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Category Archives: vFabric

Webinar Recap: Pivotal Opens For Business, GE Gets 10% Stake and How Pivotal Plans to Deliver Next-Generation PaaS

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Pivotal is now open for business!

Pivotal, first announced in December, is a new venture started by VMware and EMC that is focused on Big Data and Cloud Application Platforms. Formally launched as a stand-alone entity today, Pivotal is led by former VMware CEO Paul Maritz, who has been working as Chief Strategy Officer at EMC since last August.

In a webinar today, Maritz not only confirmed the new initiative is now a stand-alone business with 1,250 employees from VMware and EMC, but he also surprised listeners with an announcement that General Electric is making a strategic investment of $105 million into Pivotal. GE’s Vice President and Corporate Officer Bill Ruh joined the webinar today and said GE will hold a 10% stake in the new company. CEO Jeff Immelt also joined the call to explain This brings the value of the newly launched Pivotal to $1 billion.

GE also announced this morning that their Software Center is standardizing on several of Pivotal’s technologies, essentially being the first public customer to endorse the new company. Continue reading →

Upcoming Webinar: Paul Maritz on Pivotal and The New Platform for the New Era

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The cloud, mobile applications and big, fast data are fundamentally changing how applications are built and modernized today. To speed this transformation at the enterprise level, Pivotal, the new venture by VMware and EMC, will host a live streaming event on April 24th at 10:00 am Pacific/1:00 pm Eastern with a special announcement and an unveiling of its plans to build “A New Platform for a New Era”.

The Pivotal platform will unite data, application, and cloud fabrics, helping enterprises to develop faster, understand more, and succeed at an even greater scale. It is a platform that makes the consumer grade enterprise a reality.

Pivotal brings together a prodigious set of technologies and talent from a number of EMC and VMware entities, which include Greenplum, Cloud Foundry, Spring, GemFire and other products from the VMware vFabric Suite, Cetas, and Pivotal Labs.

>> Register for webinar here!

Paul Maritz, the Pivotal Leadership Team, and special guests will unveil this platform, and make a special announcement during a live streaming event on Wednesday, April 24th at 10:00 am Pacific/1:00 pm Eastern.

Sign up for the event at gopivotal.com and follow @gopivotal on Twitter for updates.

What 10 Partners Are Saying About vFabric Today

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When you are a software company like VMware, you are tied to the success of your partners in the field standing shoulder to shoulder with your customers, guiding them to a successful deployment. Their success and growth directly reflects your customer’s success as your own success in the marketplace.

Partners are focused on solutions that customers care about because it is the only way to stay in business and grow.  Today, 10 representatives from technology consulting organizations share their perspectives on how they are using the VMware vFabric Suite to achieve success with customers. Each includes a video or you can visit the full vFabric playlist on VMwareTV.

1. Modernizing Legacy Apps to Cloud and SaaS with vFabric

“In vFabric we see a very attractive modern cloud application platform.  So while spring and vFabric represent very attractive alternatives for new application development, what we see with our clients are is the desire to modernize and transform existing applications to take advantage of those same benefits of vFabric.  The run time benefits, the design time benefits.”—Chase Crawson, Director of Application Services, CSC Continue reading →

10 Lessons from Spring Applied to Java Virtualization with vFabric

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The Spring Framework became the de-facto standard for developing enterprise Java applications, and its radical simplicity was fundamental to its success. Why the “radical” simplicity? Because at the time, it was hard to imagine how creating such applications could be made simple.

By tackling issues such as portability, understanding the importance of cross-cutting concerns, and making it trivial to develop automated tests, Spring allowed developers to focus on what matters: what makes their application unique.

As I was pulling together my presentation for SpringOne2GX 2012, I reflected on the parallels between Spring’s success and the direction we were going with EM4J. Why did Spring succeed? Why did simplification win? Where are we replicating these patterns within VMware, vFabric, and Java?

In short, complexity is expensive, and simplification has many economic benefits. By giving people better, simpler, and easier to use tools to help build, run, and manage applications, we create economic advantages.

In a nutshell, there are some core reasons why Spring succeeded, “Spring values” if you will: Reducing complexity, increasing productivity, provisioning flexibility, tooling and monitoring, extensibility, automation, flexible integration and ease of testing. Continue reading →

Why Lean Application Servers Are Faster, Cheaper, and Better For Business

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The application server has been the centerpiece of modern architectures for web-based applications for over a decade. However, there are trends in technology that make us rethink how we use application servers and how we can get the most value out of them.

Over the years enterprises have built up considerable technical debt. This debt is made up of outdated processes, legacy applications, and stale technologies. We are all familiar with the types of headaches caused by older apps:

  1. Development is slow.
  2. Costs continue to rise, not fall.
  3. Business needs are increasing in speed and complexity.

The good news are there are solutions today that solve all of these challenges. This post and accompanying video are aimed straight at helping you understand what will help you evolve your applications to a modern approach that will benefit your company and your customers alike. Using VMware and open source technologies such as Spring, Apache Tomcat, vSphere, Spring Insight and Hyperic we will explain to you how these tools and methodologies come together with tc Server to evolve your development organization and applications to tap into the full potential of lean development and cloud computing.

Continue reading →

Introducing A New Reference Architecture That Will Speed Knowledge & Development of Modern Cloud Applications

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Technology is evolving at breakneck speeds.

Universally, applications are faster, deal with large data sets, and provide more compelling user experiences than ever before.

Competition is steep.

As a result, competitive organizations demand that IT leaders speed the rate of new application innovation and development.  IT must rise to the challenge or face competitive threats, missed business opportunities, and lose momentum within their user base. In short, IT leaders and providers that do not accelerate will face a backlash from executives.

In order to meet these challenges, IT is renovating application architectures to thrive in the cloud. This is an organization-wide change involving people redirection, process redesign, and technology exploitation. For many, there is a steep learning curve. Continue reading →

5 Characteristics of a Modern Mainframe Cloud App – Avoid Tornado IT

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No one likes being rushed into bad decisions.

Yet, the pace of information technology often forces IT executives to do that.

In today’s world, mainframe-to-cloud decisions need solid thinking or we risk a technology tornado. This article outlines some key lessons learned at the front-line of IT decision-making.

As previously discussed, it’s possible to “modernize” mainframe legacy applications to the cloud. You can get there with little to no modification by using a “lift-and-shift” strategy.  Several of my clients have taken this approach to quickly satisfy a “cloud mandate”. The results have been less than desirable:

  • Without the use of pooled resources, the applications do not scale well.
  • Timely user provisioning and access from any device is still a challenge because the apps do not provide on-demand, ubiquitous access.
  • In addition, utility-based pricing/costing is performed manually, with little accuracy to the realities of actual usage.
  • Most importantly, the applications continue to have monolithic, stove-piped architectures, which are difficult and expensive to maintain and enhance.

These “cloud” applications are more like funnel cloud apps or tornoado apps—waiting to cause IT organizations extreme havoc. Assuming you want to avoid funnel clouds and IT tornadoes, consider applying the following five application architecture and design principles indicative of a true cloud application: Continue reading →

Build Your First Mobile App in the Cloud in 45 Minutes (Tutorial)

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Two of the hottest topics in technology today are “mobile” and “cloud.” They are at the top of most CTOs list of objectives, yet they also seem to be the ones most shrouded in mystery. So where do you start?

With the video and do-it-yourself guide below!

This past year, at VMworld 2012 San Francisco and Barcelona, I ran a session where we built a complete database-backed web application from scratch using the SpringSource Tool Suite and the Grails framework for Java. Then, we published the application to Cloud Foundry—our open Platform-as-a-Service offering. Finally, we proceeded to build a mobile application that consumed the data from the web application built earlier.  I broke a cardinal rule by doing the entire session live, but it all went off without a hitch and audience participation with the application was an absolute blast. By the time we were done, we had built two applications from the ground up, and folks had an application that looked, smelled, and tasted like a native mobile application running on their phones. And, we did all of this in less than one hour! Continue reading →

Four Strategies for Modernizing Mainframe Applications to the Cloud

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Once a company realizes the potential benefits of modernizing mainframe applications to the cloud, and moves beyond the fear of modernization, there are several modernization strategies to consider.    And while the modernization strategies may not be all that new, they bear repeating in the context of modernizing mainframe applications by transforming them into cloud applications.  Let’s discuss four proven strategies:

1.    Lift-and-Shift
Several technologies exist for recompiling and executing mainframe applications onto commodity servers in the cloud.  Vendors offer emulation platforms to run COBOL, VSAM, ISAM, CICS 3270 green screen, among others as-is within a Linux environment.   Once “shifted” to a commodity server platform, the application can be placed into virtualized workloads, such as Linux running on vSphere, and managed from within a cloud, such as vCloud.  This approach may be the least risky and lowest cost option.  Its primary advantage is that it significantly reduces costs by moving from an expensive, proprietary mainframe environment to a commodity-based processing environment.  However, it brings little value to the modernized application itself as you are still operating within a mainframe context, maintaining brittle application code and relying on mainframe skill sets and experience. This may be the best modernization strategy if your primary goal is to reduce capital expenditures and short-term TCO. Continue reading →

Why Partners Should Check Out vFabric at PEX

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The VMware Partner Exchange (PEX) is coming up next month from February 25-28 in Las Vegas. This event is the premier event for partners to meet with product specialists from VMware, to educate and enable them to sell VMware products and services. Many partners attend just for the virtualization software itself, but especially over the past few years, many partners have opened their go-to-market strategies to include how to build cloud-ready apps using the vFabric product family.

This year, partners attending the event may be thinking of the news of the Pivotal Initiative announced last December, where a significant portion of the vFabric products are moving out of the VMware umbrella and into a new company. These partners attending or deciding to attend PEX may question if they should still pay attention to the vFabric portion of this event. Our answer is resoundingly YES. Here’s why: Continue reading →