A view from above

So here I am sat above the clouds circling London with a great View, and I ask myself what can I do to kill some time. So I decide a blog about VMware Horizon Suite is in order given that both Clouds and View are included it seemed appropriate.

For those of you who don't know VMware last week announced a new suite of end-user computing products called the Horizon Suite.

The suite bundles a numberof products from VMware and is part of the vision which VMware already detailed during the VMware Forum in May last year.

The suite consists of VMware’s View which is now called Horizon View, Horizon Mirage and Horizon Workspace. The suite delivers a complete solution for delivering a consistent workspace across different devices. Among View, Mirage and Workspace also the technologies of Project Octopus and AppBlast, Project AppShift, VMware ThinApp and Horizon Mobile are included too.

Horizon Mirage is centralised management for physical desktop images over the cloud. VMware acquired the Mirage product when it acquired Wanova in May last year.

Horizon Workspace is a new product name containing both Horizon Application Manager and Horizon Data, which we used to know as Project Octopus. Horizon Application Manager offers an Enterprise Application Store capable of presenting Windows-based applications in addition to both public and private cloud based applications. Project Octopus, which is now called Horizon Data provides on- and off-premise enterprise data sharing functionality.

Horizon View is updated to version 5.2 with a raft of new features.

The Horizon Suite will be licensed per named user.

Great move by VMware in what is a very hot topic in most CIO's agendas. Need help, contact us at Equanet.

HaaS or Hadoop on Premise Your Choice thanks to Microsoft

An area of great interest to many of our clients is understanding how to make sense of the ever increasing volume of data they hold to understand sales opportunities, e-commerce, infrastructure management or patient data for example. A technology that is on top of many CIO's agendas is Hadoop and that comes with it a new skill set, architecture and cost base. The concept of Hadoop as a Service has excited many of our clients and this is what Microsoft is working towards with Azure and also Windows Server allowing you to choose where to run your platform.

Microsoft and Hortonworks has made available for download a beta of the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) for Windows.

The new Windows platform is 100 percent open source and provides the same Hadoop experience as is available for Linux.

In 2011, Microsoft announced it was partnering with Hortonworks to create both a Windows Azure and Windows Server implementations of the Hadoop big data framework.

Some of the key elements are SQL Server 2012 which supports structured data on scalable relational database and data warehouse offerings, and unstructured data on an Enterprise-ready Hadoop distribution. You can now move data between Hadoop and SQL Server with bidirectional Hadoop connectors for SQL Server 2012 and Parallel Data Warehouse. And with HCatalog analysts can be provided SQL-like access to Hadoop so that customers can enhance their insights

HDP is a Hadoop distribution and includes high-availability, security, data services and management tools and interfaces.  The HDP offering is the foundational layer for Microsoft's HDInsight offerings.

Microsoft has made this simple and with HDInsight, Hadoop is both simple to install and manage. It demystifies the Hadoop distribution so you don’t need to choose and test the right combination of Hadoop projects to deploy. And with Windows Azure HDInsight Service deployment is simplified so much that 16-node Hadoop cluster can be live in only 10 minutes.