Steve Kaplan Virtualization from the Trenches

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Wednesday, May 22, 2013

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DABCC > Virtualization Community Visionaries > Steve Kaplan Virtualization from the Trenches

Steve Kaplan Virtualization from the Trenches

Musings from the Virtualization Consulting Channel

Software is also eating the data center
Mark Andreesen’s famous August 2011 WSJ article, Why Software Is Eating the World, discusses how software companies, especially Silicon Valley firms, are disrupting industries across the planet. Most big data center players still cling to the hardware-based models of yore.
Monday, April 08, 2013 3:29:00 PM

UCS Central Facilitates Global Data Center Management
Since the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) first debuted in early 2009, I’ve written several articles on this site and for other venues extolling its unique value as a purposefully designed platform for hosting virtual infrastructure. Despite the previous lack of any server experience, Cisco is now tied IBM as the world’s #2 provider of x86 blade servers. Cisco upped the ante this morning with three new announcements enabling consolidated management of data center operations across the globe.
Monday, November 05, 2012 11:30:00 AM

VDI Provider Pano Logic Ceases Operations
This has not been a resounding year for pioneering virtual desktop device manufacturers. First Wyse, the inventor of the Windows terminal, gets purchased by Dell, and now the originator of the zero-client, Pano Logic, has appeared to suddenly go out of business.
Monday, November 05, 2012 5:17:00 AM

Getting Private Cloud? Better Change your Funding Model
The traditional data center is a mishmash of equipment, tools and operating systems – and project-based funding is largely to blame. This budgeting anachronism was sustainable when servers were physical, but causes problems in a virtualized environment. It’s anathema to private cloud.
Tuesday, September 25, 2012 4:20:00 PM

Microsoft recycles same old VMware smack
“I’m a virt guy, it’s all I know.” VMlimited’s polyester wearing head salesman, Tad, proudly touts his shortsightedness as part of the extensive Microsoft advertising campaign mocking VMware. Tad warns about the “hidden bummers of going too far beyond virtualization” from highway billboards, banner ads, paid keyword searches, print ads, and the VMlimited site itself.
Friday, June 01, 2012 10:48:00 PM

Addressing Concerns about the “Newness” of Cisco UCS
Despite Cisco’s recent entry into the “compute” data center sector, John Chambers said during the 10/24/2009 quarter earnings call that the UCS is experiencing, “…solid market reception with a very good initial ramp and order pipeline.” As the first optimized hosting platform for a virtualized data center, Cisco Unified Computing System has generated tremendous industry buzz with many organizations eager to acquire it.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009 2:38:00 AM

The Desktops May Be Virtual, But The ROI is Real
Fielding questions while on the VDI panel at last month’s Vail Pacific Crest Forum, it became apparent that investment analysts consider a lack of VDI ROI to be common knowledge. But while the savings resulting from desktop virtualization may be less obvious than with server consolidation, they nonetheless are often substantial.
Monday, September 28, 2009 4:55:00 AM

Will UCS Unify IT Staffs?
Traditional data centers tend to be segregated into functional silos – a model that has endured in the physical world largely because of the crisp lines of demarcation. Virtualization is shaking up the status quo and increasing demand for more efficient IT processes. Cisco’s UCS helps automate and streamline the stovepipe model by unifying network, storage and servers with virtualization. It also provides an opportunity for IT organizations to begin chipping away at those silo walls.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009 2:56:00 AM

Is VMware More Like Novell or Oracle?
David Cappuccio, in his blog for Gartner, Just a Thought; Will VMware become the next Novell?, draws several disconcerting parallels between VMware’s current virtualization industry dominance and a similar position enjoyed by Novell in the early 1990’s. Cappuccio wonders if VMware, like Novell, is going to get trounced by Microsoft.
Friday, July 03, 2009 11:09:00 AM

Cisco UCS – a Disruptive Platform
The media responded to Cisco's UCS announcement last month by rushing to categorize it as essentially a new type of blade server, albeit one with an advantage in performance capabilities. While UCS incorporates server blades, it goes well beyond the traditional idea of a server. UCS is an optimized hosting platform for virtual machines that unifies network, compute and storage access. UCS works hand in hand with VMware’s vSphere 4 to facilitate disruption of the traditional data center by accelerating widespread adoption of a completely virtualized architecture.
Tuesday, May 05, 2009 3:17:00 PM

VMware has its Head in the Clouds, but its Feet are Planted Firmly on the Ground
VMware made the largest announcement in the history of the company today when it officially unveiled VMware vSphere 4 (it ships on May 21, 2009). While VMware certainly made a big deal of the event – hosting 1,000 people at its Palo Alto headquarters, it still probably understated the significance. VMware vSphere 4 provides the performance, reliability, security and management to truly enable 100% data center virtualization.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009 2:27:00 PM

The Data Center Virtualization Impact on IT Administrators
Our weakening economy means the enormous savings resulting from a virtualized data center make its implementation still more compelling. And yet, fearing their IT staffs lack the skill sets required to effectively administer the new environment, management is often slow to roll out virtual infrastructure as their organization's production data center platform. The reality is that a VMware virtualized data center is very intuitive, and it is simpler, less demanding and far more resilient than a physical architecture. Rather than being encumbered with the burden of learning a new technology, IT staff are empowered by being able to accomplish more in significantly less time. Virtualization takes the best tools from an administrator's tool belt and makes them better.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008 11:22:00 AM

Virtualization and the Cisco Nexus Switch Combine to Kill Blade Servers
It is amazing how frequently we hear IT managers talk about deploying blade servers as an integral component of their new virtual infrastructures - as if there were an obvious synergy between VMware and blade server architectures. The opposite, in fact, is nearly always the case. There are three situations in which it makes sense to use blade servers in a physical (aka 1.0) data center: a limitation of data center space, the need to hot swap blade servers and a desire to simplify cable management.
Thursday, November 06, 2008 6:20:00 AM

Automating the Disaster Recovery Process through Virtualization
While virtualization simplifies and lowers the cost of disaster recovery, it leaves the challenges of automating the recovery of virtual machines. VMware’s new Site Recovery Manager application is similar to an ERP application in the way it defines business processes and forces organizations to adopt a dynamic but process-driven recovery framework.
Wednesday, August 06, 2008 12:23:00 AM

The Coming Virtual Appliance War
Microsoft extends most of its virtualization licensing benefits to platforms other than just its own Virtual Server. An organization, for instance, can run up to four instances of Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition on a VMware ESX Server by purchasing just one license. Microsoft’s stance in regards to virtual appliances, though, remains unclear.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007 12:49:00 AM

Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 Debuts
Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 launched on March 8, and it includes a host of new features and enhancements in that can provide significant incentive to incorporate to make the upgrade. The old differentiation between Presentation Server (Advanced and Enterprise) and Citrix AccessSuite is gone. Now there are just three versions of Presentation Server: Advanced, Enterprise and Platinum.
Friday, March 09, 2007 4:59:00 PM

How the New Microsoft Licensing Affects VMware Environments
Microsoft is a huge company with a vast number of products. Licensing can be, to say the least, confusing. The virtualization environment has been particularly challenging in obtaining clarification around licensing. This is probably due, in part, to the fact that Microsoft has previously not viewed virtualization as an alternative to physical computing. We've advised our clients on licensing issues according to our best educated guess – but have been unable to get written confirmation from Microsoft.
Monday, March 06, 2006 12:01:00 AM

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	Latest Steve Kaplan Articles Software is also eating the data center UCS Central Facilitates Global Data Center Management VDI Provider Pano Logic Ceases Operations


	About Steve Kaplan Steve Kaplan is Vice President, Data Center Virtualization Practice for INX, a publicly traded professional services firm. Kaplan formerly co-founded and ran AccessFlow which was acquired by INX in June 2008. Although just three years old at the time of acquisition, AccessFlow was recognized as a top virtualization consulting firm and was named the VMware Rising Star of the Americas at VMworld 2007. Kaplan previously co-founded and ran RYNO Technology which was named the Citrix Partner of the Year for the United States before being acquired by MTM in 2001. He has sat on the advisory boards of several industry leaders including a position on the Microsoft Partner Advisory Council, and was a Microsoft MVP for Terminal Server for four years. In 2008, he was named one of the charter VMware vExperts. Kaplan has authored scores of published books, articles and white papers on various IT topics including security, disaster recovery and regulatory compliance. He originated the utility initiative of extending incentives to organizations that virtualize. Kaplan is a frequent speaker across the globe and delivered the keynote address at ThinPower in Norway. He holds a B.S. in business administration from U.C. Berkeley and an MBA with an emphasis in both marketing and finance from Northwestern’s J. L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management. Contact: steve.kaplan@inxi.com

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