VMworld 2010 is at its last day and VMware decided to place the second keynote today. The second keynote is usually more technical than the first one, but as virtualization.info readers know, the first keynote already was a split between vision/strategy and technology/roadmap , with both Paul Maritz, CEO, and Dr. Stephen Herrod, CTO and SVP of R&D on stage.  So today it will be interesting to see what will be presented. Rick Jackson, CMO, is on stage to introduce the day. The theme is “innovation”. Apparently, VMware wants to use today to reinforce its image as leading innovator. To do so it invited three guest speakers to show some cutting-edge technologies. The first one is Pranav Mistry , inventor of SixthSense. SixthSense is a wearable gestural interface that leverages a camera and a tiny projector mounted in a pendant to augment reality on any object around users. It projects information onto surfaces, walls, and other physical objects. A video of the prototype in use is shown. It’s almost exactly the futuristic interface seen in the Minority Report movie and even more than that. A lot of companies are working to bring to the market that interface, but Mistry’s project seems well beyond that. The second guest is Natan Liner , Intel Fellow and part of the Fluid Interfaces Group at the M.I.T. Media Lab. He introduces project LuminAR, a robotic lamp that combines a pico-projector, camera, and wireless computer in a compact form factor. This self-contained system enables users with just-in-time projected information and a gestural user interface, and it can be screwed into standard light fixtures everywhere. The long-term idea is to provide augmented reality through a new computer form fact that can fits into any standard lamp arm providing 120V AC. The third guest is Tan Le, Cofounder of Emotiv Systems . The company is working on a direct interface for the brain called Emotiv. Dr. Stephen Herrod is invited on stage to demonstrate how the interface, which only costs a few hundred dollars, works. Now the guests are on a very short panel with Jackson about the way we could rethink computing. Jackson closes the keynote with a simple message: innovators think out of the box and VMware adopters have been innovators. This is a rather subtle way to leverage the human emotions: VMware first inspired the audience with futuristic projects, then it suggested that virtualization has been and still is similarly innovative, and finally implied that anybody can be an innovator believing in its products and adopting them. Overall,  this has been one of the most interesting VMworld ever in the last few years, and VMware deserves some credit for the incredible improvement shown in messaging. Execution is an entirely different story that can’t be proven on stage but will be seen on the field in the next few months. Starting tomorrow, virtualization.info (and cloudcomputing.info) will restart usual coverage of the industry. There are more than 100 announcements that have been released during this week, so expect a lot of information to come. Labels: Events , VMware

Visit link:
virtualization.info

Here we go again. As usual virtualization.info is at the VMworld conference to live cover the keynotes and any other major announcement released by VMware during the event. Paul Maritz, CEO, is today’s keynote speaker. He will speak in front of 17,000 attendees, as Rick Jackson, CMO, confirmed on stage. Is VMworld on track to compete against the Oracle OpenWorld in terms of audience? Before Maritz performance, VMware starts with a funny video that tries to describe what cloud computing is without using any technical jargon. The choice demonstrates how early-stage this market still is considered. Martiz on stage. He reports that in 2010 the number of virtual machines surpasses for the first time the number of physical servers deployed (more than 10M). He also reports that VMware has over 25,000 partners and over 50,000 VMware Certified Professionals (VCP) worldwide. Maritz says that VMware is committed to innovate on automation and management to decrease OpEx. Seeing that the primary focus is on automation is very positive: datacenter orchestration has been overlooked for too much time. He also says that innovation should also focus on the way infrastructure resources should be purchased. Now Maritz is making a case for the SpringSource acquisition (and all the others related to that): are legacy apps on new infrastructure enough? VMware believes that the world embracing cloud computing would move on more sophisticated, next generation web applications , and this implies the need for a new application platform, made of management tools (Hyperic), open frameworks (Spring) and common services (APIs). In this new world the challenge is to grant end user access though a number of different new devices, while managing them as part of the enterprise infrastructure. So VMware sees the need for a new stack, made of three pieces: a new infrastructure, a new application platform and a new end user access. The message this year is extremely mature, and it definitively presents an articulated new mission. VMware is working to go well beyond its role as a virtualization player, and it’s doing a good job at communicating it during this keynote. Martiz leaves the stage to Dr. Stephen Herrod , CTO and Senior Vice President of R&D at VMware. He starts with a recap of the innovations introduced in vSphere 4.1, with a first focus on policy driven SLAs through Storage and Network I/O Controls. Herrod announces on stage the VMware’s acquisition of a company called Integrien . Integrien flagship product, Alive , is a real-time performance analytics solution that analyzes and correlates data across the monitored IT infrastructure. It will be interesting to see how Alive will integrate with the (many) other monitoring solutions VMware is offering today (including the SpringSource Hyperic). Herrod also announces the availability of vCloud Director 1.0 (formerly vCloud Service Director). Interestingly, VMware places this new product side by side with vSphere and vCenter as key tiers of the new infrastructure described by Maritz at the beginning of the keynote. VMware has another three new products to announce, all about security and all available today: vShield Endpoint 1.0 , vShield App 1.0 and vShield Edge 1.0 . vShield has been placed inside the new infrastructure as its fourth and last tier. Another interesting aspect of this keynote is that there’s no mention of “virtual machines”. The entire discussion is focused on “applications”. Now Herrod announces a thing called vFabric , the cloud application platform made with SpringSource, GemStone and other technologies acquired in the last year by VMware. vFabric offers application management, data management, messaging, dynamic load balancing and app server. Last but not least, Herrod announces the (expected) availability of VMware View 4.5 . It introduces support for Microsoft Windows 7, the offline VDI capability (through a type-2 VMM), a client for Apple Mac OS X and support for vSphere 4.1.   This page will be frequently updated to report about his speech. Keep refreshing! Labels: Events , VMware

See the original post:
virtualization.info

This week the CEOs of both VMware and Red Hat offered very interesting comments on cloud computing that the mainstream press has republished. First, Paul Maritz, VMware’s CEO, said that customers are now ready to invest in cloud computing after months of putting off the decision due to the economic downturn: There was a qualitative change in our customer base in the last 18 months…Now, customers really want to go do this. True or not, one thing is sure. Maritz has all interest in saying so since VMware is about to release its vCloud Service Director (vCSD) in mere two months . James Whitehurst, Red Hat’s CEO, did even better by saying that clouds can become the mother of all lock-ins: The industry has to get in front of the cloud wave and make sure this next generation infrastructure is defined in a way that’s friendly to customers, rather than to IT vendors. … Our customers can run the workload in their data center or migrate it to multiple cloud providers… and we’ll support you on it and your ISVs will support you on it. Whitehurst has all interest in saying so since Red Hat is working on a commercial implementation of the open source Deltacloud project , a meta-API that allows to interoperate with different cloud computing platforms.

Follow this link:
virtualization.info

In July 2008, the VMware Board of Directors voted to remove the founder Diane Greene as CEO of the company. Greene was offered another position that she declined, leaving the company that she created and led through one of the most impressive IPO in the IT history . Two months after her departure, his husband Mendel Rosenblum, left too . Rosenblum co-founded VMware and was the Chief Scientist declining the company vision. The board immediately replaced her with Paul Maritz, a long-time Microsoft executive that joined the EMC ecosystem after his startup Pi was acquired in February 2008.

Here is the original post:
virtualisation.info