I have uncovered some grossly underhand tactics by mischievous colleagues of mine to deliberately tamper with and manufacture results of my recent poll entitled "What do you think of my blog?" so I have reluctantly removed it. A free and fair voting procedure is an important part of the democracy we enjoy and concerted efforts to falsify results is not something that can be tolerated. Just ask the BBC. All complaints concerning the removal of this poll should be forwarded to Jamie Garner at COMPUTERLINKS.
And the next time I pose that question, I won't be so stupid as to offer "You're an idiot" as an answer :-)
Monday 30 June 2008
Hyper-V release
After about 3 years of coding and development (a lot of which was, by all accounts, carried out by XenSource before the acquisition by Citrix), Microsoft have finally released Hyper-V, their long-awaited hypervisor and management system. I haven't seen it myself, and wouldn't actually know what to do with it if I had, so I'll just concentrate on the commercial impacts I believe this will have.
According to reports I have read and people I have spoken to though, the first version of this product isn't exactly up to much with regard to features and functionality. But then it doesn't really need to be. It will be baked into Windows Server 2008 and will be essentially free so it's unlikely to ever really set the world alight. Having said that, I'm sure it'll be good enough to do the basics of virtualisation and thereby you will be able to enjoy the benefits you get from this process - consolidation of servers, more dynamic data-centres, reduced need for power, cooling, space etc. - by using Microsoft products instead of a competitor's. This was actually, in my opinion, always one of the main drivers behind Hyper-V. Doing VMWare some serious damage. More on that in a second.
So, alongside hurting the dastardly VMWare (who have successfully managed to really rub the guys at Redmond up the wrong way), why have Microsoft gone down this route? How are they going to make any extra money from it? Internal discussions with Dominic and David here at COMPUTERLINKS led us to 3 main reasons for doing it:
1) The hypervisor itself will cost $28. Times that by the amount of server licenses Microsoft sell and that's not a bad start, particularly as the Hyper-V edition of Windows Server 2008 will be the default. But I'm sure Microsoft are expecting improved revenues of the management suites around it too. Things like SMS, MOM, Virtual Machine System Centre and other management tools as well as the advancements around VECD (Vista Enterprise Centralised Desktop or virtual desktops), which ideally need a virtualised datacentre to function properly, will also add incremental business in no small fashion.
2) The world is moving that way anyway. Let's not forget, Microsoft are way behind the curve on this. They failed to move early enough on the wave of virtualisation, allowed VMWare to build up a substantial lead and are desperately trying to catch up now. The business reasons for virtualisation and dynamic datacentres are robust enough for this to take off in a big way and Microsoft simply can't get up amongst the leaders early enough.
3) I saw a documentary on Bill Gates a couple of weeks ago where Sir Alan Sugar was also interviewed. He referred to the Microsoft sales guy who came to try and sell him an operating system all those years ago as a "transatlantic smoothie". He also refused to buy MS-DOS for his Amstrad computers until the cost came down so far that it was as good as free. Microsoft (and Gates admitted this freely), were doing nothing but seeding the market. Any income from it was good but the main point was that, if a customer was using Microsoft products, that meant they weren't using a competitor's. Google had a similar approach. Offer your utilities for free for as long as it takes for people to become dependent on them, then bring in the charges - mainly in their case to organisations who want to advertise to those people using your utilities, but also (I'm sure the future will bring this) to those people themselves. Ironically enough, Google, and the whole concept of cloud computing, probably now offer the largest threat to Microsoft's current domination of global IT, but that is a whole new topic for another day.
So where does this leave Citrix then? They have spent the last 13 or 14 years practically selling Terminal Services CALs for Microsoft, spent 500 million dollars last year on a hypervisor and are now in the unenviable position of having to get a return on that investment just as their biggest partner brings out their own competitive solution. (All this "co-opetion" speak no longer floats my boat I'm afraid. It's a competitive product, just as VMWare ESX is.) And the big difference this time around is that Citrix don't have the protection of the TS CAL story to help them out.
Imagine the scenario. You've bought Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V. It doesn't quite do everything VMWare does but you've saved your company many thousands of pounds at the same time and can live without the schnick-schnack. Why would you then decide to buy Citrix to "add value" to your Hyper-V? With Terminal Services it was different - that's mission critical so the proposition that Citrix offered on top of TS was justifiable. Virtualising servers and managing them isn't really mission critical. It may become so in the future but it's not right now. Brian Madden thinks it will take 2 years for VDI to become mainstream and also, interestingly, thinks Citrix will actually ditch XenServer altogether.
I wouldn't perhaps go that far but I also have my doubts. Can this nice, cushy, you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours relationship with Microsoft last much longer?
Postscript 01/07/08: Apologies, I misunderstood Brian Madden in the article he wrote to which I linked above. He is not predicting the end of XenServer, he is predicting the end of Citrix' support for Xen, the open-source hypervisor, as he now clarifies in this article.
According to reports I have read and people I have spoken to though, the first version of this product isn't exactly up to much with regard to features and functionality. But then it doesn't really need to be. It will be baked into Windows Server 2008 and will be essentially free so it's unlikely to ever really set the world alight. Having said that, I'm sure it'll be good enough to do the basics of virtualisation and thereby you will be able to enjoy the benefits you get from this process - consolidation of servers, more dynamic data-centres, reduced need for power, cooling, space etc. - by using Microsoft products instead of a competitor's. This was actually, in my opinion, always one of the main drivers behind Hyper-V. Doing VMWare some serious damage. More on that in a second.
So, alongside hurting the dastardly VMWare (who have successfully managed to really rub the guys at Redmond up the wrong way), why have Microsoft gone down this route? How are they going to make any extra money from it? Internal discussions with Dominic and David here at COMPUTERLINKS led us to 3 main reasons for doing it:
1) The hypervisor itself will cost $28. Times that by the amount of server licenses Microsoft sell and that's not a bad start, particularly as the Hyper-V edition of Windows Server 2008 will be the default. But I'm sure Microsoft are expecting improved revenues of the management suites around it too. Things like SMS, MOM, Virtual Machine System Centre and other management tools as well as the advancements around VECD (Vista Enterprise Centralised Desktop or virtual desktops), which ideally need a virtualised datacentre to function properly, will also add incremental business in no small fashion.
2) The world is moving that way anyway. Let's not forget, Microsoft are way behind the curve on this. They failed to move early enough on the wave of virtualisation, allowed VMWare to build up a substantial lead and are desperately trying to catch up now. The business reasons for virtualisation and dynamic datacentres are robust enough for this to take off in a big way and Microsoft simply can't get up amongst the leaders early enough.
3) I saw a documentary on Bill Gates a couple of weeks ago where Sir Alan Sugar was also interviewed. He referred to the Microsoft sales guy who came to try and sell him an operating system all those years ago as a "transatlantic smoothie". He also refused to buy MS-DOS for his Amstrad computers until the cost came down so far that it was as good as free. Microsoft (and Gates admitted this freely), were doing nothing but seeding the market. Any income from it was good but the main point was that, if a customer was using Microsoft products, that meant they weren't using a competitor's. Google had a similar approach. Offer your utilities for free for as long as it takes for people to become dependent on them, then bring in the charges - mainly in their case to organisations who want to advertise to those people using your utilities, but also (I'm sure the future will bring this) to those people themselves. Ironically enough, Google, and the whole concept of cloud computing, probably now offer the largest threat to Microsoft's current domination of global IT, but that is a whole new topic for another day.
So where does this leave Citrix then? They have spent the last 13 or 14 years practically selling Terminal Services CALs for Microsoft, spent 500 million dollars last year on a hypervisor and are now in the unenviable position of having to get a return on that investment just as their biggest partner brings out their own competitive solution. (All this "co-opetion" speak no longer floats my boat I'm afraid. It's a competitive product, just as VMWare ESX is.) And the big difference this time around is that Citrix don't have the protection of the TS CAL story to help them out.
Imagine the scenario. You've bought Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V. It doesn't quite do everything VMWare does but you've saved your company many thousands of pounds at the same time and can live without the schnick-schnack. Why would you then decide to buy Citrix to "add value" to your Hyper-V? With Terminal Services it was different - that's mission critical so the proposition that Citrix offered on top of TS was justifiable. Virtualising servers and managing them isn't really mission critical. It may become so in the future but it's not right now. Brian Madden thinks it will take 2 years for VDI to become mainstream and also, interestingly, thinks Citrix will actually ditch XenServer altogether.
I wouldn't perhaps go that far but I also have my doubts. Can this nice, cushy, you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours relationship with Microsoft last much longer?
Postscript 01/07/08: Apologies, I misunderstood Brian Madden in the article he wrote to which I linked above. He is not predicting the end of XenServer, he is predicting the end of Citrix' support for Xen, the open-source hypervisor, as he now clarifies in this article.
Friday 27 June 2008
Give the bean counters some slack
I found out yesterday that a reseller I know reasonably well went into administration this week. I won't mention their name here as I don't think it's fair to broadcast it any more than is necessary, both legally-speaking and in terms of protecting the owner's dignity. Suffice to say, they were a Citrix partner, although (thankfully) not one of ours, and were heavily involved in the server-based computing/thin client world.
To be perfectly honest, I hadn't really noticed much in the way of a slow-down in the economy or any real tangible signs of a credit crunch yet, but maybe it is more serious than I had originally thought. Of course there are any number of reasons why a company goes bust, it may not necessarily have been the credit crunch. Sometimes I guess it only takes one late payment from an end user to tip things over the edge and the cleaners are called in. However this reseller had been around for a while and I wonder if economic factors did play a role.
Which got me thinking a little bit about the way we regard our accounts departments, otherwise known by many as the "sales prevention departments". In sales, we concentrate solely, as we should, on getting as much business in as possible and, if we had it our way, every deal would go through on 30 days credit. The finance directors and credit control managers of this world, however, are paid to ensure they actually get the money for all these purchase orders and it's fair to say they don't have an easy job. We do all the hard work by getting the deals in and, at the last minute (literally), we are prevented from closing that deal by our own colleagues. They then get it in the neck from both us and the customer.
But do we actually do all the hard work? Who pays our salaries? Is it sales, by getting the deals in, or accounts, by getting the hard cash for those deals in?
When I told our accounts department of the above news, I found the reaction, which was of genuine personal frustration, really interesting. I guess it's a black mark on their book - they authorised the credit for the deal so it's sort of their responsibility when it goes wrong.
I, for one, have suffered some frustration with accounts departments in the past few years but, knowing this particular reseller as well as I do and seeing the pain that the news of the reseller's plight caused our finance team has made me understand their situation much better. We in sales have no idea of company backgrounds and general financial health and, to be honest, it's not our role to care too much about it, as long as they place orders. But somebody does need to care. They're not the evil dark side, they are securing our future, both as a company and as an employee.
I think I will go easier on the bean counters from now on. Well, a bit anyway...
To be perfectly honest, I hadn't really noticed much in the way of a slow-down in the economy or any real tangible signs of a credit crunch yet, but maybe it is more serious than I had originally thought. Of course there are any number of reasons why a company goes bust, it may not necessarily have been the credit crunch. Sometimes I guess it only takes one late payment from an end user to tip things over the edge and the cleaners are called in. However this reseller had been around for a while and I wonder if economic factors did play a role.
Which got me thinking a little bit about the way we regard our accounts departments, otherwise known by many as the "sales prevention departments". In sales, we concentrate solely, as we should, on getting as much business in as possible and, if we had it our way, every deal would go through on 30 days credit. The finance directors and credit control managers of this world, however, are paid to ensure they actually get the money for all these purchase orders and it's fair to say they don't have an easy job. We do all the hard work by getting the deals in and, at the last minute (literally), we are prevented from closing that deal by our own colleagues. They then get it in the neck from both us and the customer.
But do we actually do all the hard work? Who pays our salaries? Is it sales, by getting the deals in, or accounts, by getting the hard cash for those deals in?
When I told our accounts department of the above news, I found the reaction, which was of genuine personal frustration, really interesting. I guess it's a black mark on their book - they authorised the credit for the deal so it's sort of their responsibility when it goes wrong.
I, for one, have suffered some frustration with accounts departments in the past few years but, knowing this particular reseller as well as I do and seeing the pain that the news of the reseller's plight caused our finance team has made me understand their situation much better. We in sales have no idea of company backgrounds and general financial health and, to be honest, it's not our role to care too much about it, as long as they place orders. But somebody does need to care. They're not the evil dark side, they are securing our future, both as a company and as an employee.
I think I will go easier on the bean counters from now on. Well, a bit anyway...
Wednesday 18 June 2008
We're getting a new Daddy
As you may have seen in the press over the last couple of days (on Channel EMEA, CRN or Bloomberg amongst others), a company called Platin 274 which is financed by Barclays Private Equity in the background, has made a friendly offer to acquire the COMPUTERLINKS group for €15.50 per share. This values our company at €104 million or approximately 82 million pounds.
I am extremely pleased by this news. With the current rate of consolidation in our industry (Arrow buying DNS, DNS buying Centia, Avnet buying part of Magirus, Avnet potentially buying Horizon and so on), it was only a matter of time before we were snapped up. Our growth has been exceptional over the last few years, especially in such a competitive market where product margins are being reduced at such a rate of knots, and this growth was in no way reflected in our stock market price. For a company that now has a major presence in 17 or 18 countries worldwide and consistently showed contra-market upward development, hovering around 11 or 12 Euros a share was simply not good enough. With a powerful financial partner behind us, I think we can move forward a lot more quickly and dynamically without the pressure of being a listed company and all the inevitable shackles and responsibilities to share-holders that that entails.
The most important thing for me however, is that we weren't acquired by a competitor. Niche players such as us who offer genuine value to the customers who buy from us, as opposed to just shifting boxes out the door, are becoming thin on the ground. I have developed a great affinity to COMPUTERLINKS, they have served me well and I like to think the reverse is also true. So I would definitely not appreciate having to work for another distributor, purely interested in accessing our customer base with no understanding of the company spirit. This has happened to some of our competitors recently and I'm really glad our board found a serious, cash-rich, long-term backer not already associated with the industry.
Finally, I also think Barclays have uncovered an absolute bargain. 82 million pounds, bearing in mind other recent technology acquisitions, is a steal in my opinion. 82 million would have got you almost exactly a third of XenSource, a company with a turnover, if the grapevine is to be believed, of 5 million dollars. Maybe that's not quite apples and apples but I wouldn't be surprised if Barclays look to sell COMPUTERLINKS in a few years time for an awful lot more than 104 million Euro. Let's hope staff get share options then...
I am extremely pleased by this news. With the current rate of consolidation in our industry (Arrow buying DNS, DNS buying Centia, Avnet buying part of Magirus, Avnet potentially buying Horizon and so on), it was only a matter of time before we were snapped up. Our growth has been exceptional over the last few years, especially in such a competitive market where product margins are being reduced at such a rate of knots, and this growth was in no way reflected in our stock market price. For a company that now has a major presence in 17 or 18 countries worldwide and consistently showed contra-market upward development, hovering around 11 or 12 Euros a share was simply not good enough. With a powerful financial partner behind us, I think we can move forward a lot more quickly and dynamically without the pressure of being a listed company and all the inevitable shackles and responsibilities to share-holders that that entails.
The most important thing for me however, is that we weren't acquired by a competitor. Niche players such as us who offer genuine value to the customers who buy from us, as opposed to just shifting boxes out the door, are becoming thin on the ground. I have developed a great affinity to COMPUTERLINKS, they have served me well and I like to think the reverse is also true. So I would definitely not appreciate having to work for another distributor, purely interested in accessing our customer base with no understanding of the company spirit. This has happened to some of our competitors recently and I'm really glad our board found a serious, cash-rich, long-term backer not already associated with the industry.
Finally, I also think Barclays have uncovered an absolute bargain. 82 million pounds, bearing in mind other recent technology acquisitions, is a steal in my opinion. 82 million would have got you almost exactly a third of XenSource, a company with a turnover, if the grapevine is to be believed, of 5 million dollars. Maybe that's not quite apples and apples but I wouldn't be surprised if Barclays look to sell COMPUTERLINKS in a few years time for an awful lot more than 104 million Euro. Let's hope staff get share options then...
Tuesday 17 June 2008
Citrix iForum - part 5
And finally... Green IT.
I've heard a lot of people banging on about Green IT in the last year or so and, in actual fact, I personally am responsible for some of that banging. I have always thought that virtualisation, as a concept, is fantastic in itself in lowering carbon emissions by reducing power consumption and so on but I must admit I had never considered the impact to be that huge. That was until I saw the Green IT speech by Reed Managed Services.
They reckon they are the largest 64-bit Citrix user in the UK and have recently won a "Green Oscar", whatever that is. Instead of what used to be 29 users on average on a blade, they can now get up to 100.
Add in a whole host of WYSE terminals, which use 12 watts of power instead of 75 with a PC, and a virtualised server infrastructure using VMWare (only because XenServer wasn't around 2 years ago of course) and Reed not only made their company completely carbon-neutral but saved 26% of their IT budget in the process. Which I thought was pretty impressive.
The speaker also suggested many other ways that IT manufacturers can further reduce carbon footprints such as using smaller packaging, implementing fewer delivery drops into the shipping process, providing 100% recyclable packaging and removing instruction manuals completely and just putting them online instead. Apparently it's possible to get 99% of packaging to be recyclable currently. The other 1% is the bubble wrap. One bright spark in the audience suggested we put CO2 in the bubbles, which I thought was quite amusing.
I think I'll bang on about Green IT a bit more now.
I've heard a lot of people banging on about Green IT in the last year or so and, in actual fact, I personally am responsible for some of that banging. I have always thought that virtualisation, as a concept, is fantastic in itself in lowering carbon emissions by reducing power consumption and so on but I must admit I had never considered the impact to be that huge. That was until I saw the Green IT speech by Reed Managed Services.
They reckon they are the largest 64-bit Citrix user in the UK and have recently won a "Green Oscar", whatever that is. Instead of what used to be 29 users on average on a blade, they can now get up to 100.
Add in a whole host of WYSE terminals, which use 12 watts of power instead of 75 with a PC, and a virtualised server infrastructure using VMWare (only because XenServer wasn't around 2 years ago of course) and Reed not only made their company completely carbon-neutral but saved 26% of their IT budget in the process. Which I thought was pretty impressive.
The speaker also suggested many other ways that IT manufacturers can further reduce carbon footprints such as using smaller packaging, implementing fewer delivery drops into the shipping process, providing 100% recyclable packaging and removing instruction manuals completely and just putting them online instead. Apparently it's possible to get 99% of packaging to be recyclable currently. The other 1% is the bubble wrap. One bright spark in the audience suggested we put CO2 in the bubbles, which I thought was quite amusing.
I think I'll bang on about Green IT a bit more now.
Citrix iForum - part 4
I actually attended one particular session at iForum that I didn't even mean to atttend. I walked into the wrong room by accident but, due to the fact that about 30 pairs of eyes revolved 180 degrees in unison thanks to the door slamming hard behind me, I then felt compelled to sit down and shut up anyway. As it turned out, it was all about virtualisation and security and was thoroughly fascinating. Anyhow, as a distributor that built its reputation on security products, I also felt as though I was doing my bit for COMPUTERLINKS at the same time.
The talk was given by Chris Mayers, a Citrix guy who I think I've met before at their Cambridge R & D labs when the Access Gateway product was released. He's a very interesting speaker actually. Completely unassuming but authoritative nevertheless and with a soft, smooth voice I could listen to all day. I think he should quit this IT lark and go and do the speaking clock or the shipping forecast on Radio 4. I found him very entertaining. I love listening to people who so obviously know their topic inside out and I'm sure I won't be able to do his speech any justice at all here.
He brought up lots of important points however I only managed to note down a few. The aforementioned Citrix bag had a velcro fastener on it and I didn't think that, after my escapades with the slamming door, any more noise disturbance by getting out my notebook would have gone down particularly well.
Have you ever heard of Hyperjacking? I hadn't but apparently it exists. It means attacks on the hypervisor and the virtualisation layer and is already becoming more and more prevalent. Chris said a lot more work needs to be done around this by the likes of McAfee, Symantec, Trend and the rest of them but, oddly enough, a hypervisor-based server could actually be less prone to this sort of attack than a normal one in some situations. The reason being that some malware will automatically shut off if it thinks it's entered a virtualised environment because it will presume that it has been snared by a honeypot. Best not leave it at that and hope for the best though I guess.
Another point made was that, in a virtualised environment, there may well be less potential for user administration error. The natural separation of duties that occurs in normal environments, i.e. one person (or team) looks after the servers, another looks after the desktops and yet another the security and so on, does not necessarily need to happen in virtual server deployments. Using virtual firewalls and anti-malware devices instead of physical and putting them on gold builds could reduce the amount of people required for these tasks and therefore make the organisation as a whole less vulnerable. This could play an important part in PCI-DSS qualification and maintenance.
However, it's not all good. With virtual servers, memory is now disk. If you were to stop a server at the wrong time, you may well find all sorts of interesting information that, normally, would have been saved to disk and encrypted that is now in memory instead. Also, time can go backwards just as easily as forwards in virtual worlds. Simple roll-back is one of the main benefits of virtualising servers but can you always be sure, by going back, that all the necessary patches and security updates have then been installed? If so, how would this be policed?
I think Chris' speech may well have raised as many questions as it did answers but it is undoubtedly something that will dominate future developments in this area. Chris actually appealed for everyone to put pressure on their application suppliers to ensure not only compatibility but also security for their apps in a virtual world. I know Tripwire, for one, are doing a lot of work around this. One of my colleagues informs me the virtualisation security checker recently released on their website has had hundreds of thousands of downloads in just a few days. Currently it only works with VMWare but I'm sure they'll see the light eventually.
Hypervisors are typically small and sit on bare metal rather than the OS but does that make them safer? I am certainly not qualified to say but I expect a lot of companies to be jumping on the bandwaggon of telling us "NO!!! BUY OUR PRODUCT OTHERWISE YOUR VIRTUAL SERVERS ARE DOOMED!!!" any month now.
P.S. if you'd like to read up further on this, I noticed Chris was also quoted in ZDNet recently.
The talk was given by Chris Mayers, a Citrix guy who I think I've met before at their Cambridge R & D labs when the Access Gateway product was released. He's a very interesting speaker actually. Completely unassuming but authoritative nevertheless and with a soft, smooth voice I could listen to all day. I think he should quit this IT lark and go and do the speaking clock or the shipping forecast on Radio 4. I found him very entertaining. I love listening to people who so obviously know their topic inside out and I'm sure I won't be able to do his speech any justice at all here.
He brought up lots of important points however I only managed to note down a few. The aforementioned Citrix bag had a velcro fastener on it and I didn't think that, after my escapades with the slamming door, any more noise disturbance by getting out my notebook would have gone down particularly well.
Have you ever heard of Hyperjacking? I hadn't but apparently it exists. It means attacks on the hypervisor and the virtualisation layer and is already becoming more and more prevalent. Chris said a lot more work needs to be done around this by the likes of McAfee, Symantec, Trend and the rest of them but, oddly enough, a hypervisor-based server could actually be less prone to this sort of attack than a normal one in some situations. The reason being that some malware will automatically shut off if it thinks it's entered a virtualised environment because it will presume that it has been snared by a honeypot. Best not leave it at that and hope for the best though I guess.
Another point made was that, in a virtualised environment, there may well be less potential for user administration error. The natural separation of duties that occurs in normal environments, i.e. one person (or team) looks after the servers, another looks after the desktops and yet another the security and so on, does not necessarily need to happen in virtual server deployments. Using virtual firewalls and anti-malware devices instead of physical and putting them on gold builds could reduce the amount of people required for these tasks and therefore make the organisation as a whole less vulnerable. This could play an important part in PCI-DSS qualification and maintenance.
However, it's not all good. With virtual servers, memory is now disk. If you were to stop a server at the wrong time, you may well find all sorts of interesting information that, normally, would have been saved to disk and encrypted that is now in memory instead. Also, time can go backwards just as easily as forwards in virtual worlds. Simple roll-back is one of the main benefits of virtualising servers but can you always be sure, by going back, that all the necessary patches and security updates have then been installed? If so, how would this be policed?
I think Chris' speech may well have raised as many questions as it did answers but it is undoubtedly something that will dominate future developments in this area. Chris actually appealed for everyone to put pressure on their application suppliers to ensure not only compatibility but also security for their apps in a virtual world. I know Tripwire, for one, are doing a lot of work around this. One of my colleagues informs me the virtualisation security checker recently released on their website has had hundreds of thousands of downloads in just a few days. Currently it only works with VMWare but I'm sure they'll see the light eventually.
Hypervisors are typically small and sit on bare metal rather than the OS but does that make them safer? I am certainly not qualified to say but I expect a lot of companies to be jumping on the bandwaggon of telling us "NO!!! BUY OUR PRODUCT OTHERWISE YOUR VIRTUAL SERVERS ARE DOOMED!!!" any month now.
P.S. if you'd like to read up further on this, I noticed Chris was also quoted in ZDNet recently.
Wednesday 11 June 2008
Citrix iForum - part 3
One of the so-called Super Sessions at iForum was conducted by Ian Pratt, who is a professor at the University of Cambridge and was one of the original founders and writers of the Xen hypervisor. His is a rather interesting story that started in the early noughties, when he decided that hypervisors should be small, stable and, most importantly, free. It wasn't until 2004, though, that it saw the spawning of XenSource, which provided a fully supported, chargeable product based on Xen. XenSource, as I would hope you're aware, was then bought by Citrix last year for 500 million dollars (hope he had some share options!). I certainly didn't want to miss the opportunity to listen to a genuinely brilliant academic and about 150 other people agreed with me.
Ian was talking about what a dynamic data centre would really comprise of. You may well be aware of a product called Provisioning Server, it originated from Citrix's acquisition of Ardence a while back. Provisioning Server does exactly what it says really, it provisions both virtual and physical machines from one image stored at the back-end. Once you have your gold build, you can replicate that out, very quickly and in a uniform fashion, to as many servers as you like. What often used to take hours can now be completed in just a few minutes.
This product, according to Pratt, transforms a deadweight lump of a data centre into an agile, dynamic, lively, moving thing, capable of automatically adapting capacity on the fly for ever-changing work-loads. It doesn't do it on its own, however. There are one or two other things that contribute to a large degree and, I must admit, I didn't immediately think of them until Ian mentioned them.
One is Workflow Studio, which is currently in beta code. This enables you to pre-program and automate run-of-the-mill tasks such as powering servers up and down, adding new users etc., by configuring a workflow on an easy-to-use GUI. It ties in with all of the Citrix products, obviously, but, interestingly, with 3rd-party products too. The possibilities are endless...
Another is EdgeSight - monitoring the performance of the end user's applications and feeding that data back in a measurable format. This would potentially provide the raw data that determine how the data centre ultimately reacts.
The other features Ian mentioned that are integral to a dynamic data-centre are embedded into the XenServer product itself.
Live migration, i.e. taking a running virtual machine and moving it from one physical server to another, provides not only great resilience and disaster recovery options, but also contributes, in no mean way, to the agility mentioned earlier. Should an SLA require it, for example, a user's session can be moved to a server that is currently less busy and can provide better performance. Alternatively, you could allow it to work as a kind of manual load balancer.
Resource pooling provides a way of allowing virtual machines to share resources and talk to one another. This enables them to make intelligent decisions on where the next VM should be created for example.
3rd-party vendor inclusion - the creators of XenSource and XenServer have always had a very open-door policy to co-operation with other software and hardware manufacturers - hardly surprising considering the open source background. This extends to storage too. A lot of companies do storage but EMC (the owners of VMWare), Symantec and NetApp are probably the best known. These companies have a an awful lot of clever machinery to do what they have to do and XenServer uses APIs to leverage this. Such things as snapshotting and machine-cloning is not done in the XenServer software but provided through partners. Why re-invent the wheel? Why not let customers continue to use what they're already using? Makes sense to me.
So, why would you want a dynamic data centre then? One partner of ours has already pointed out that, outside the enterprise, say 100 server estates and more, they don't really see the point of it all.
Pratt maintains these are the main reasons:
1) Administrative policy enforcement - backups, firewalls, malware prevention etc. can all be enforced through providing gold builds and updating those gold builds regularly. If all of your servers had the same config because there was no other way to provision a server other than to use the gold build, wouldn't you sleep a little better at night?
2) Abstracting physical world complexity, e.g. multi-path storage and networking - sorry, I was too busy writing the last bit to get what Ian meant by this and, to be honest, it was a bit too sandals, beards and BO for me.
3) Simplifies application-stack certification - once you know a particular application works on a particular OS, you can set up your system to always that app provisioned onto that server OS. That can be taken one step further by establishing which OSs run well on which hypervisors and even one step further than that by ensuring a particular hypervisor is compatible with the hardware bare metal beneath.
4) Near-native performance - we are very close to a zero footprint hypervisor these days. XenServer is not much more than 50,000-odd lines of code as it is, but with recent developments, you can hardly tell a server has a hypervisor on it in terms of the performance of that server's nuts and bolts. Not necessarily a reason TO go down the route of creating a dynamic data centre but, at least, eradication of a potential reason why NOT to.
3rd-generation virtualisation, as Ian Pratt called it, is all about moving from server consolidation to the concept of: Monitor -> Decide -> Act. In Citrix product terms, that's obviously EdgeSight -> Workflow Studio -> Provisioning Server, all underpinned by XenServer.
Ian was talking about what a dynamic data centre would really comprise of. You may well be aware of a product called Provisioning Server, it originated from Citrix's acquisition of Ardence a while back. Provisioning Server does exactly what it says really, it provisions both virtual and physical machines from one image stored at the back-end. Once you have your gold build, you can replicate that out, very quickly and in a uniform fashion, to as many servers as you like. What often used to take hours can now be completed in just a few minutes.
This product, according to Pratt, transforms a deadweight lump of a data centre into an agile, dynamic, lively, moving thing, capable of automatically adapting capacity on the fly for ever-changing work-loads. It doesn't do it on its own, however. There are one or two other things that contribute to a large degree and, I must admit, I didn't immediately think of them until Ian mentioned them.
One is Workflow Studio, which is currently in beta code. This enables you to pre-program and automate run-of-the-mill tasks such as powering servers up and down, adding new users etc., by configuring a workflow on an easy-to-use GUI. It ties in with all of the Citrix products, obviously, but, interestingly, with 3rd-party products too. The possibilities are endless...
Another is EdgeSight - monitoring the performance of the end user's applications and feeding that data back in a measurable format. This would potentially provide the raw data that determine how the data centre ultimately reacts.
The other features Ian mentioned that are integral to a dynamic data-centre are embedded into the XenServer product itself.
Live migration, i.e. taking a running virtual machine and moving it from one physical server to another, provides not only great resilience and disaster recovery options, but also contributes, in no mean way, to the agility mentioned earlier. Should an SLA require it, for example, a user's session can be moved to a server that is currently less busy and can provide better performance. Alternatively, you could allow it to work as a kind of manual load balancer.
Resource pooling provides a way of allowing virtual machines to share resources and talk to one another. This enables them to make intelligent decisions on where the next VM should be created for example.
3rd-party vendor inclusion - the creators of XenSource and XenServer have always had a very open-door policy to co-operation with other software and hardware manufacturers - hardly surprising considering the open source background. This extends to storage too. A lot of companies do storage but EMC (the owners of VMWare), Symantec and NetApp are probably the best known. These companies have a an awful lot of clever machinery to do what they have to do and XenServer uses APIs to leverage this. Such things as snapshotting and machine-cloning is not done in the XenServer software but provided through partners. Why re-invent the wheel? Why not let customers continue to use what they're already using? Makes sense to me.
So, why would you want a dynamic data centre then? One partner of ours has already pointed out that, outside the enterprise, say 100 server estates and more, they don't really see the point of it all.
Pratt maintains these are the main reasons:
1) Administrative policy enforcement - backups, firewalls, malware prevention etc. can all be enforced through providing gold builds and updating those gold builds regularly. If all of your servers had the same config because there was no other way to provision a server other than to use the gold build, wouldn't you sleep a little better at night?
2) Abstracting physical world complexity, e.g. multi-path storage and networking - sorry, I was too busy writing the last bit to get what Ian meant by this and, to be honest, it was a bit too sandals, beards and BO for me.
3) Simplifies application-stack certification - once you know a particular application works on a particular OS, you can set up your system to always that app provisioned onto that server OS. That can be taken one step further by establishing which OSs run well on which hypervisors and even one step further than that by ensuring a particular hypervisor is compatible with the hardware bare metal beneath.
4) Near-native performance - we are very close to a zero footprint hypervisor these days. XenServer is not much more than 50,000-odd lines of code as it is, but with recent developments, you can hardly tell a server has a hypervisor on it in terms of the performance of that server's nuts and bolts. Not necessarily a reason TO go down the route of creating a dynamic data centre but, at least, eradication of a potential reason why NOT to.
3rd-generation virtualisation, as Ian Pratt called it, is all about moving from server consolidation to the concept of: Monitor -> Decide -> Act. In Citrix product terms, that's obviously EdgeSight -> Workflow Studio -> Provisioning Server, all underpinned by XenServer.
Tuesday 10 June 2008
Citrix iForum - part 2
Today saw the first day of the conference proper. Mark Templeton kicked things off in his inimitable style. I like the way he tones things down when talking to a typically reserved British crowd. No toe-curling renditions of how "pumped" he is and no enthusiastic requests for audience participation, as there are at the Summit event in Orlando. It doesn't go down too well over here and Mark knows that. It's always quite amusing in the States, the Americans sit at the front whooping and hollering at every opportunity, the Asians and Eastern Europeans sit in the middle not entirely sure what exactly is going on and the Brits and Irish sit as far back as possible nursing crippling hangovers, desperately trying to catch up on some sleep but constantly being woken up by the people at the front. Still, none of that malarkey for me today, I was bright as a button this morning and took 13, yes 13, pages of notes throughout the day.
The keynote started with some impressive figures: there are now over 1 million Citrix servers globally, 100 million users, 200,000 customers and 75% of Internet users go through a NetScaler box at least once every day. The latter I knew already but 100 million users was new to me. Not bad.
NetScaler took pride of place as the first topic of discussion. The release of the quite horrifyingly fast MPX line will take Citrix into a new world with regard to web app optimisation and will certainly get F5 hopping about a bit. Citrix Online delivered what we have become accustomed to: massive percentage growth. Distribution don't sell these products. More's the pity with over 100 million online collaboration sessions this year alone.
Mark compared Citrix to satellite television: simple, fast, on-demand, device-independent but with secure access control, dynamic capacity and predictable costs. They also both need a controller, a receiver and a delivery mechanism. A very good analogy in my opinion, particularly as he went on to announce the release of what's called the Citrix Branch Repeater (this is the branch office box that used to be called Project Evergreen and was developed in tandem with Microsoft. It incorporates WANScaler technology to provide content caching and network data compression).
Wes Wasson, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer (they're very resourceful at Citrix, everyone seems to do two jobs - Mark Templeton is officially called President and Chief Operating Officer), then took over and outlined 4 main areas of focus for Citrix:
1) Deliver web apps (NetScaler - announced co-operation agreement with Akamai Technologies)
2) Deliver Windows apps (XenApp - 35% of all licenses now Platinum)
3) Enhance the user experience (this is a bit more complicated but basically involves a) the Branch Repeater to cheer up those poor lonely souls who work outside company HQ, b) using Password Manager to give users just one password to remember, c) providing on-demand support with GoToAssist, d) monitoring and optimising their applications' performance with EdgeSight, e) integrating VoIP with EasyCall and f) using Workflow Studio to orchestrate, automate and compose menial tasks such as setting up a new user or expanding an existing user's capabilities.)
4) Deliver app workloads (the aim being to go from consolidation of data centres to dynamic delivery of virtualised server workloads with XenServer Platinum)
I don't have time to go into all of the products mentioned above in much detail here but feel free to contact me for further info. In time, I will try and post a bit more about each.
Just as I was beginning to think XenDesktop wasn't going to get a mention at all, in fact I wrote in big letters on my notepad that the word XenDesktop didn't once cross anyone's lips until 10:45, almost 2 hours after the start of the keynote, Mark T was hauled back on stage to announce it officially. I've written about this product in previous posts and my suspicions were confirmed. This is a big one for Citrix. Mark Templeton took the opportunity to remind us he had been there for 13 years and he said the XenDesktop launch felt a bit like the launch of WinFrame all those years ago. Quite important then...
The main point he made was that this form of IT delivery has to fulfil two main objectives. It has to be a high-definition experience for the user (alluding once again to satellite TV) and it must enable simple, real-time assembly and disassembly of the component parts for the Administrator. Citrix are calling it Desktop 2.0 and the bits that make up the end product should be seen as being attached by Velcro rather than the superglue used in "Desktop 1.0". Again, another nice analogy.
To get the best out of it, you should use a new machine that most of the Thin Client vendors have developed that includes something called the Desktop Receiver - an all-singing, all-dancing client that all of the other individual Citrix clients, such as XenApp, Access Gateway etc., all plug into. Desktop as a Service (DaaS) gives users the feeling of a fresh, new PC every time they log on. There is also a new edition of XenApp solely designed for use with XenDesktop. If you have XenApp already, you simply pay a small upgrade fee - as long as you're on XenApp Platinum that is.
The XenDesktop demo worked perfectly this time, I am happy to say, although that thing that "had never worked before" that I mentioned in the previous blog, didn't work. Although no-one noticed because it wasn't used in the end. And no, I won't tell you what it was. XenDesktop was the only live demo, all the rest were videos of Citrix Synergy 2 weeks ago. The audio did fail on a video demo of XenServer Platinum which was quite amusing but generally the keynote was a huge success. The cynic in me says there wasn't a huge amount that was really new, it was just presented in a different way, but I must remind myself that I live and breathe Citrix (well, from 9.00am - 5.30pm anyway) and am privy to a lot of insider knowledge. For end users (except those that buy licenses in the thousands and therefore also get that same insider knowledge), I'm sure this was a huge eye-opener.
I will go into more detail on particular sessions in due course.
The keynote started with some impressive figures: there are now over 1 million Citrix servers globally, 100 million users, 200,000 customers and 75% of Internet users go through a NetScaler box at least once every day. The latter I knew already but 100 million users was new to me. Not bad.
NetScaler took pride of place as the first topic of discussion. The release of the quite horrifyingly fast MPX line will take Citrix into a new world with regard to web app optimisation and will certainly get F5 hopping about a bit. Citrix Online delivered what we have become accustomed to: massive percentage growth. Distribution don't sell these products. More's the pity with over 100 million online collaboration sessions this year alone.
Mark compared Citrix to satellite television: simple, fast, on-demand, device-independent but with secure access control, dynamic capacity and predictable costs. They also both need a controller, a receiver and a delivery mechanism. A very good analogy in my opinion, particularly as he went on to announce the release of what's called the Citrix Branch Repeater (this is the branch office box that used to be called Project Evergreen and was developed in tandem with Microsoft. It incorporates WANScaler technology to provide content caching and network data compression).
Wes Wasson, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer (they're very resourceful at Citrix, everyone seems to do two jobs - Mark Templeton is officially called President and Chief Operating Officer), then took over and outlined 4 main areas of focus for Citrix:
1) Deliver web apps (NetScaler - announced co-operation agreement with Akamai Technologies)
2) Deliver Windows apps (XenApp - 35% of all licenses now Platinum)
3) Enhance the user experience (this is a bit more complicated but basically involves a) the Branch Repeater to cheer up those poor lonely souls who work outside company HQ, b) using Password Manager to give users just one password to remember, c) providing on-demand support with GoToAssist, d) monitoring and optimising their applications' performance with EdgeSight, e) integrating VoIP with EasyCall and f) using Workflow Studio to orchestrate, automate and compose menial tasks such as setting up a new user or expanding an existing user's capabilities.)
4) Deliver app workloads (the aim being to go from consolidation of data centres to dynamic delivery of virtualised server workloads with XenServer Platinum)
I don't have time to go into all of the products mentioned above in much detail here but feel free to contact me for further info. In time, I will try and post a bit more about each.
Just as I was beginning to think XenDesktop wasn't going to get a mention at all, in fact I wrote in big letters on my notepad that the word XenDesktop didn't once cross anyone's lips until 10:45, almost 2 hours after the start of the keynote, Mark T was hauled back on stage to announce it officially. I've written about this product in previous posts and my suspicions were confirmed. This is a big one for Citrix. Mark Templeton took the opportunity to remind us he had been there for 13 years and he said the XenDesktop launch felt a bit like the launch of WinFrame all those years ago. Quite important then...
The main point he made was that this form of IT delivery has to fulfil two main objectives. It has to be a high-definition experience for the user (alluding once again to satellite TV) and it must enable simple, real-time assembly and disassembly of the component parts for the Administrator. Citrix are calling it Desktop 2.0 and the bits that make up the end product should be seen as being attached by Velcro rather than the superglue used in "Desktop 1.0". Again, another nice analogy.
To get the best out of it, you should use a new machine that most of the Thin Client vendors have developed that includes something called the Desktop Receiver - an all-singing, all-dancing client that all of the other individual Citrix clients, such as XenApp, Access Gateway etc., all plug into. Desktop as a Service (DaaS) gives users the feeling of a fresh, new PC every time they log on. There is also a new edition of XenApp solely designed for use with XenDesktop. If you have XenApp already, you simply pay a small upgrade fee - as long as you're on XenApp Platinum that is.
The XenDesktop demo worked perfectly this time, I am happy to say, although that thing that "had never worked before" that I mentioned in the previous blog, didn't work. Although no-one noticed because it wasn't used in the end. And no, I won't tell you what it was. XenDesktop was the only live demo, all the rest were videos of Citrix Synergy 2 weeks ago. The audio did fail on a video demo of XenServer Platinum which was quite amusing but generally the keynote was a huge success. The cynic in me says there wasn't a huge amount that was really new, it was just presented in a different way, but I must remind myself that I live and breathe Citrix (well, from 9.00am - 5.30pm anyway) and am privy to a lot of insider knowledge. For end users (except those that buy licenses in the thousands and therefore also get that same insider knowledge), I'm sure this was a huge eye-opener.
I will go into more detail on particular sessions in due course.
Monday 9 June 2008
Citrix iForum, part 1
I am currently up in Edinburgh attending Citrix iForum 08. It kicks off in earnest tomorrow but I went to the opening "party" tonight. Maybe it's just me getting old and cynical but I get the impression everything is ever so slightly lower-key this year. The devil's in the detail with these things and the conference bag's not up to much this time around, I must say. It looks like something a slightly camp metrosexual would buy, nothing like the sporty red rucksack number that we got last year. You could imagine stubble-faced, hard-core triathletes would be happy to be seen with that one. I use it for my gym kit.
The entertainment, if you can call it that, was a couple of weird-looking buck-toothed Proclaimers look-alikes dressed up in parking attendant outfits telling crap jokes before introducing a hula-hoop spinning girl and a male tap-dancer. (Perhaps he was the one who chose the conference bag.) Still there was plenty of free beer.
Sometimes I really wish I could wax lyrical about how good things are, I feel I moan a lot. My fiancee calls me Victor Meldrew. Personally I prefer to liken myself to two of my favourite writers, Bill Bryson and Jeremy Clarkson. The big difference between them and me, however, apart from their undeniable talent compared to my amateurish rants, is that they can be equally enthusiastic about good things as they can scathing about bad.
Still, I'm sure I'll have more exciting news tomorrow after the keynotes. I'm looking forward to hearing Mark Templeton speak but I sincerely hope the demos work this time around. I managed to catch one of the Citrix techies who had, almost literally, been hauled out of a nearby pub to: "go and make something work that he had never managed to get working before". His words, not mine. Could be interesting tomorrow morning.
The entertainment, if you can call it that, was a couple of weird-looking buck-toothed Proclaimers look-alikes dressed up in parking attendant outfits telling crap jokes before introducing a hula-hoop spinning girl and a male tap-dancer. (Perhaps he was the one who chose the conference bag.) Still there was plenty of free beer.
Sometimes I really wish I could wax lyrical about how good things are, I feel I moan a lot. My fiancee calls me Victor Meldrew. Personally I prefer to liken myself to two of my favourite writers, Bill Bryson and Jeremy Clarkson. The big difference between them and me, however, apart from their undeniable talent compared to my amateurish rants, is that they can be equally enthusiastic about good things as they can scathing about bad.
Still, I'm sure I'll have more exciting news tomorrow after the keynotes. I'm looking forward to hearing Mark Templeton speak but I sincerely hope the demos work this time around. I managed to catch one of the Citrix techies who had, almost literally, been hauled out of a nearby pub to: "go and make something work that he had never managed to get working before". His words, not mine. Could be interesting tomorrow morning.
Wednesday 4 June 2008
Postscript to previous article
After putting down some thoughts last night about XenDesktop and trying to understand why Citrix paid such a huge amount of money for a hypervisor, I was fascinated to find this article on Google Alerts this morning: http://www.dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=7884.
It's written by Doug Brown and covers why he thinks Citrix spent 500 million dollars on XenSource. Doug is one of these highly-respected engineers in the Citrix world, similar to Brian Madden.
It's written by Doug Brown and covers why he thinks Citrix spent 500 million dollars on XenSource. Doug is one of these highly-respected engineers in the Citrix world, similar to Brian Madden.
Tuesday 3 June 2008
Now I get it... I think.
I mentioned below I would write about XenDesktop soon and I have noticed a lot of other people doing the same thing of late. And rightly so - it could possibly just be the next big thing in IT. One such person doing this much more intelligently than I ever could is Robin Bloor, founder of Bloor Research and author of the titillatingly entitled Have Mac, Will Blog. (Thanks to Harry at Citrix UK for showing me this.)
XenDesktop is a product, released recently by Citrix, that virtualises desktops - have a quick read through Robin's blog for more detailed information on what it does. In basic terms, in addition to the virtualisation of applications with XenApp (formerly Presentation Server, formerly MetaFrame XP, formerly MetaFrame, formerly WinFrame, formerly the artist known as Terminal Services) and the virtualisation of servers with XenServer (formerly XenSource, formerly Xen, formerly a couple of clever clogs at Sun Microsystems accidentally creating software that might actually dissuade people from buying loads of servers - which obviously didn't quite tie in to their business plan), we are now tackling the desktop.
Citrix promise nirvana: "It's like getting a fresh new PC every day" is the bold statement on their homepage at the moment. Citrix aren't exactly renowned for getting version 1.0 products quite as they intend but, to be fair to them, which software company is? Added to that, this product has been in evolution for a long, long time and if any of the guys at Citrix were to hear me call it a version 1.0 product, I don't think they'd be too chuffed. Nonetheless, it is, well, new-ish. And, on that basis, I expect there to be one or two teething problems.
But if it does anything like what that rather irritating phrase involving a tin suggests, I'm looking forward to trying it. In the past few months, my PC has been taking longer and longer to log on. I have been advised the easiest thing to do is just switch it on, put in your password and go and get a coffee. Well, how about switch it on, put in your password, go travelling for a few years, marry a Columbian girl, pro-create with her, watch the child grow up and become a coffee plantation worker, watch him grow the coffee beans, leave Columbia for the UK with said coffee under arm, take them to Maxwell House and ask them to turn them into instant cappuccino with hint of mint, then put the kettle on? At that stage, and only then, can I even think about starting Outlook.
Anyway, back to the main reason for this article - XenDesktop. As I understand it (I didn't make my training at Citrix this morning so this may not be completely accurate), but you need a hypervisor of some description for XenDesktop to work. This can be XenServer, and obviously Citrix would prefer it were, but the "co-opetive" MS Hyper-V or the dastardly VMWare will also do.
So Citrix spent half a billion greenbacks on XenSource.
And they want 50 million dollars revenue from XenServer before the end of this year.
And, with XenDesktop, we're talking about a technology that apparently eradicates slow log-ons, always provides a pristine image and always provides a user with their correct settings wherever in the world they log on?
Which means that desktop upgrade project I heard about where one guy was about to set off on a global tour of his company's remote locations that would take 3 years(!) to complete, could potentially now be done in, say, a few days?
And it needs XenServer to work?
The penny is beginning to drop...
XenDesktop is a product, released recently by Citrix, that virtualises desktops - have a quick read through Robin's blog for more detailed information on what it does. In basic terms, in addition to the virtualisation of applications with XenApp (formerly Presentation Server, formerly MetaFrame XP, formerly MetaFrame, formerly WinFrame, formerly the artist known as Terminal Services) and the virtualisation of servers with XenServer (formerly XenSource, formerly Xen, formerly a couple of clever clogs at Sun Microsystems accidentally creating software that might actually dissuade people from buying loads of servers - which obviously didn't quite tie in to their business plan), we are now tackling the desktop.
Citrix promise nirvana: "It's like getting a fresh new PC every day" is the bold statement on their homepage at the moment. Citrix aren't exactly renowned for getting version 1.0 products quite as they intend but, to be fair to them, which software company is? Added to that, this product has been in evolution for a long, long time and if any of the guys at Citrix were to hear me call it a version 1.0 product, I don't think they'd be too chuffed. Nonetheless, it is, well, new-ish. And, on that basis, I expect there to be one or two teething problems.
But if it does anything like what that rather irritating phrase involving a tin suggests, I'm looking forward to trying it. In the past few months, my PC has been taking longer and longer to log on. I have been advised the easiest thing to do is just switch it on, put in your password and go and get a coffee. Well, how about switch it on, put in your password, go travelling for a few years, marry a Columbian girl, pro-create with her, watch the child grow up and become a coffee plantation worker, watch him grow the coffee beans, leave Columbia for the UK with said coffee under arm, take them to Maxwell House and ask them to turn them into instant cappuccino with hint of mint, then put the kettle on? At that stage, and only then, can I even think about starting Outlook.
Anyway, back to the main reason for this article - XenDesktop. As I understand it (I didn't make my training at Citrix this morning so this may not be completely accurate), but you need a hypervisor of some description for XenDesktop to work. This can be XenServer, and obviously Citrix would prefer it were, but the "co-opetive" MS Hyper-V or the dastardly VMWare will also do.
So Citrix spent half a billion greenbacks on XenSource.
And they want 50 million dollars revenue from XenServer before the end of this year.
And, with XenDesktop, we're talking about a technology that apparently eradicates slow log-ons, always provides a pristine image and always provides a user with their correct settings wherever in the world they log on?
Which means that desktop upgrade project I heard about where one guy was about to set off on a global tour of his company's remote locations that would take 3 years(!) to complete, could potentially now be done in, say, a few days?
And it needs XenServer to work?
The penny is beginning to drop...
Monday 2 June 2008
The good, the bad and the ugly
Thursday 5th June sees three things begin...
The good: England start the 3rd test against the New Zealand cricket team after a fantastic comeback in the 2nd test. They lead 1-0 and just need a draw to win the series.
The bad: Euro 2008 gets underway. I hate football, as you'll see from one of my May posts, but it does amuse me that none of the home nations is involved.
The ugly: The single worst thing ever to appear on television, Big Brother, kicks off what feels like its 78th series. Are we not bored with this rubbish yet? Surely the novelty wore off after the second one?
The good: England start the 3rd test against the New Zealand cricket team after a fantastic comeback in the 2nd test. They lead 1-0 and just need a draw to win the series.
The bad: Euro 2008 gets underway. I hate football, as you'll see from one of my May posts, but it does amuse me that none of the home nations is involved.
The ugly: The single worst thing ever to appear on television, Big Brother, kicks off what feels like its 78th series. Are we not bored with this rubbish yet? Surely the novelty wore off after the second one?
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