With 140 breweries in more than 70 countries creating 200 million hector liters of beer and cider a year, including a large export business to the United States from the three breweries of its base in Holland, Heineken is one of the largest, worldwide brewery operations in the world. Its IT environment is demanding. It requires a 24/7 IT operation because brewing is a 24/7 operation. Shutting down a packaging line, for instance, costs the company 12,000€ an hour.  Heineken had been running on Hewlett-Packard blade servers and storage with 12 server rooms it wanted to combine into a single data center. It had virtualized its test environment with VMware but was constrained in its plans to  upgrade to Windows Server 2008 and to th

New-generation development frameworks like VMforce (http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmforce.html), are changing the focus of software development and opening new opportunities for developers, says VMware CTO Steve Harrod. Interviewed on SiliconAngle.TV from VMworld2010 immediately after the announcement of VMforce, the new third-generation development platform being co-developed by VMware and salesforce.com, he said, “Developers want to write apps that reach the largest audience.” But this is becoming a challenge as we move from a Microsoft Windows dominated end-user environment to a multi-platform world with Apple, Android, Windows 7, and the Palm WebOS (now owned by Hewlett-Packard), all playing into an increasingly mo

It’s been eighteen days since the bidding war over 3Par began, and we’re wondering if there’s even an end in sight. 3Par released a statement this morning saying that HP raised its bid again, to $33 per share. That’s an increase from its previously announced offer of $30 per share. This “Superior Proposal” aims to woo 3Par as far away from Dell’s initial acquisition offering as it can, with the terms of agreement allowing the server company to entertain other offers. That’s exactly what 3Par has been doing, stretching this bidding war out for nearly three weeks. Back in August, John Furrier predicted 3PAR bidding would exceed $2 Billion, and predicted back in May that storage would be the next hot market to watch for merg

The deadline for the 3Par bid is nearing, and speculation is bubbling around whether or not Dell will make a last raise on its bid to acquire the company. HP had started a bidding war for 3Par, when it topped Dell’s initial bid of $18 per share earlier this month. Early predictions have put HP in the lead. The bidding war has been the running tech soap opera drama to play out over the past few weeks, with 3Par seeming to sit quite comfortably in the middle of it all. 3Par’s terms of agreement Dell, the computer manufacturer was allotted three days, beginning Monday, to determine what it’s next move would be. With HP’s latest offer of $2 billion ($30 per share), Dell will have to devote a hefty sum to acquire 3Par. Interesti

Novell’s made a joint announcement with VMware at the VMworld 2010 conference today in San Francisco,  delivering SUSE Linux Enterprise Server features to its wide array of clients.  Novell stopped by TheCUBE to make the announcement, which was streamed live at SiliconANGLE.tv.  This marks the first of several steps the companies will be taking in their expanded partnerships, first announced in June. With the new server solutions, Novell and VMware strive to reduce IT complexity, accelerating customer’s journey towards a fully-virtualized datacenter.  To do so, the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware focuses on its broad application support, boasting nearly 6,000 application certifications.  The partnership will bring the op

Virtualization leader VMware has purchased Integrien, a monitoring company based in Irvine California.  From the company’s website: “Thru advanced analytics Integrien stands alone in it’s ability to leverage existing monitoring infrastructures to solve performance problems. Listed below is only a short list of the benefits our customers enjoy after deploying Alive. Make sure to review the specific details associated with each solution.” All of Integrien’s employees, (80) have accepted jobs at VMware. The the two companies had already been working together, as Integrien announced the  launch of its AliveVM monitoring product for VMware administrators on August 31.

Howie Xu, R&D Director from VMware, put forth a vision of VMware’s direction for the future of networking, the challenges faced and VMware’s current thinking on how these issues should be solved.  As part of the transformation of IT to create more scalable and flexible environments (what VMware and others would call the journey to the cloud), networking has some changes to make.  It is VMware’s direction that to fully enable the mobility of network traffic, that more of the networking infrastructure that is currently in hardware should be moved into the networking layer.  Networking switch hardware has mostly avoided the consumerization of IT, will custom switch ASICS become just another application for x86? From

Businesses are facing a desktop IT dilemma, VMware Director of Product Marketing Raj Mallempati said in an interview with David Vellante, CEO of Wikibon.org, and John Furrier, CEO of SiliconAngle.com, on www.siliconangle.tv from VMworld 2010. Their immediate problem is that they are facing an expensive, time and resource consuming migration to from Vista and XP to Windows 7. Their medium term problem is what he called the “blob” architecture of the desktop in general, in which if applications act up the entire system has problems. And the longer term issue is empowering collaboration across the enterprise and beyond. “What we are trying to do with desktop virtualization is to modernize that architecture,” Mallempati said. “

The new wave of IT virtualization is certainly driving huge growth for VMware, which has added 1,500 employees so far in 2010. But the important thing to realize is that this is not just a boom for a few companies, says VMware COO Todd Nielsen. “This is an opportunity for everyone at all levels of the stack and for all of our 25,000 customers.” Interviewed by Wikibon.org CEO David Vellante and SiliconAngle CEO John Furrier on SiliconAngle.TV from VMworld 2010 (www.siliconangle.tv), Nielsen said that the first rule that VMware senior management always keeps in mind is that they are only part of the picture. “The value has to be shared by the whole ecosystem. Making it possible for everybody to add value at every layer of the stack

Compellent is here at the VMworld 2010 conference, holding a live press conference here at TheCUBE (watch it here). The company is announcing a new virtualized storage system for the VMware-based data center for Heineken Netherlands, providing private cloud computing designed to handle growth, streamlined storage and power usage, and automated data management. The goal for Heineken Netherlands was to find the best route for upgrading its HP EVA storage systems, facing a challenge that several IT departments have. Compellent delivered a solution through its channel partner Intel Access B.V., presenting its Fluid Data storage and server architecture. “Enterprises are making strategic choices to deploy game-changing technologies, and C