Dell goes up to Eleven

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

A briefing this week from Dell, which has started down the path pioneered by IBM, in retreating further away from hardware sales and tentatively towards various methods of consulting for businesses.

The company wanted you to hear about its pre-virtualisation check, done entirely remotely. It wanted to pass on the news about its new smaller business servers – T400 and T710 – which are decently configured for VMware and Hyper-V, and made a point of mentioning its next-generation remote management card, which will update drivers and patches for you as they are announced.

I’m writing this at some speed, just after the end of its embargo period, though to be perfectly honest I couldn’t see any Big Secrets being let out of the bag. When I asked the questions that PC Pro is getting a bit of a reputation for, about how Dell’s remote access services would be legally defined to protect the client’s data and help to disclose exactly where the team of consultants furtling round your servers, are based… then I got a few simple, honest ‘don’t knows’.

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Is the world really going virtual?

Monday, May 18th, 2009

According to our sister site Channel Pro the number of virtual machines is set to outnumber their physical counterparts during 2009. There’s a caveat to that: we’re talking servers rather than desktop systems, but it’s still an amazing statistic. (more…)

Why Microsoft should worry about VMWare once more

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

Has VMWare turned the tables on the competitors? Has it pulled off the great magic trick of pulling the tablecloth off the table while leaving the champagne glasses not only upright but still full of bubbly?

 Yes, I think so. Tonight, Contributing Editor Cassidy and I are having dinner with the senior Microsoft virtualisation people. And we will be reporting back tomorrow on their response to today’s announcements.

 But the move of VMWare to let anyone set up a cloud-computing infrastructure, to allow for SLAs and metrics in the delivery process, to let a customer have an internal business cloud or use a range of external cloud vendors (and cheefully move loads between them at will) has driven a hatchet through the lock-in plans of the existing players: Microsoft, Amazon, Google.

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Grass is Greener at VMWare

Tuesday, July 8th, 2008

Looks like VMWare has lost it’s den mother: CEO Diane Greene has been replaced by Paul Maritz. Having seen Ms. Greene in action on two occasions, I will be fascinated to see how Maritz copes with that role – VMWare’s somewhat scattered product portfolio and happy go lucky acquisition model always seemed to represent a collection of cats resolutely refusing to make up a herd. Seems like the shareholders – companies not famous for their touchy-feely, den-motherish management style, like Cisco and EMC – reacted with that classic American short-term peevishness when revenues dropped, and Someone Had To Go.

The question in my mind is; was VMWare surfing a wave during the pre-recession years, or actually driving it? Will the uber-boffins who delivered the goods, keep doing so without their Den Mother?