Digital Walkabout

RingCube Unveils New Security and Performance Innovations for Desktop Virtualization at VMworld 2010

RingCube announced a series of enhancements to their vDesk Desktop Virtualization solution in security, performance, management and usability, which were developed in association with Intel. The capabilities introduced include:

• Hardened security features, including pre-authentication host checking, to protect against keystroke loggers; and granular logging for regulation compliance;
• Performance improvements to their MobileSync features, including compression of encrypted workspaces and block-level differencing
• Management and usability features that enable deployment of vDesk across the network faster; as well as higher levels of resiliency with improved architecture; and usability improvements for USB-attached printers.

RingCube is demonstrating vDesk solution on Intel vPro devices VMworld 2010 this week.

Learn more about Workspace Virtualization from Intel, CSC, Gartner Research, and RingCube at: http://www.DesktopVirtualizationOptimized.com

iPhone security breach highlights mobile, cloud issues

Per Jesus Diaz at gizmodo.com, downloading a simple PDF file can give hackers access to your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad. The security hole is applicable to all iOS 4 devices.

"The vulnerability is easily exploitable. In fact, the latest one-click, no-computer-required Jailbreak solution for iOS 4 devices uses this same method to break Apple's own security...It just requires the user to visit a web address using Safari. The web site can automatically load a simple PDF document, which contains a font that hides a special program. When your iOS device tries to display the PDF file, that font causes something stack overflow...The result is that, without any user intervention whatsoever, that program can do whatever it wants inside your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad." 

For the complete story, see Apple Security Breach Gives Complete Access to Your iPhone.

vFabric, the VMware Network OS, to be announced at VMworld?

http://wikibon.org/blog/vmware-network-os-announcement-at-vmworld-vfabric/

VMware Director of R&D Howie Xu will be presenting The Future Direction of Networking Virtualization at VMworld 2010 in San Francisco (9am Monday 8/30 and 4:30pm Wednesday 9/1) and Copenhagen.  In a preview video, Howie states that “VMware will be announcing an open, extensible networking virtual chassis platform, a Network OS or networking hypervisor, so that anyone can develop the on-demand networking service on top of vSphere.”  There will also be services built on top of the platform.

 

A recent VMware video suggests the company is about to jump into networking in a big way. Dubbed “vFabric,” This new offering would be a generic hypervisor for virtual network devices, from load balancers to security appliances, and would presumably be integrated with the existing vNetwork Distributed Switch functionality.

 

Most hypervisor products include an internal virtual network switch, but VMware’s ESX has multiple choices. The original “dumb” virtual Ethernet switch was augmented by vSwitch back in the ESX 3 days, bringing more-advanced configuration options.VMware improved and renamed the vSwitch in vSphere 4, creating the vNetwork Standard Switch (vSS). The introduction of vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS) in vSphere 4 really set VMware’s network capabilities apart.

  Howie Xu released a video discussing his sessions at VMworld, beginning with a quick pan past Xu’s whiteboard, and including a discussion of the state of the art, vision, and product and technology roadmap for VMware’s networking-related efforts.

  Xu talks about creating a “networking virtual chassis or hypervisor” to allow third-parties to develop and roll-out advanced networking devices within vSphere. VMware has already steamrolled through the heart of server-based applications, making VMware-based virtual appliances as common an installation format as the DVD. Now the company is turning its attention to the network.

  Xu speaks of both a platform and a service to support this ”open extensible networking virtual chassis platform,” and goes on to suggest that it could be used by “networking security, load balance, application acceleration, IP address management, and performance management” products. The virtual appliance marketplace is already populated by the familiar names in networking, from F5 to Bluecoat to Checkpoint.

  Networkers have been conditioned with the belief that custom silicon is the best way to achieve low latency and high performance for network devices. The same could be said of the storage world, where companies like HDS, 3PAR, and BlueArc pride themselves on their custom ASICs. But EMC, HP, and others are proving that Intel’s server-class CPUs and peripheral busses now have the guts to go head-to-head with custom silicon. The networking world is no different, with many newer companies basing their products around industry-standard hardware.

  But deploying these systems in a virtual environment is more challenging. Can a virtual machine hypervisor prioritize threads for network devices? Can it handle the overhead related to networking operations in real-time? What happens in the event of a DDoS or network flood? Most network devices run real-time operating systems like VxWorks or QNX to ensure packet throughput, but virtual environments are notorious for “overflow” of I/O or CPU load between guest machines.

  The whiteboard provides some hints as to how VMware will tackle these issues. First, note the term, “latency-aware queueing,” which suggests that a mechanism will monitor the hypervisor and alter the queues for virtual network devices as the load changes. As latency rises, the hypervisor can move workloads to different processor cores or even alternate hardware using vMotion. We also spot a reference to “non-blocking”, suggesting an asynchronous I/O mechanism will reduce the likelihood that one of these virtual network devices will have to wait for data.

  Both of these technologies are hallmarks of real-time operating systems (RTOS), and are critical to the design of scalable hypervisors like VMware’s ESX. It is likely that the company is developing an advanced hypervisor environment for these specialized devices.

  If these assumptions are true, then this is a remarkable development. One could see an entirely new and more-powerful ecosystem evolve around VMware vSphere, running virtual network devices in a quasi-real-time environment. vFabric will not destroy the larger network device market, yet expect wide vendor support for the concept, especially those involved in lower-end and remote-office applications. 

Intel Application Lab in Portland on August 25

The registration website has gone live for our next Intel Application Lab, happening in Portland on Wednesday, August 25.  This will be of particular interest to Mobile and Web 2.0 developers, wanting to understand how Intel's mobile tools provide a cross-platform solution for mobile applications.

Find all the event details (including agenda) at the registration website http://bit.ly/applabblog

Also, see the Facebook Fan Page at http://www.facebook.com/dev4atom

HyTrust Advances Trust in the Cloud with Intel Technology

HyTrust announced that it has joined the Intel  Enabled Solutions Acceleration Alliance (ESAA) to working jointly with Intel to develop a recipe that brings hardware-based trust attestation  to policy-driven, multi-tenant virtual environments.

 

Intel ESAA enables resellers to more easily build and deploy IT solutions, through validated configuration guides developed by Intel together with third party vendors such as HyTrust.

 

The HyTrust solution will utilize Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT), supported by the latest generation of Intel’s server processors, the Xeon 5600 series. Intel TXT helps attest to platform identity and trustworthiness with hardware-based mechanisms that enable the controlled launch and registration of critical infrastructure software. This serves to establish trust and protect the confidentiality and integrity of software applications and data --a critical prerequisite for building a trusted cloud computing platform.

 

VMware platform technology together with HyTrust Appliance complements Intel's TXT measured launch environment, via the VMware vSphere 4.1 Web Services SDK, which manages which virtualized cloud operations are allowed or disallowed based on the integrity of the underlying platform.

 

"HyTrust Appliance provides control, visibility and security for shared environments that are a foundation of internal and external clouds," said Eric Chiu, CEO of HyTrust. "Working with innovators like Intel and VMware allows our rich policy engine to drive security zone definition all the way down to hardware, paving the way for broader cloud acceptance."

How Big is Amazon's Cloud Computing Business?

http://gigaom.com/2010/08/02/amazon-web-services-revenues/

It goes without saying that with its array of web services, Amazon has transformed the computing landscape and nurtured what is generically known as the cloud computing industry. By turning expensive storage and computing hardware into a billable service, it has opened up new vistas for entrepreneurs and made corporations rethink how they build and use their computing and storage resources. The question often people ask: How much money is Amazon making from these web services? I’ve heard some wild estimates.

Today, UBS Investment Research analysts Brian Pitz and Brian Fitzgerald released a report which projects revenue numbers against Amazon’s web services. The duo estimate that in 2010, AWS will generate about $500 million in revenues and will grow this number to $750 million by 2011. By 2014, it would bring in close to $2.54 billion in revenues.

UBS analysts believe that the total market for AWS-type services will be between $5-to-$6 billion in 2010 and will eventually grow to $15-to-$20 billion in 2014. How they arrive at these numbers:

• IDC says the total global cloud market in 2010 will be $22 billion and $55 billion in 2014.
• IDC says the total servers and storage account for $5 billion-to-$6 billion in 2010 and $15-to-$20 billion in 2015.

Of the twelve AWS product lines, only two (EC2 and S3) compete in this subcategory. AWS essentially ‘rents out’ IT infrastructure to companies that seek to outsource IT needs such as Application Hosting, Web Hosting, High Performance Computing, Storage, E-Commerce, and more. Amazon was one of the first entrants (3Q06), and is a top player in the rapidly growing market. (UBS Research Report)

(Amazon Web Services: Revenue Model)

They argue that while so far the AWS revenue has been small and immaterial when compared to the overall Amazon revenues (roughly $25 billion), that will change soon and AWS will contribute about 10 cents a share in earnings during 2010, and grow it to 22 cents in 2011. The UBS analysts value the AWS business at between $3.4 billion to $3.8 billion. According to their estimates, AWS business had a net income of $58.2 million in 2010 and will make $100.7 million in 2011. By 2014, that number will jump to $393 million, or 83 cents a share. The analysts estimate that gross margins of the web business will be around 50 percent versus Amazon’s gross margins of around 22 to 23 percent.

These are astounding numbers and, if accurate, will prove that Amazon was smart to bet early and bet big on the cloud computing opportunity. Perhaps one thing I should note (and caution) — so far, Amazon has not publicly broken down its revenues along various product categories.

Yet I wonder how elastic this is, given the traditional Web Hosting market supported by AT&T, Rackspace, etc and other markets? Also do IaaS and PaaS provide incremental revenue for these services, or has this affected revenue for them?

 

Entering the tablet fray

CNet columnist Brooke Crothers, wrote this week that “Intel is wasting precious time waiting for its ‘partners’ to build the equivalent of an iPad and iPhone," and that Intel should build its own tablet.

Crothers seems impatient for someone, anyone, to bring some competition to  Apple’s tablet. He said Intel had the wherewithal to produce compelling products and should “short circuit” the process of watching OEM partners “prattle about Intel-based tablets, then do nothing.”

In most computing markets, he said, Intel of course can’t produce its own branded products because we would compete with products from our OEM customers, not to mention attract charges of dominating those market segments. But, he said, tablets and smartphones are different.

“In these markets, Intel does not carry the clout (potential for big revenue streams) as it does in PCs...In tablets and smartphones, Intel is just another chipmaker—and not seen as competitive to boot,” he wrote.

He noted that there’s a lot of design expertise at Intel, and that some of the first eye-catching ultra-thin laptop designs came from Intel. And the hiring of former Palm executive Mike Bell increases that expertise even more.

He agrees with Intel execs who say tablets aren’t eating into PC sales. But he asked, “Will Intel keep saying this while slowly consigning itself to insignificance in some of the most interesting newfangled device markets?”

Mobility and QoE with Hardware-Assisted Workspace Virtualization

Workspace Virtualization provides a scalable, performant architecture for desktop virtualization, which simplifies the creation, access and management of virtual desktops.

The advantages of Workspace Virtualization include global scalability and enhanced manageability, which enable enterprises to create a hierarchical desktop virtualization management system that can be distributed globally with multi-site storage support; automated synchronization and on-going backup of virtual workspace images; isolation and workspace security to prevent data leakage and reduce the attack surface of the virtual environment.

This provides a compelling architecture for Cloud Computing that is truly mobile and productive. Although great advances have been made with mobile networks, we are still only intermittently connected, contending with high latency, low bandwidth, or no connection at all. With virtual workspaces deployed to devices, you address the issues of intermittent connectivity. If the virtual workspace is only run remotely, in the data centre, you need to be reliably connected in order to be productive. That simply isn't realistic for the enterprise, thus the demandd for a rich device to run the virtual workspace.

Imagine bringing in a contractor into your enterprise, who brings their company-owned notebook, and remotely loading a virtual workspace onto that device with the relevant workload for the project. This workspace is secure, partitioned from one's corporate workload, and when the contract is finished, the workspace is removed, leaving practically no footprint on the device.

Now extrapolate that to the Bring-Your-Own-Computer (BYOC) scenario - you have a device that you love, and rather than provisioning you with another device, you use yours onto which the enterprise's virtual workspace is deployed. You then have the corporate workload on an attested image, running in a virtual workspace. The enterprise can trust it because it's secured from both your user information and based on the device identification. The enterprise only has to manage their virtual workspace, the user manages all their personal data and applications, neither environment can affect or unbalance the other. The user gets the device they want, and the enterprise remains productive.

The same applies for Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS), which targets small and medium business (SMB) - Service Providers can deliver virtual workspaces to user devices that can be initialised, upgraded, and revoked with a fine-grained degree of control, without ever having to see or touch those devices. The SMBs can rest assured that only authorised, vetted devices can access their services in a truly scalable and mobile fashion.

The power of this architecture is derived from capabilities delivered by the underlying hardware which provide devices with identity; execution, communication and I/O isolation; trust attestation; encryption acceleration; and remote, in-band and out-of-band management capabilities. This hardware-assisted workspace virtualization realizes the full value proposition.

Intel and RingCube have come together to deliver hardware-assisted workspace virtualization with vDesk 3.1 - providing scalable, high performance desktop virtualization for Windows 7. vDesk leverages the capabilities of Intel's vPro mobile platform to provide truly mobile user productivity, lower desktop management costs and eliminates the performance and resource overhead of virtualization technology. Users can run their vDesk workspace on managed or unmanaged devices, providing a solution for campus workers, field staff, telecommuters, contract/off-shore workers.

Read more about how RingCube vDesk 3.1 and Intel vPro deliver Workspace Virtualization in the joint white paper now available.