HP Expands WebOS to a PC (and More) Near You

HP has always been a smart company, even if it’s a tricky puppy to pin down. To data center professionals, it’s a server company; to consumers, it’s a PC company; to some competitors, it’s snidely referred to as “that printer company.” It also sells software, services, storage, and much more. And now it seems the company wants to be an OS vendor as well.

To an extent, of course, HP (NYSE: HPQ) already is. That’s thanks to its high-end HP-UX server operating system offering, which the company has recently spent a great deal of time bigging up using sponsored research. The company also peddles server hardware running Microsoft’s server operating systems as well as Linux open source software, and millions of PCs running Windows desktop operating systems to boot.

But now HP has big plans for WebOS, the little smartphone operating system it acquired when it bought Palm last year for $1.2 billion. Last week, Tom Bradley, an HP vice president, stunned the world by announcing that, starting next year, every PC HP ships will include the ability to run WebOS in addition to Microsoft Windows.

Stunned is perhaps too strong a word — scratching its head with puzzlement is probably closer to the mark. What does “the ability to run WebOS” actually mean? How on earth would HP get WebOS running on a PC? And, more to the point, why would anybody want to? It’s a good mobile phone OS, and probably a great tablet OS. But a desktop OS? Really?

The company has big plans for WebOS beyond the desktop, it turns out. “We’ll put the same technology on our printers, we’ll put them [sic] on PCs, we’ll put them on TouchPads, we’ll put them on smartphones, so you’ll see this become a very massive, very broad platform,” HP boss Leo Apotheker said yesterday.

What’s interesting about this is that HP seems to be copying Google’s operating system strategy. That, you’ll recall, involves Android for smartphones, a version of Android for tablet devices, and the lightweight ChromeOS, which is designed to run on laptops and desktops. It’s the same strategy adopted by Apple and Microsoft. Both of these companies have mobile operating systems (iOS and Windows Phone) as well as desktop ones (OS X and Windows 7)

The only real difference between HP’s strategy, and those of Google and Apple, is that HP’s isn’t so foolish as to risk upsetting Microsoft, the 400-pound gorilla of the desktop operating system world, by competing directly in that market. How is it going to pull that off? By making WebOS run in a browser in a Windows environment. “Just to be absolutely clear: Microsoft is a great partner; Microsoft will remain a great partner. The way we have enabled our WebOS technology is to leverage the entire Microsoft ecosystem,” Apotheker schmoozed.

And that’s a pretty smart move. After all, despite the best efforts of Apple, Google and the Linux community, they’ve all failed miserably to wrest anything more than a few scraps of the desktop operating system pie from Microsoft. Why should HP be any different? No, HP is proving itself to be canny as well as smart. Its strategy calls for an operating system presence on smartphones, tablets and the desktop, but it’s not going to go toe to toe with Microsoft to achieve that.

Instead, it plans to co-exist with Microsoft. For now, at least. As for the future, everything is very much up in the air. Ultimately, much of it will probably end up in the cloud

VMware Brings Virtual Operations to vCenter

VMware this week took a major step toward holistic data center and cloud management with the release of vCenter Operations. Most significant about vCenter Operations is that it goes beyond pure virtualization management and looks to manage the data center from end to end — including servers, storage, networking components and various management tools.

VMware’s Rob Smoot, director of product marketing, VMware vCenter Operations, explained to ServerWatch that it is VMware’s first foray into the operation’s realm and represents a strategy and new solution to simplify and automate how IT organizations manage services in dynamic virtual and cloud environments. The new offering aims to help customers transform IT operations to achieve the agility and economics of cloud computing. Strategically, “it is very much focused on managing highly virtualized cloud environments.”

Datamation explains that to do this, vCenter Operations is tightly integrated with VMware vSphere., “Tightly integrated with VMware’s vSphere virtualization management software, vCenter Operations ‘understands’ other management tools in the enterprise and can analyze the millions of data points these systems produce in real-time.”

If vCenter Operations does not deliver all of the desired data, enterprises can continue to use vSphere to pull in data from third-party management tools.

Its integration with vCenter enables it to better dive and view into the environment, Smoot said. He explained, the interface to manage user environment is integrated in vCenter via a tab. With all of the aggregate information in one place, an admin can use analytics metric to identify “what’s driving the abnormal behavior” and determine what the issue is. Smoot said this makes it easy to see what part of the stack is causing the problem. He also said he believes the solution is superior to the longstanding procedure where a database admin has an isolated et of tools. When performance issues hit, he or she must sort through the collection to and decide which to use and where.

vCenter Operations is actually not a single product but rather a set consisting of products and solutions that will bring together performance, capacity and configuration management capabilities via vSphere. The functionality found in VMware vCenter CapacityIQ, VMware vCenter Configuration Manager and Integrien Alive make up vCenter Operations.

Three editions will be released in late first quarter priced starting at $50 per VM. vCenter Operations Standard will offer performance management with capacity and change awareness for VMware vSphere-virtualized and cloud environments; vCenter Operations Advanced adds more advanced capacity analytics and planning; and vCenter Operations Enterprise offers performance, capacity and configuration management capabilities for both virtual and physical environments as well as customizable dashboards, smart alerting and application awareness.

Amy Newman is the senior managing editor of Internet.com’s server vertical. She has been covering virtualization since 2001, and is the coauthor of Practical Virtualization Solutions, published by Pearson in 2009.

Zenoss Delivers Datacenter Insight

Monitoring data center operations is one thing, providing insight into those operations is quite another.

Zenoss this week is out new technology that is set to deliver analytics that provides insight into data center operations. The new solution leverages the Zenoss Enterprise monitoring software suite to collect data from datacenter infrastructure.

“What we’re providing now is a way to have unified analytics on top of all the data,” Bill Karpovich, CEO of Zenoss told InternetNews.com. “We can understand how things relate, and we can slice and dice the data and look at historical trends as well as usage.”

Karpovich noted that Datacenter Insight can also be leveraged to forecast usage based on historical trends. The core Zenoss Enterprise Platform is the engine that collects and monitors data sources from physical and virtual components, both on-premise and in the cloud. Those data sources then flow into Datacenter Insight.

The new Datacenter Insight solution goes beyond what Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions currently provide, according to Karpovich.

“We do event management and we do performance data, which SIEM doesn’t typically provide,” Karpovich said. “We can correlate performance with events and we have availability information, so we have a broader scope to what we do.”

Karpovich added that Zenoss gets log information, but also notes the correlation of how different components are related to one another. Correlating events is also something that SIEM vendor LogRhythm is aiming to deliver. LogRhythm recently updated its solution with an Advanced Intelligence (AI) engine designed to help identify patterns in logs for security events.

Zenoss’s monitoring software is also particularly well suited for monitoring VMware environments. Karpovich noted VMware itself uses Zenoss as the overall management software platform into which VMware’s own vCenter monitoring data can flow.

“We are the overall unified aggregation point for real time operation and service management,” Karpovich said. “Now we become the place for analytics and planning with Datacenter Insight.”

Karpovich noted that VMware’s vCenter is designed to manage hypervisors, while Zenoss takes a broader approach including network and storage components. As such, he stressed that Zenoss can be complementary to other solutions.

Datacenter Insight is a proprietary product and is not open source. Zenoss Enterprise is also closed source though it is based on the open source Zenoss community edition.

Microsoft Tests Updated System Center Tools

Microsoft will begin beta testing new releases of some of its System Center management tools Tuesday, adding new features to make them work with both public and private cloud environments.

“The new System Center 2012, slated for release later this year … will enable IT managers to build private clouds with the infrastructure they know and own today,” a Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) spokesperson told InternetNews.com in an email.

The announcement came at the Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas during a keynote by Brad Anderson, corporate vice president of the company’s management and security division. The idea is to provide comprehensive management tools that cover the entire cloud computing stack, from the environment to the applications, and from public to private.

“Virtualization and server consolidation are important steps toward cloud computing, but it’s essential to have management tools that provide intelligence about how the apps themselves are doing, not just management of virtual machine black boxes,” Anderson said in a statement.

The beta of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2012 will provide new features for datacenter and cloud management, including the ability to pool and allocate virtual resources, such as hypervisors VMware, Xen, and Hyper-V. It will also manage Windows Azure resources.

Meanwhile, System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 2012 will provide monitoring for .NET and J2EE applications. The tool is the result of Microsoft’s acquisition of AVIcode last fall.

Besides providing maximum availability and performance, SCOM adds new dashboards to track service-level agreements and network performance, the company said.

Microsoft is also working on System Center Service Manager, which will provide “self-service” deployment and management capabilities to a wide range of users, IT managers, and developers.

A fourth package, System Center Data Protection Manager, will provide “enterprise-class centralized backup” and deeper Hyper-V support, including support for SharePoint and de-duplication workloads, Microsoft statements said.

In addition, System Center Project, which is codenamed Concero, will provide a management console with functions appropriate to each group of users.

“You can register Windows Azure resources within Concero and manage both the public and private cloud resources,” Amy Barzdukas, general manager of Microsoft’s server and tools business, told InternetNews.com.

For instance, Concero lets application managers deploy and manage their applications on private and public cloud infrastructure, while still letting IT professionals maintain visibility and control across both, the company said.

Further, Microsoft also debuted the System Center Orchestrator — previously known as Opalis, which the company purchased in late 2009.

Microsoft characterizes Orchestrator as an IT process automation platform that orchestrates workflows across systems and tasks. Finally, System Center Advisor, previously codenamed Atlanta, and available as a release candidate Tuesday, provides a “secure cloud service” meant to help IT professionals avoid configuration problems.

Although the company did not give exact dates, the new versions of the System Center tools are coming fairly soon.

Proxy server

In computer networks, a proxy server is a server (a computer system or an application) that acts as an intermediary for requests from clients seeking resources from other servers. A client connects to the proxy server, requesting some service, such as a file, connection, web page, or other resource, available from a different server. The proxy server evaluates the request according to its filtering rules. For example, it may filter traffic by IP address or protocol. If the request is validated by the filter, the proxy provides the resource by connecting to the relevant server and requesting the service on behalf of the client. A proxy server may optionally alter the client’s request or the server’s response, and sometimes it may serve the request without contacting the specified server. In this case, it ‘caches‘ responses from the remote server, and returns subsequent requests for the same content directly.

Most proxies are a web proxy, allowing access to content on the World Wide Web.

A proxy server has a large variety of potential purposes, including:

• To keep machines behind it anonymous (mainly for security).
• To speed up access to resources (using caching). Web proxies are commonly used to cache web pages from a web server.
• To apply access policy to network services or content, e.g. to block undesired sites.
• To log / audit usage, i.e. to provide company employee Internet usage reporting.
• To bypass security/ parental controls.
• To scan transmitted content for malware before delivery.
• To scan outbound content, e.g., for data leak protection.
• To circumvent regional restrictions.

A proxy server that passes requests and replies unmodified is usually called a gateway or sometimes tunneling proxy.

A proxy server can be placed in the user’s local computer or at various points between the user and the destination servers on the Internet.

A reverse proxy is (usually) an Internet-facing proxy used as a front-end to control and protect access to a server on a private network, commonly also performing tasks such as load-balancing, authentication, decryption or caching.

Server (computing)

In computing, the term server is used to refer to one of the following:

• a computer program running as a service, to serve the needs or requests of other programs (referred to in this context as “clients“) which may or may not be running on the same computer.
• a physical computer dedicated to running one or more such services, to serve the needs of programs running on other computers on the same network.
• a software/hardware system (i.e. a software service running on a dedicated computer) such as a database server, file server, mail server, or print server.

In computer networking, a server is a program that operates as a socket listener. The term server is also often generalized to describe a host that is deployed to execute one or more such programs.

A server computer is a computer, or series of computers, that link other computers or electronic devices together. They often provide essential services across a network, either to private users inside a large organization or to public users via the internet. For example, when you enter a query in a search engine, the query is sent from your computer over the internet to the servers that store all the relevant web pages. The results are sent back by the server to your computer.

Many servers have dedicated functionality such as web servers, print servers, and database servers. Enterprise servers are servers that are used in a business context.