enterprise servers when, where and how you want.

By moving your applications safely and easily, servers can be retired, data centers consolidated, and as Jeffrey Burt says, flexibility ensues. But not only to reduce hardware operating costs as he suggests, but to bring flexibility to production environments rather than the develop/test labs where reports suggested 96% of virtualized server and OS solutions are ghetto-ized.

Focusing on the application, we think, helps clear the muddy waters of virtualization.

Posted by [Al Liebl] at [04:19 PM] to Thought Capsules | Permalink