Another Monday

Today was one of those days that make you wonder: Just how may PR firms are working the virtualization sector? First up, virtualization's 800-pound gorilla released fourth-quarter earnings. Charlie Babcock has a nice bit of analysis here. Bottom line for 2007: VMware hit $1.33 billion in revenue. The company's projections for growth this year aren't as aggressive as analysts had hoped; VMware ended trading at $83 a share, just a wee bit lower than the post-IPO high of $125 last fall. Ouch. VMware is selling well (sales are up 80% over last year), seems to be buying the right companies for tech and talent, and is maintaining dominance despite maturing opposition. I guess sales aren't quite good enough, acquisitions aren't yielding immediate returns, and open source virt vendors plus Microsoft and other niche competitors are chipping away at VMware's aura. The Street is tough.

On a completely different note, Reflex Security is now offering its VSA (virt security appliance) for XenSource, er, Citrix XenServer. It will, of course, continue to offer Reflex VSA for VMware, too. And VSA for Xen-based Virtual Iron. This is good news for the Xen camp and anyone looking to address intrahost security threats. VSA runs alongside customer VMs, keeping tabs on guest machines, virtualized network connections, and calls outside the host platform as well. Perhaps this isn't great news for VMware ...

A Fortune 100 capacity-planner buddy of mine has been trying to get me to come to the local CMG (Computer Measurement Group) chapter for years. I'm going to have to bug him for a copy of Beyond The Hypervisor Hype by Dr. Michael Salsburg from Unisys. I just like the title. Salsburg's work was one of the winners at the CMG'07 awards fete; papers are available gratis to members, so I'm hoping to read my buddy's copy. Yes, this announcement was in my PR bucket this morning, along with a rundown of all the other CMG winners.

Last bit for the day. Longtime readers may remember we had an equipment shuffle in the lab because of Dell's move on EqualLogic last fall. We lost our old long-term loaner SAN as capital assets got recalled to the mother ship for a final reckoning. After the initial Dell fever died down, EqualLogic ended up sending us a new top-end SAS-based iSCSI SAN on loan, making our host boxes very happy. My guess is that the folks at Nashua are pretty happy now that the deal is finally done, and Dell is happy with expansion opportunities in the channel market, using EqualLogic's partner relationships to leverage existing storage customers with other server products.

Those were the top four of 19 virt-based tidbits delivered to my in-box. Who knows what news Tuesday will bring?