Virtual Instruments and Data Centers, and Why it Matters. A Lot.

In March I published my article on meaningful visibility into the data center. I mentioned several vendors who are doing good work in this challenging field including Virtual Instruments (VI).

There are lots of monitoring, capacity planning and general trending products out there. These vendors market their products to virtualization and cloud markets hoping to catch the big wave of investment in those fields. There is nothing wrong with these tools and IT needs them in discrete settings, but they don’t go nearly far enough in managing new levels of data center complexity. They offer some visibility, but dynamic data centers require not only information but also the ability to correlate information across multiple systems and to automatically act on it. We call this crucial piece of the puzzle “instrumentation.”

White Servers from Intel Now Available with Tightly Integrated InMage Software

On March 19, 2012, Intel and InMage introduced a packaged solution at Intel Solution Summit that intrigued me. InMage, as we know, is a data protection software vendor that has been in the industry for 6+ years. Their software suite called Scout is essentially a server based CDP that eliminates backup windows and allows for very rapid (in most cases instant) recovery. Recovery snapshot capability is built in, as is replication, failover and failback. One product to solve both backup/recovery and replication issues. Over the past few years they extended the solution to include Windows, Linux, Solaris, AIX, VMware, Hyper-V and XenServer support. So what is a data protection vendor doing with Intel?

Hitachi Data Systems Unifies Block, File and Object

Hitachi has brought together block, file and object storage in a unified array that should appeal both to mid-range and cloud storage users.

GreenBytes Solidarity Offers Better than Solid Performance

GreenBytes Solidarity offers very strong features and high availability to a market that can be under-served by other storage systems.

DH2i: Getting Mission Critical Apps Virtualized

Application Virtualization may be the way to reap the benefits of virtualization for mission critical apps like databases, which tend to not virtualize completely beneficially at the server or machine level.  DH2i’s initial offering, DxConsole, claimes to virtualize SQL Server instances above and agnostic of the underlying physical or virtual operating system with great resulting mobility, simplified management, and software license savings.

IBM Puresystems, or, How Many Heads Does Convergence Have?

IBM PureSystems seems to be a major convergence play. Let’s take a quick look at convergence history to see why IBM might be a very different take on a long-term industry development.