New Florence. New Renaissance.

Infrastructure Management 2.0

Google, an early convert to Puppet, uses its products to rapidly update the software running servers and employee PCs. So does music-streaming service Spotify. On servers or PCs, “it would have been impossible to grow and manage the Spotify infrastructure without a configuration management tool like Puppet,” says company engineer Johan Haals. GE Capital uses Chef to manage its servers and network switches, and chief engineer Justin Arbuckle says he can use it to distribute a new app across a network in a couple of hours. “In the past, it would have literally taken weeks and weeks,” he says.

BusinessWeek

 

Nutanix: Server/Storage Hybrid

"We have brought the storage into the cluster, and we have commoditized it," says Ting, and this is why the US government, financial services firms, healthcare companies, and educational institutions are running a lot of proofs of concepts with the NX-3000 series of appliances.

About 25 per cent of the iron is going to Uncle Sam, which is in many cases putting server clusters into vehicles to get image and signal processing at command posts or into the field in Humvees, in some cases.

Virtual desktop infrastructure was the obvious early-use case for Nutanix machines, and it is still driving a lot of deals, but Ting says the company is seeing companies dump Microsoft workloads such as Exchange Server and SQL Server on the boxes, and has just closed a deal this month with a Global 2000-class company for 1,500 server nodes to run an analytics workload."

The Register

Thanks to Anshu Sharma for pointing out Nutanix's rapid growth in the market

 

Next-Gen Data Centers

"Google threw out the book on data centers and went back to basic heat transfer and electrical theory, he explained, eliminating everything not strictly necessary and coming up with a minimalist design."

Dan Farber at ZDNet

10 Virtualization Vendors to Watch

IT World Canada identifies the likely next VMWare's

CiRBA
Vizioncore
Akorri
Platform Computing
Embotics
EqualLogic
PlateSpin
Marathon Technologies
Blue Lane
Reflex Security

The Virtualization Feast

Driven by VMWare's impressive success, this year's VMWorld has an even bigger buzz and product showcase.

PC World

SearchServerVirtualization.com will also announce "best" products from 110 in contention

World's most powerful computer

"The first supercomputer capable of crunching through a thousand trillion mathematical operations every second has been announced by IBM. This is roughly equivalent to the combined processing power of a 2.4-kilometre-high pile of laptop computers."

New Scientist

Virtues of Virtualization

InfoWorld has a whole issue focused on server, storage, application and desktop.

EMC is getting ready to IPO VMware - a company it acquired in 2003 - and is growing at a phenomenonal rate.