Reading Between The IT Lines – Issue #2

Welcome to the second edition of our roundup of what’s hot and what’s not in the IT world. Hope you enjoy the tour. Let’s get started:

EUC

You might tend to neglect it, but now is finally the time to pay serious attention to optimizing your VDI workloads. Link

A new version of the beloved Citrix Optimizer is out. Really great to see how it grows. Link

Daniel Feller writes about how the improved MCS RAM-based write cache in the latest Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop XenDesktop (come on, I hate these weird new names) can save you a lot of disk time. Actually, this is really neat. Link

This is nice, an updated version of Citrix Cloud and Azure cost calculator. Link

Here we go again, the yearly rumor about how Citrix is going to sell itself. 10 years ago I was sure HP should buy them. Now, it’s really hard to think of anyone who would pay more than $15 billion for them. But hey, maybe Amazon would?! Link

VMware

Update 2 for ESXi 6.7, vCenter 6.7 and vCenter Appliance 6.7 has been released to the wild with tons of bug fixes and new features. Link, link

Big release for vROps, with cloud cost estimations, a new agent to collect the in-guest data, Integration with ServiceNow and much more. Link

IT

We all know that the HCI (hyper-converged infrastructure) market is the hottest in the hardware world, but even I was surprised by the growth numbers of the top player (VMware revenue from vSAN, for example, grew by 80% compared to the previous year). And also two interesting numbers – 1. Nutanix lost some market share to VMware (mainly); 2. Poor HPE, even Simplivity can’t help them compete with VMware/Dell and Nutanix. Link

The unbelievable just happened, HPE will sell ProLiant servers loaded with Nutanix Cloud OS (AHV). My hardware-hugging friends almost got a heart attack.
But that’s what happens when you need to meet your quota. Link

And this is a great graph to understand how the HCI market evolved over the last 5 years. Link

Cloud and OSS

Azure AD Password Protection (cloud-based – but can help you with on-prem environments – passwords policy engine) is out from preview to GA. Link

Azure reduces the Azure Container Instances cost (15% for vCPU and 70% for RAM). Link

AWS is planning to open a new region in Indonesia. Link
Asia pacific will be the next battlefield for cloud vendors.

Nice (this is because I agree with 95% of what he wrote) opinion-based post about the future of the cloud. tl;dr in few words – all cloud, mainly serverless. Link

While AWS is forking elasticsearch, GCP is going to provide a managed service based on popular open source software (Elastic, Influx, Confluent and the like). Let’s just hope they won’t come to the same conclusion as AWS. Link

Also, Google announced a service (Anthos) that will allow customers to deploy and manage applications (containers based on Kubernetes) everywhere they want. On GCP, on-prem or AWS and Azure. Link
Think about it, GCP going to manage workloads running on AWS.

Rancher – a company that does exactly that – can’t be happier. Link
Yeah, right.

Open Source Software is the future, take #525 – Chef is making its software and any additions going forward open source with Apache 2 licensing. Interesting. Link

Cyber & Privacy

Facebook failed to keep its users’ records secured, take #53421. Link

Why am I  not surprised, it seems like Amazon is listening to your conversations with Alexa. Link ️‍♀️

Expanding Horizons ‍
The story about the never ending WinRAR’s 40-day trial. Link

Thanks for reading thus far – hope you enjoyed it! Stay tuned for more reading between the IT lines, coming soon.