Novell loses many PlateSpin people, moves development to India

Posted by Alessandro Perilli   |   Monday, May 25, 2009   |   18 Comments

Along with Vizioncore (acquired by Quest in January 2008) and a very few others, PlateSpin was one of the oldest and most successful VMware partner in the history of modern virtualization. But after the Novell acquisition, which took place in February 2008, the company lost much of its popularity.

Novell never really clarified its virtualization strategy and this is severely impacting the PlateSpin brand.
Besides the November 2006 interoperability agreement with Microsoft, the Novell moves in the virtualization space have been very weak: the company announced plans to release a stand-alone virtualization platform in March 2008 but it never came out, and renamed its management solution ZENworks in PlateSpin Orchestrate in December 2008.

This doesn’t seem enough to counter the many challenges that the company is facing in the highly competitive virtualization space:

• Novell has no guarantees on the future of Xen development, which is deeply influenced by Citrix since the acquisition of XenSource in August 2007
• The best alternative to Xen which Novell may want to adopt, KVM, is deeply influenced by its worst competitor, Red Hat, since the acquisition of Qumranet in September 2008
• In the near future Novell will have a new dangerous competitor in the Xen virtualization space: Oracle, which now owns three Xen-based hypervisors (Oracle VM Server, Sun xVM Server and Virtual Iron)
• The competitive advantage that PlateSpin accumulated is now matched by the newest products from Vizioncore and VMware, which also gives away for free a lot of technology.

On top of these challenges Novell is facing an additional major issue as many of the minds behind PlateSpin left the company in the recent months:

• its CEO, Stephen Pollack, is now busy as advisor at Embotics and at Enomaly
• its CTO, Paul Philp, is now working as Vice President of Products at dna13
• its Director of Corporate Marketing, Mark Pileski, is now Vice President of Marketing at VMLogix
• its Vice President of EMEA, Patrick Malaperiman, is now working as independent business development advisor
• its EMEA Channel Director, Jason Jackson, is now working as Channel Director at Centrix Software
• its Regional Director of Central & Eastern Europe, Lothar Esser, is now a Channel Manager at Vizioncore
• its Senior Solutions Specialist, Jacob Ben-David, is now Technical Sales Engineer at VMLogix

Probably the are more that virtualization.info couldn’t track.

This exodus may depend on or may be the consequence of the fact that Novell moved the entire product development unit for PlateSpin Recon (formerly PowerRecon) in India, as virtualization.info has learned from trusted sources.

In both cases Novell has to stop this haemorrhage and describe its vision or its entire presence in the virtualization space will be soon questioned by partners, customers and prospects.

Labels: Novell, PlateSpin

May 20th, 2009

EMC: Virtualization is ready to run the world's biggest applications

Posted by Jason Hiner @ 2:52 pm

Categories: EMC, EMCWorld, VMware, virtualization

Tags: EMC Corp., Cloud Computing, Storage Management, Virtualization, Utility Computing..., Storage, Hardware, Jason Hiner

TalkBack

• • Typically, when IT departments decide to use virtualization in the data center, the big question is which workloads to virtualize. The conventional wisdom has been to avoid virtualizing anything that was too I/O-intensive, such as databases and e-mail systems.

However, EMC wants to put that idea to rest. The company, which owns virtualization market leader VMware, spent a lot of time at EMC World 2009 this week driving home the point to IT professionals that the entire data center can be virtualized.

“Virtualization is now ready to run the biggest applications,” said EMC CTO Chuck Hollis (right). “It’s ready for the biggest applications today.”

In fact, Hollis said that virtualization is already running a lot of the biggest applications for many of the world’s largest companies. America’s top auto makers are one example. Driven by intense economic pressures to reduce costs, the auto makers have recently accelerated their adoption of virtualization.

Another industry that is extensively using virtualization is oil and gas, where they have to deliver the same enterprise applications to both desktops and supercomputers. Plus, they also have a wide diversity of sites across the globe that need access to these applications. As a result, they’ve embraced virtualization to get the kind of flexibility they need on the backend.

EMC itself is committed to eventually moving its entire internal server infrastructure to virtualization, but CEO Joe Tucci said in his keynote on Monday that the company isn’t even halfway there yet. That said, Hollis noted that EMC is doing big stuff with virtualization. “We put big, hairy Oracle and Exchange workloads on VMware,” he said.

And, there are some companies that have taken the plunge and gone 100%. Hollis remarked, “We work with outsourcers that are now completely virtualized.”

In some cases, it’s happening very quietly in the background. Hollis told the story of an IT manager who had virtualized over 3,000 servers. Hollis asked him, “How did you get your users to accept this?” The IT manager smiled and replied, “I didn’t tell them.” Apparently, no one noticed.

That’s what EMC believes will happen in nearly all cases, when virtualization is deployed correctly. Meanwhile, virtualization gives IT a lot more flexibility in managing the company’s technology infrastructure.

Hollis said that the new premise of virtualization is “architecting for choice.” He characterized virtualization to a shipping container for server workloads. This was also reflected in Tucci’s slide on virtual infrastructure:

EMC is also trying to make the case that building a virtualization infrastructure inside the firewall will enable companies to create an “internal cloud” now, and better take advantage of the opportunities presented by cloud computing (”external cloud”) in the future. It’s all conceptual and a bit of a stretch, but it’s a fairly compelling idea. Here’s Tucci’s slide on it:

For this concept to really take off, it would likely require standardization and cooperation among the various enterprise vendors, including EMC, Dell, IBM, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and Citrix. It would require more than just compatible hypervisors in the virtualization layer.

That kind of collaboration is probably unlikely. EMC is one of the more open collaborators in that group and they show no interest in reaching out. Hollis claimed that VMware currently owns 97% of the virtualization market, so he argues that it is the de facto standard. While there’s some truth to that, it’s difficult to imagine that the virtualization market won’t get a lot more crowded in the years ahead because so many of the companies listed above are putting so much emphasis on it — especially since it can now handle virtually any type of server load out there.

Just two weeks ago, after one year and a half of silence, EMC (or better a couple of its top executives) decided to publicly criticize the Oracle support policy against its subsidiary VMware.

The trigger for such change of directions probably was the acquisition of Sun, which may transform Oracle in a dangerous competitor in the long term.
Rather than replicate on the corporate blog, Oracle answered with the acquisition of Virtual Iron, which is pretty much equal to a declaration of war.

While Oracle VM Server is being sold as a general purpose hypervisor that customers can use for any workload, a few are really using it to run any application but Oracle ones.
The acquisition of Virtual Iron, even more than the acquisition of Sun and its xVM virtualization portfolio, may change this perception and attract a different kind of customers that not necessarily use Oracle products.

So EMC is back on the topic, this time attacking the entire Oracle virtualization strategy.
Once again is Chuck Hollis, Vice President, Global Marketing CTO, to push the button on his personal blog:

Game on!