Microsoft virtual networking upgrades keep pressure on VMware

As part of the R2 series of updates to Windows Systems Center and Windows Server 2012, Microsoft is taking a stepping up its virtual networking support, just as other cloud providers are doing the same.

The goal of the feature enhancements is to more easily manage hybrid environments that combine on-premises resources with hosted public cloud infrastructure and migrating virtual machines between the two. "If you're using multiple clouds you want them to operate the same way," says Corporate Vice President Brad Anderson. "Build once, deploy anywhere" is the goal, he adds.

The advances in virtual networking are just one aspect of a broader refresh of R2 releases. Microsoft announced those would be available for eligible customers to download on October 18, along with the much-anticipated Windows 8.1 update.

New virtual networking functionality, which is outlined in this blog post from the company, will allow for more granular control of network topology in Windows Server (a server OS) and Windows Systems Center (which is an entire data center-scale management platform).

Previous support in the 2012 versions of the products allowed for the creation of virtual private networks (VPNs), but new advancements take the networking features even further.

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New multi-site VPN features can create secure tunnels between multiple sites and a public cloud. When transferring VMs back and forth between those environments, new functionality will allow the VMs to keep the same IP addresses, no matter where it is running. New site-to-site VPNs allow for segmentation of networks and new controls that can be placed on them, including rate-limits and tenant-specific traffic filters.

The advancements solve pain points that enterprise customers are feeling today, says Chris Wolf, a Gartner researcher. "Our clients want flexibility to move workloads withouthaving to reconfigure the network," he says. "Network virtualization and SDN are huge enablers for simplifying both VM mobility and disaster recovery."

The virtual networking components come at an interesting time. VMware is gearing up for its VMworld show at the end of the month and some industry watchers expect the company to advance its virtual networking capabilities given its $1.2 billion acquisition of Nicira last year and its plans to launch a hybrid cloud service.

Microsoft's Anderson said there are significant differences between Microsoft and  VMware, even when it comes to virtual networking. For one, he says Microsoft has experience running large-scale cloud deployments which it has gleaned insight from and packaged into these R2 releases. Microsoft runs more than 200 cloud-based application brands in its cloud, and has Azure, the public PaaS and IaaS cloud platform, which has more than 50,000 networking changes each day that are all automated. "There's really no substitute to building and operating a massive-scale cloud," Carpenter says, who addsMicrosoft is "unparalleled" in that respect compared to organizations "who want to become a provider."

The networking-related R2 advancements are just one portion of a broader set of functionality Microsoft announced today. Other R2 updates include advancements to the Hyper-V hypervisor that automatically detect VM failure and remedy the problem. Linux is also now more fully supported as a backup OS. Microsoft has already been threatening hypervisor leader VMware with Hyper-V, and Wolf says these new advancements only further Hyper-V as a general purpose X-86 virtualization platform "Make no mistake," he says. "This is a significant step forward.

Is Apple killing paid upgrades?

Apple’s release of Logic Pro X has brought users of the company’s audio authoring software a slew of new features. By all accounts, it seems to be an excellent update to a very popular app used by thousands of artists, famous and otherwise.

One thing that’s not included in the package, though, is an option for existing customers to upgrade from Logic Pro 9 for a reduced price. Regardless of whether you’re approaching Logic for the first time, or you’re a long-running user of the app, getting your hands on this latest version will set you back a cool $200—no exceptions.

In a sense, this was to be expected. Logic, like almost every other piece of software Apple offers, is now distributed exclusively through the Mac App Store, which doesn’t make allowances for any upgrade mechanism—something that developers and users have complained about almost from the moment the store was announced.

Until now, many of Apple’s consumer apps have received free updates—the one notable exception being OS X. This approach, however, cannot work for higher-priced “prosumer” software, which reaches a smaller market and cannot easily be justified simply as a way to incentivize customers to purchase the company’s hardware.

And, while the folks in Cupertino could have probably made a one-time change to the way the store works for their own benefit, it’s likely that the uproar over giving its own software preferential treatment—while forcing all other developers to live sans upgrades—would have been significant, and rightfully so.
Logic Pro X: One price fits all

  One way or another, it’s been clear for some time that Apple has set its sight on paid-upgrade cycles, and that the tech giant is intent on making those cycles a thing of the past.

There are at least a couple of reasons why this makes sense from the company’s point of view. The first is that upgrade pricing introduces confusion in the customer’s mind: If someone can buy a piece of software at a lower price, why can’t everyone? In addition to signalling that software is worth less than its full price tag claims, upgrades create an artificial barrier to entry for new customers, leading to reduced adoption and higher support costs.

Obviously, the lack of paid upgrades also pushes developers to offer more free updates, which plays into Apple’s attempt to create an ecosystem where software for its devices is cheap and plentiful, making it easier for consumers to swallow a premium price for its hardware.

Consumers have benefited from Apple’s scheme by enjoying generally-lower prices. Just a few years ago, Logic Pro cost $500—which means that, assuming that the new pricing holds, you now would have to buy three versions of the software before you’d spend as much money as just one at the old price. The same goes for many of Apple’s consumer-level apps as well, including OS X, which will now set you back a fraction of what you would have spent just a few versions ago.

For developers, the bag is decidedly more mixed. Coupled with the App Store’s generally depressed (and depressing) prices, its lack of support for paid upgrades makes life very hard for companies that have an established customer base long accustomed to incremental pricing. And even those who are publishing their app for the first time directly on the Mac App Store face an uphill battle trying to sell customers on the idea that they should fork over the entire purchase price again to get their hands on a new release.

This makes Logic Pro X’s release that much more relevant, particularly if the lack of upgrade pricing becomes part of a trend: The fact that the world’s largest tech company may have foregone the traditional approach towards upgrades can only signal to customers that a fairly-priced app is a good idea even if you have to fork over the full price every time a major update comes out.

And there is reason to believe that this will trickle down to third-party developers, who can jump on the bandwagon and adopt a distribution strategy in which small updates are free, and major releases are priced independently as separate products. In the long run, this might mean both higher revenues and a customer base that is more receptive to prices that are reasonable for both sellers and buyers. 

EMC upgrades Data Domain, Avamar, NetWorker and Mozy

EMC has announced upgrades to its hardware, software and cloud backup products, including four new Data Domain data deduplication backup target devices; a full number upgrade to the Avamar backup app; a point upgrade to the NetWorker backup app, and; Microsoft Active Directory integration for its Mozy cloud backup service.

The new Data Domain boxes – launched at an event in New York this week – are the DD2500, DD4200, DD4500 and DD7200, all of which fit into the midrange between the entry level DD160 and high end DD9200.

The key upgrades over the products they replace (the DD640, DD670, DD860 and DD890) are a CPU upgrade to Intel Sandy Bridge for a claimed 4x faster processing/throughput and higher capacity drives of 3TB in place of 2TB for a 10x capacity boost over the previous products.

Data Domain is EMC’s hardware data deduplication backup hardware family, acquired in 2009, which serves as a backup target at which data volume is reduced inline as it is ingested. That makes it most suited to use in datacentres, where bandwidth to the disk target is not an issue.

EMC has also added Data Domain backup integration with SAP’s HANA Studio and Oracle Exadata.

The Avamar product has undergone a full upgrade to version 7 and now supports backup to Data Domain of NAS/NDMP workloads. This is in addition to VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, Oracle, SAP, IBM DB2 and Sybase, which were given Data Domain integration in Avamar previously.

To backup EMC Isilon scale-out NAS, remote offices, desktop or laptops, however, customers still need Avamar RAIN architecture storage hardware.

Further key Avamar upgrades include: newly-created virtual machines inheriting existing backup policies; VM Instant Access, which allows users to boot a virtual machine from Data Domain; NAS backup via the NDMP protocol, and; the ability for administrators to manage Avamar from vSphere.

EMC NetWorker 8.1 has added snapshot management that includes auto-discovery of snapshots, wizard-based configuration and intelligent assignment of snapshots to storage media.

EMC has also added the ability for NetWorker to use DD Boost – software that deduplicates data at source prior to Data Domain ingest – over Fibre Channel for a claimed 30% backup speed increase and 2.5% increase in restore time.

Networker now also incorporates the virtual machine backup features of Avamar.

EMC’s cloud backup product Mozy has added Microsoft Active Directory integration that includes automatic discovery of user account profiles and self-service operations.

Microsoft releases disk images for Windows 8.1 beta upgrades

Microsoft Thursday released its Windows 8.1 beta as a disk image, making it more convenient to upgrade multiple devices within an organization or enterprise.

 

Windows 8.1 Preview launched Wednesday, but was initially only available from Microsoft’s app market, the Windows Store. Each Windows 8 or Windows RT PC or tablet had to individually download the massive upgrade from the store.

 

By downloading a disk image, then burning it to DVD or storing it on a USB flash drive, users can upgrade machines or devices faster or when they are offline.

 

The .iso files range in size from 2.7GB to 3.9GB, depending on the language and whether the upgrade is 32- or 64-bit. Microsoft has made disk images available in English, Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish.

 

Once downloaded, the .iso file must be converted into bootable media—typically either a DVD or a flash drive—to upgrade Windows 8, Windows RT, Windows 7, Vista, or even the 12-year-old Windows XP.

 

In a note accompanying the .iso download links, Microsoft warned users that they would not be able to uninstall the beta if they upgraded using a disk image. The company has posted other information about upgrading in a brief FAQ on Windows 8.1 installation.