When a company has 500,000 enterprise customers that are paying for perpetual licenses and support on systems software – this is an absolutely enormous base by corporate standards, and a retro licensing model straight from the 1980s and 1990s – what does it do for an encore? …
Building a platform is hard enough, and there are very few companies that can build something that scales, supports a diversity of applications, and, in the case of either cloud providers or software or whole system sellers, can be suitable for tens of thousands, much less hundreds of thousands or millions, of customers. …
What happens when the world’s largest public cloud and the biggest peddler of server virtualization in the enterprise team up to create a hybrid cloud? …
Where do you go when you are an infrastructure software provider that already has 500,000 enterprise customers? …
It has been just about a decade and a half since server virtualization juggernaut VMware debuted the first release of its ESX bare metal hypervisor, and nearly a decade since this hypervisor and its virtual machine guests had enough oomph to take on the job of encapsulating and consolidating multiple operating systems and workloads on since physical servers. …
In the first part in this series, we talked about the nature of processor virtualization on different systems and how this affects the underlying capacity and performance of compute in cloud infrastructure. …
We can rent as much or as little compute capacity or storage or connectivity as we want, and we can get it when we want it. …
The conventional wisdom these days is that the server virtualization hypervisor is a commodity, and as the executives at hyperconverged infrastructure upstart Nutanix are putting it as they rev their software stack, “it is the new sheet metal for the cloud era.” While that makes a good metaphor, it is somewhat ironic, then, that Nutanix has cooked up its own hypervisor, called Acropolis, that can be placed at the heart of its server-storage hybrid clusters. …
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