I recently had the opportunity to speak with Red Hat's Joel Berman, Product Management Director for Virtualization products, and Nick Carr, Director of Public and Analyst Relations. First of all, thanks guys for generously giving of your time to bring me back up to date on Red Hat's views of virtualization.
SUSE supports the notion that cloud computing and open source software are perfect companions for organizations that look to the use of cloud computing to lower their overall costs of IT infrastructure, offer freedom to deploy its workloads wherever appropriate, and avoid being locked into a single vendors hardware or software products.
DataStax believes that by combining Apache Hadoop, Cassandra and Solr it can bring together batch big data analytics and enterprise search.
Making network routing more programmable and sub-networks more dynamic is an important step in creating networks that are as agile of virtual servers and virtual storage. Big Switch Networks thinks that its Open SDN is a must have. Will its competitors agree?
Enterprises create and store a massive amount of structured and unstructured data. The problem is that they often have no idea what they have or how to find it. Lucid Imagination believes Apache Lucerne and Apache Solr contain the answer.
Vendors and research firms often collaborate to survey the vendors' customers in the hopes of learning more about their requirements and purchasing behavior. Although the result is often based upon a biased or limited sample, the resulting study findings are trumpeted to the world as if they were broadly applicable.
Novell hopes its ZENworks Application Virtualization 9 will make it easier for organizations to migrate from Windows XP to Windows 7 as well as install, deliver and update applications. The company faces strong challenges from Microsoft, Citrix, VMware, Intel and AppZero, however.
Ilan Sehayek, CTO of Jitterbit introduced his company, the company's products and himself a while ago. Jitterbit is a provider of an open source data and application integration platform designed to make it easier for organizations to integrate a number of different types of applications hosted on different platforms (see graphic below).
While I was making my way out to San Francisco for OpenSource World/Next Generation Datacenter/Cloudworld, VMware issued a press release stating that they were acquiring Spring Source, a supplier of Platform as a Service offerings. This, I believe, opens the door for VMware to offer a nearly complete, end-to-end solution for those wanting a Cloud Computing offering.
Richard Whitehead, one of the interesting people from Novell I speak with on an irregular basis, contacted me to tell me about an update to the PlateSpin portfolio and how Novell the PlateSpin product family and the former ZenWorks Orchestrator have been rebranded. Novell's products in the area of virtualization technology and management of virtualized environments appear both powerful and easy to integrate into many existing datacenter configurations.