Virtualization

All of a sudden, everything is virtualization. What began in the operating systems arena with technologies like Xen and VMWare is now moving throughout the stack.

Curt Monash looks at the state of the virtualization world in the database arena: Data(base) virtualization — a terminological mess.

Data/database virtualization seems to be a hot subject right now, and vendors of a broad variety of different technologies are all claiming to be in the space. A terminological mess has ensued

By plowing through vendor press releases, technology presentations, and marketing materials, Monash provides a solid service by validating technology that represents a real breakthrough, while rejecting vendor attempts to re-brand existing technology under the latest trendy terminology; this is the best sort of independent analyst work and I'm grateful to Monash for his efforts.

Meanwhile, as virtualization continues to spread through the networking world, everybody seems to be jumping on board there, too. GigaOm highlights one: Alcatel-Lucent makes its network play for the cloud.

Alcatel Lucent, the grandaddy in telecommunications gear, has dreams of getting into the cloud infrastructure game with a new venture called Nuage Networks (nuage means cloud in French). The division was created a year ago and is prepping a new product aimed at creating flexible and programmable networks for cloud providers.

Unfortunately, the GigaOm team aren't as willing to call "BS" on vendor fluff, and so they publish an article like this while admitting that the vendor "didn’t want to tell me what, exactly, it is".

And who knows what it is, when you go to the vendor's home page and find:

By extending the Popek-Goldberg virtualization theorems to the network, we can create a new type of distributed network hypervisor that will enable nested overlays and will bridge the performance gaps between overlays and underlays. This yields an efficient, reliable and elastic Compute Service Fabric.

I have no idea what that says, if anything.

It's important to stay up to date. It's frustrating when it's so hard to do.