Traditional IaaS cloud—whether AWS’s EC2, Azure’s offering, or even a private IaaS cloud running vCloud Director, vRA, or OpenStack, to name a few—is in trouble. Now, that sounds like quite a contentious statement to make, but I feel the writing is on the wall. “What?” you may ask. “How can you say that? There are many companies that have not even started their cloud journey, and surely IaaS is the first baby step in their travails.” Well, the answer to this is “yes and no.”
Tom Howarth is an IT Veteran of over 20 years experience and is the owner of PlanetVM.Net Ltd, Tom is a moderator of the VMware Communities forum. He is a contributing author on VMware vSphere(TM) and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing ESX and the Virtual Environment, and the forthcoming vSphere a Quick Guide. He regularly does huge virtualization projects for enterprises in the U.K. and elsewhere in EMEA. Tom was Elected vExpert for 2008 and each subsequent year thereafter.
Those of us in the industry who have been around the block somewhat, shall we say, and worked in end user compute when it was still called terminal services will remember when there seemed to be only two players in the game: Microsoft and Citrix. Then, along came this little upstart from Pennsylvania called IndependenceIT. It shouted loud and proud about breaking free from the shackles of corporate bondage in the form of what was then called Presentation Server. However, it never really managed to break out. It underwent three VC fundraising rounds—the last one in 2016—for an undisclosed amount and pivoted from onsite endpoint management and desktop delivery to DaaS, workflow, automation, and application delivery. To be fair, it was a logical step for it and allowed it to integrate into vCloud Air, Citrix’s Workspace Service, and Azure.
Tom Howarth is an IT Veteran of over 20 years experience and is the owner of PlanetVM.Net Ltd, Tom is a moderator of the VMware Communities forum. He is a contributing author on VMware vSphere(TM) and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing ESX and the Virtual Environment, and the forthcoming vSphere a Quick Guide. He regularly does huge virtualization projects for enterprises in the U.K. and elsewhere in EMEA. Tom was Elected vExpert for 2008 and each subsequent year thereafter.
Citrix Acquires Cedexis and CloudJumper Acquires IndependenceIT
On February 12, Citrix announced that it has acquired Cedexis, a Portland-based leader in the Internet traffic management space. On February 13, CloudJumper, a Workspace as a Service (WaaS) provider, announced that it has purchased IndependenceIT, a purpose-built virtualization platform for service providers. The specific details of each were not disclosed; however, both acquisitions are complete.
Jo Harder has been involved with virtualization for over 18 years, long before virtualization was the norm. After holding several sales and marketing positions, she started down the path of bits and bytes while at AT&T/Lucent Technologies. She then moved onto Citrix in 1999, where she became a Senior Architect. Her 11-year tenure included a combination of Citrix Consulting and Technical Readiness roles. After leaving Citrix, Jo provided consulting services for various clients for the next year. In her current role at a hosting provider, she is focused on cloud-based solutions for financial industry clients. In February 2015, she was awarded Citrix Technology Professional.Jo's diverse background of sales, marketing, management, and architectural/technical expertise brings a unique perspective to Virtualization Practice. She welcomes input from vendors, industry contacts, and end users and can be reached at joharder@virtualizationpractice.com.
I was privileged to witness Zerto’s humble beginnings at Tech Field Day 6, when it came out of stealth with a product that quite frankly surprised us. Why? Not because Zerto was so different, not because it was a technical game changer, but because it seemed at the time to be a product too late to market. VMware was just about to release VDP, virtual machine replication that did not rely on there being similar storage arrays at primary and secondary sites.
It is safe to say that we were worried for Zerto’s future. However, fast-forward six years, and according to our research, it is one of the leaders in the data protection market. From those humble beginnings, Zerto has managed to sideline VMware’s core data recovery and protection product SRM. Now it is moving into the arena of multicloud.
Tom Howarth is an IT Veteran of over 20 years experience and is the owner of PlanetVM.Net Ltd, Tom is a moderator of the VMware Communities forum. He is a contributing author on VMware vSphere(TM) and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing ESX and the Virtual Environment, and the forthcoming vSphere a Quick Guide. He regularly does huge virtualization projects for enterprises in the U.K. and elsewhere in EMEA. Tom was Elected vExpert for 2008 and each subsequent year thereafter.
In case you missed it, on January 8, 2018, SolarWinds, “a leading provider of powerful and affordable IT management software…announced it has completed the acquisition of Loggly, Inc., a provider of cloud-based log monitoring and log analytics software. With the transaction, the company also will add to its team of world-class software engineering talent.”
Stephen Beaver is the co-author of VMware ESX Essentials in the Virtual Data Center and Scripting VMware Power Tools: Automating Virtual Infrastructure Administration as well as being contributing author of Mastering VMware vSphere 4 and How to Cheat at Configuring VMware ESX Server. Stephen is an IT Veteran with over 15 years experience in the industry. Stephen is a moderator on the VMware Communities Forum and was elected vExpert for 2009 and 2010. Stephen can also be seen regularly presenting on different topics at national and international virtualization conferences.
Veeam has dug its hand down the back of its corporate couches and handed over a tidy $42.5 million to N2WS, a provider of cloud-native enterprise backup and disaster recovery services for AWS. Who, you might ask?
N2WS is the company that powered Veeam’s AWS backup solution. To paraphrase Victor Kaim, Veeam liked the product so much that it bought the company.
Veeam Aquires N2WS to Consolidate Its AWS Cloud Business
Tom Howarth is an IT Veteran of over 20 years experience and is the owner of PlanetVM.Net Ltd, Tom is a moderator of the VMware Communities forum. He is a contributing author on VMware vSphere(TM) and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing ESX and the Virtual Environment, and the forthcoming vSphere a Quick Guide. He regularly does huge virtualization projects for enterprises in the U.K. and elsewhere in EMEA. Tom was Elected vExpert for 2008 and each subsequent year thereafter.
