Kusnetzky Group analysts publish their take on products, service offerings, partnerships, alliances and other interesting happenings. Here's what Dan has to say.
Lucid Imagination wants to make Apache Lucene/Solr your enterprise search tool
Paul Doscher, new CEO of Lucid Imagination, and his colleague, Grant Ingersoll, Chief Scientist. I've spoken with Paul in times past, but this was the first time for me to meet Grant. It is clear that they are on a mission to help enterprises deal with their ever-growing pile of structured and non-structured data.
The problem
Enterprises are creating more and more data and are having trouble turning this into useful information that comes easily to hand. Data can be found in structured databases inside of the enterprise's transactional and business systems. Data can also be found in electronic messages, documents, presentations, spreadsheets, tickler files, instant messages. That data, unfortunately, is not easy scan for something important.
Often what happens is that staff members can't find needed data and so they create it again.
This can be quite a problem if the data is needed for regulatory compliance. It can be very embarrassing and potentially quite costly if the enterprise is asked for data related to some event and can't produce it in a timely fashion.
Stratus tackles single point of failure in virtual server environments
Stratus saw that VMware's vCenter, a critical component of a VMware-based virtual environment, had become a single point of failure. Stratus knew that it had a highly compatible solution that could make that little problem disappear. All the company had to do was host VMware's vCenter on one of its ftServer systems and, Presto!, the function would become highly available, that is it would have 99.999+% uptime.
To make this solution easy to purchase and install, Stratus is offering one of its servers in a packaged configuration designed to address this very issue. Stratus calls this package "Stratus Uptime Appliance For VMware vCenter Server. While the name is a bit complex, the product isn't.
Here's how Stratus describes this little gem:
When you manage a large enterprise with VMware® vCenter® Server, downtime can be disastrous. This single point of failure can put everything at risk: from site recovery to operations, from business management to chargeback processes.
The Stratus Uptime Appliance for vCenter Server is a single-system solution designed from the ground up to prevent downtime via resilient hardware and software, combined with proactive 24/7 remote monitoring. Built on the company’s fault-tolerant, Intel® processor-based ftServer architecture, the Stratus solution offers users plug-and-play simplicity at significantly lower costs than a similarly configured VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat solution.
IBM XIV Storage System and a walk down memory lane
Quite a number of storage suppliers have started offering storage systems that are based upon solid state devices, such as Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) or flash memory when non-volatile storage is a requirement.
IBM's recent IBM XIV Storage System announcement caused me to stroll down memory lane and think about issues IT has with storage and why suppliers are flogging solid state storage now.
The bottom line is that solid state storage, when used correctly, solid state storage can address some of the issues that have created IT's strained relationship with storage over the years.
IT's love/hate relationship with storage
Since the early days of computing, the IT department has had a love/hate relationship with storage. Workloads need to be able to rapidly access and update data, but storage devices have a history of being costly, consuming a great deal of power, producing quite a bit of heat (which in turn leads to high cooling costs), offering only a limited capacity and have been thought of as an application bottleneck.
Roozz's Jesper Thomsen responds
Jesper Thomsen, of Roozz, wanted to respond to my recently published post, Roozz enters the application virtualization race. Here are his comments:
Having read through the article, there are a couple of things I would like to clarify:
- Roozz.com supports all browsers in the market
- Our focus today is adding more Windows application however there are plans under way to make our platform cross platform compatible - including tablets.
- Where we are different from other companies in this space, is that we focus strictly on offering Windows desktop applications to end users on a rental basis. We have a number of publishers on our platform already allowing users to now rent their application and run it in the browser. This is an entirely new offering that - to the best of our knowledge - no one else has today.
Jesper went on to say "We now have close to 100 titles in a number of segments within software and games and above 450,000 downloads of our plugin.
Egenera focuses on scalability and private clouds
Egenera's VP of Marketing, John Humphreys, stopped by to chat about the the company is doing now. The message this time is that Egenera's "infrastructure automation" product, PAN Manager, has been enhanced to both support private clouds and to dramatically expand the scalability of the environments PAN Manager can support.
Snapshot analysis
Every time I speak with Egenera, I'm impressed how comprehensive and capabile PAN Manager is. Although Egenera has been doing its best to increase market awareness of this gem, it still appears to be a well-kept secret. As I've often said before, PAN Manager is one of the best tools to manage converged infrastructure systems I've come across. It's key strengths are the ability to treat all of the servers, I/O devices, networking and storage as a pool of resources that can be dynamically assigned to tasks.What's new this time is the focus on using that pool of resources as a private cloud computing environment and the scale of the environment.
Egenera has worked with a number of hardware suppliers to support their systems. Over time the list grew to include the Egenera BladeFrame, Fujitsu Primergy blade servers, Dell PowerEdge blade servers, HP ProLiant blade servers, and, NEC's SIGMABLADE severs for the Japanese market.