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The Dream of the 90s is Alive in the Flash Market

Alex Williams — Fri, 25 May 2012 12:49:55 +0000

“Hey Dave, so you’re back from Vegas.”

“Yeah, Alex, it was unreal.”

“Really?”

“I have a lot to tell you.”

“You know, Violin Memory, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, the founder, Don Basile, he came onto theCube this week at EMC World and basically said the dream of the 90s is alive in the flash market.”

“No way.”

“I’m serious. I mean, he talked about when IBM’s SNA technology dominated the networking market. They controlled like 70 to 80% of the data running through any corporate network.”

“Yeah, I remember that. There were like all these promises of e-business.”

Defining interfaces – devops explosion

“Exactly. Cisco eventually bought SNA in a $2 billion deal.”

All the hot jobs were in networking – yeah

“After that, Cisco just got bigger and bigger. They already had 75% of the market. And with the deal, they did not have to build a service business. They just relied on IBM.”

Mainframe heaven

“Totally. They just killed it.”

You could build the Internet in your basement, yeah!

“Alex – that’s what’s happening now. The flash market is like those networking days. I mean, Violin could raise several hundred million in an IPO.”

“So, Don Basile says it is like Chambers II – the sequel?”

“Exactly, Alex.”

“I’m not sure I want to think about that.”

“I know.”

“So the flash market is like this alternative universe where hard drives don’t exist.”

“Yes.”

Turn that server upside down. No more latency frowns.

“It’s a land where the data center can be in your closet, again.”

“Right.”

“Where legions of nano robots march across infinite data fabrics, take your picture and stitch it with a trillion other photos to tell your future.”

“I think that’s taking it a bit far, Alex.”

“Okay. So, what did he say about really understanding this parallel space?

“Just follow the application vendors, they are all doing it.”

“You mean like in-memory apps and things like that?”

“Flash just makes it faster, Alex.”

The dream is al-i–ive

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In the same vein:

EMC’s M&A Strategy Dictates ExtremIO and Syncplicity to Become $1 Billion Businesses

Alex Williams — Thu, 24 May 2012 21:44:08 +0000

EMC guides its strategy according to what it calls its “triple play.” It serves as a framework to

run the company internally and guide its way in the market.

According to EMC CFO and Executive Vice President David Goulden,that means three things:

Make sure the business is growing in the overall market and increasing its market share.
Invest in the future.
Produce financial leverage.

The trick is to do all three at once.

It’s in this context that EMC models its acquisition strategy, Goulden said on theCube this week at EMC World.

Acquired companies need to be $1 billion businesses when they grow up. Most of the acquisitions do not have that much revenue so most of the growth internally has to be organic.

That puts XtremIO and Syncplicity in that category. Both acquisitions do represent fundamental technologies as companies move to the cloud and create, aggregate and share data. XtremIO is in the flash market and Syncplicity is in what can be loosely described as the cloud management market.

Goulden said in 2002 that EMC did $5 billion in revenues. In 2011, the company posted $20 billion. That $15 billion in growth can be in part attributed to its acquisitions and the organic growth they posted.

VMware did $3.7 billion in revenues last year, accounting for about 25% of that $15 billion.

“We are buying an asset we can develop,” Goulden said.

It’s an insightful viewpoint from one of the most powerful CFO’s in tech and widely considered as an heir to the throne now heldy by Chairman and CEO Joe Tucci.

The question: What company will EMC acquire next?

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In the same vein:

VMware Extends Desktop Virtualization Portfolio with Wanova

Maria Deutscher — Thu, 24 May 2012 20:00:15 +0000

VMware signed an agreement to acquire an Israeli firm called Wanova, with the goal of enabling virtual desktop management on offline end point devices. This is according to a blog post from earlier this week by Scott Davis, the CTO of the virtualization giant’s VDI group.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed in the official release, but local publication Haaretz believes the transaction is worth approximately $100 million.

Wanova’s flagship product is Mirage, a replication and layering solution with one particular feature that evidently managed to draw VMware’s attention: the platform caches and executes images on the client side. View does the same thing only remotely, using a graphics protocol that requires an internet connection.

The company has plans to integrate Mirage with VMware Fusion, which will allow extend its portfolio’s reach to not online offline machines but also virtual OS environments.

Davis elaborated more on the actual software and why his company considered it to be a good enough investment:

“As a standalone product, Wanova Mirage broadens our EUC offerings by bringing many of the operational and centralized management benefits associated with VMware View to laptops and physical systems. This means both native user experience through local execution and disconnected access.

The benefits include push-button image restore/recompose with user state preservation, desktop DR, far more reliable patch management and a variety of migration use cases.”

Earlier this month EMC, VMware’s majority stakeholder, announced that it too has acquired a Middle-Eastern firm. The storage giant agreed to pay $430 million for ExtremIO, a maker of storage solutions that was in the very early stages of initial growth prior the merger.

SSD technology is one of the big highlights of this week’s EMC World gathering. Among other things, clients such as Goldman Sachs have been invited to demonstrate the advantages they’ve seen after upgrading in their infrastructures.

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In the same vein:

Fear and Opportunity Drive Big Data in Business, Says Tom Roloff

Bert Latamore — Thu, 24 May 2012 19:20:17 +0000

Big data is still in the strategy planning stage in most industries according to Tom Roloff, COO for EMC Consulting. But, he said in an interview in The SiliconAngle Cube from EMCworld 2012, companies are moving aggressively, and often fear is as much a motivator as business opportunity (see full video below).

“Everybody is worrying about ‘Are my competitors in my industry learning something that I’m not?’” he says. “There’s an element of ‘Can you tell me what other people in financial services are doing with big data because if they’re doing something I should be doing, I’d better find out about it quick.’”

Big data discussions with customers are almost always involve LOB management and the CIO in large enterprises. And they are vertical-industry centric since each vertical has its own set of business problems. As a result, about half of EMC’s consultants come out of a specific vertical industry, know the business issues of that industry, and only talk to business leaders in that vertical, and EMC Global Consulting is organized by vertical industries rather than territories. The other half are technology consultants that are horizontal and join the engagement after the initial business planning is finished.

Also, despite common belief, most of the business issues EMC consults on are not new problems. “So if you’re talking to a telco and the problem is customer churn, that’s been a problem with telcos forever. Or when a bank officer says, ‘I don’t know if the John Smith who has a brokerage account, the John Smith who has a bank account, and the John Smith who has a wealth management account is the same John Smith or three different John Smiths’, that’s been a problem in banking forever.”

Nor is data analysis a new idea for these industries. The telcos, for instance, have been analyzing their customer data almost since the days of Alexander Graham Bell.

What big data does is allow companies to expand the data set being analyzed far beyond just the rows and columns in their structured databases to include unstructured data inside the company and outside in the cloud, he said. “Now you can bring all that information together. It’s a massive amount of information. Then how do I get some insight out of all that information? Now it’s a technology problem. So these engagements merge business and technology problems.”

Mobile Computing

Big data is not the only major area of transformation concerning companies today. Mobile computing is another. “In banking in particular, huge amounts of effort are being spent right now on ‘How do I render information to users in the way they want to consume it, and how do I design a user interface and a way to interact with all that information in the right way.’”

So for instance he said EMC Consulting is working with a large credit card company on designing an e-wallet. The application is not challenging, “but ultimately we have to create the user interface for the iPhone, the iPad, etc., that you and I will ultimately be carrying around. There’s a strong conversation about what the user experience will be like and how we will enable the mobile worker.”

Cloud Computing

Global consulting is also excited about the opportunity in cloud development. This has three components, he said: people, process, and technology. Most companies are past the planning stage now and are implementing, which is a huge change from two years ago, when very few large industry CIOs even thought cloud was real – almost all those he talked to said it was all hype. “When I asked the 70 CIOs at our CIO Connect Event Monday who did not have a private cloud strategy, nobody raised their hand.”

And in the last year, the trend has shifted from private to hybrid cloud. In the annual Wikibon IT Transformation Survey, just completed, for instance, 37% of respondents indicated that they were building hybrid clouds, a huge jump from a year ago when only about 9% were considering hybrid.

Gartner has just published a report saying that by 2016, 50% of large corporate data, even in regulated industries, will be sitting in a public cloud, he said. “You say that to people today, and they say, ‘No way!’ But I think four years is way too long. I think it’s happening right now.”

Fear and Opportunity Drive Big Data in Business, Says Tom Roloff is a post from: SiliconANGLE
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In the same vein:

U.S. State Department Hacks al-Qaeda Webpages

John Casaretto — Thu, 24 May 2012 18:44:44 +0000

An AP report has disclosed that the U.S. State Department launched the “hacking” of al-Qaeda sites in Yemen. The article states that propaganda on the web pages was reversed to show altered versions of the ads that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton describes as showing “the toll al-Qaeda attacks have taken on the Yemeni people”. The information replaced al-Qaeda propaganda regarding the killing of Americans. This marks a public confirmation that the US is utilizing a breadth of technology based offensive in addition to other means against its enemies.

This admission of covert cyber operations is unusual, and it indicates a fairly non-destructive tact of distributing information as opposed to any attacks or surveillance of any organization or government.

As the article describes:

“Clinton described the cyber effort as part of a larger, multipronged attack on terrorism that goes beyond attacks like the Navy SEAL raid that killed Usama bin Laden to include the propaganda battle, and the longer, slower campaign of diplomats working alongside special operations troops to shore up local governments and economies and train local forces.”

Clinton also stated that the attack was launched by the Center for Strategic CounterTerrorism Communications, a group that includes diplomats, special operators, intelligence analysts, some of whom no doubt have hacking skills and experience. A component of the group’s mission is as Clinton states:

“Together, they will work to pre-empt, discredit and outmaneuver extremist propaganda,”

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In the same vein:

EMC President Pat Gelsinger Materializes Data Infrastructure in theCube at EMC World 2012

Kit Dotson — Thu, 24 May 2012 18:13:05 +0000

Pat Gelsinger, President and Chief Operating Officer of EMC, dropped into theCube at EMC World 2012 to speak with John Furrier and Dave Vellante—he visits every year at EMC World and always brings a lot of interesting insights into the moving-and-shaking projects at EMC. This time he sat down with the intrepid pair to talk about the future of the market, flash storage, and even analytics.

Vellante mentioned that EMC’s portfolio has transformed across the board with acquisitions, Isilon, flash, and software.

“Clearly with the acquisition of XtremIO, as we understand the taxonomy of the industry today, we have all the pieces we need,” said Gelsinger. “But far be it for me to say that we’ve ended innovation in this space at that level. So, I’ll never say never: we haven’t cornered the market on new innovative ideas but at least we understand the taxonomy now. We got the pieces we need, period.”

He went on to explain how all the products that EMC has gathered tie together in a synergy that deliver not just fabric, connectivity, storage, and analytics, but also the availability to mean that all EMC products are extensions of each other. A customer can grab ahold of one product and then look around the portfolio and discover that if they want to upgrade sideways or expand their project, there it is already in EMC’s inventory and it fits right in for them.

Furrier asked Gelsinger to speak about “frictionless data movement” and what’s called data viscosity or otherwise and understanding of how much analysis and business methodology is tied up in not just access but being capable of making sure data is where it is when it’s needed. Gelsinger sees the metaphor as a “data pool” instead of a data island, how private silos are a thing of the past, and that what’s important is virtualizing the data.

Now people don’t just need to store that data, but they need to store it with context and they need to be able to protect it. All of these elements mean that the raw data is just as important as the metadata attached to it as well as the application path for moving it from place to place or accessing it for analysis. All of these elements come together with EMC products in not just providing storage for massive amounts of data but rapid, protected availability.

EMC as a disruptive player in the data center infrastructure market

“What is it? We view our vision as centering around three things: cloud, big data, on a foundation of trust…” says Gelsinger. “And we see those things becoming the foundations for data and IT of the future. It is being the most disruptive player for data center infrastructure writ large.”

He sees EMC as wanting to be the primary data center infrastructure provider for everyone from big to small, enterprise IT, and even on-the-ground solutions.

“We are a products and technology company, 17,000 engineers,” he continues, “and we’re going to keep growing our engineering capacity. We’re going to increase our percent R&D over time.”

EMC has been huge in acquisitions and successful choices over the past few years. We’ve seen them grow from a storage company into an all-in-one infrastructure company who don’t just provide solutions, but bring together other companies who offer hardware, software, communication, and products that organically blur together.

Impact on niche communities

Gelsinger says that through all the different markets he saw two that were very ad hoc and extremely unstructured: the university (academic) community and the startup community. So EMC took a hard look at those cultures and started up projects to align to them.

He says that they started platforms that would cater to their needs, workshops to explain how they could use data infrastructure products to aid their missions. While much of both of these cultures work from the basis of people and they also often produce a great deal of data—generally with very low budgets in the beginning looking at academic—meant that it was a good place for EMC to insert themselves into the smaller niche aspects of big data and storage.

Click here for a slideshow of images from the interview

EMC culture and Gelsinger on “being a cool global company”

“In successful companies cultures are never static, you have to keep moving them forward, changing them, evolving them,” says Gelsinger. “I think we really have evolved as a leader and a much cooler place to participate in. As a thought leader in the industry we’re on the leading edge of the cloud, we’re on the leading edge of big data.

“But the next layer of the transformation really about is about being a global company. With all the success we’ve had with expanding the company success globally, I have to be as cool in Beijing, Shanghai, Qingdao, Bangalore, São Paulo, etc. I have to be seen as a cool leader in all of those places as well.

“I think we’ve gone from East Coast to a broad data center play,” he continues, “and the next phase for us is to really be a cool global company.”

EMC President Pat Gelsinger Materializes Data Infrastructure in theCube at EMC World 2012 is a post from: SiliconANGLE
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In the same vein:

Android’s Google Play Faces Rising Competition from Amazon, Facebook and China

Saroj Kar — Thu, 24 May 2012 16:04:37 +0000

Android’s open nature allows its users to find thousands of applications not only on Google Play, but also through alternative markets that offer different services and promotional offers. And Google Play’s main rival, the Amazon Appstore, has made a name for itself by doing things differently than Android’s official market. The Appstore offers daily deals, curated apps and other interesting features not found on Google Play, and this week Amazon began rolling out its Test Drive feature, which will allow users to try out apps before downloading or buying.

The Appstore currently supports testing of more than 5,000 Android apps, and is enabled for more than 16,000 Web apps. If users have a compatible smartphone, they can first try simulating the app on their phone before deciding whether they want to buy it.

“The more we remove friction for customers who want to try apps, the more apps they will try. Those customers are more likely to find apps they are excited to download,” Amazon said in a post on its Appstore developers blog. “In this way, Test Drive helps customers understand the value of premium apps and helps drive downloads of freemium apps.”

Amazon said the test drive feature will be activated on selected compatible smartphones, and will be available for free for users who upgrade their phone with the latest version of Amazon Appstore for Android.

“Amazon brings the Test Drive experience to Amazon.com and Android phones using the massive server fleet that comprises the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a web service that provides on-demand compute capacity in the cloud for developers,” Amazon said. “When customers click the Test Drive button, we launch a copy of the app on EC2. As customers interact with the app, we send those inputs over the phone’s Wi-Fi Internet connection to the app running on Amazon EC2. Our servers then send the video and audio output from the app back to the customer’s computer or phone. All this happens in real time, allowing customers to explore the features of the app as if it were running locally on their mobile device.”

The blog post goes on to note that apps requiring Java Native Interface (JNI), keyboard, multi-touch, microphone, camera, gyroscope, near-field communication or GPS are not part of the test drive feature, but soon will be included in the upgraded test drive releases.

Google doesn’t offer such lucrative services and deals or app testing to the emerging mobile platform; they are just concentrating on the increased availability of Android applications. Users can ask for a refund only once within 15 minutes from downloading the app from Google Play. We can only hope that Google Play soon introduces more consumer-centric features, which they’ll have to do if they want to remain competitive.

Facebook Upgrades App Center for Mobile

Shortly after its IPO filling Facebook announced the latest development in its forthcoming App Center for mobile apps. The company blog post said that developers can now use the Facebook App Center platform to place their apps, and iOS and Android users have streamlined options to install apps via the platform, either through their computer or mobile devices.

“Facebook sends over 160 million people to mobile apps each month through news feed and timeline,” Facebook software engineer Brent Goldman wrote in a blog post this week. “Soon, with the App Center, it will be easier than ever to drive mobile app installs and reach the over 500 million people using Facebook on mobile devices.”

The App Center is available from Facebook’s iOS app, Android app and mobile website m.facebook.com.

The move will allow developers to better integrate mobile apps with the Facebook platform, and will also provide them a stage to incorporate Facebook login on their apps. This will give the Facebook app experience some structure, as users will have the control to download apps, rate apps and get to know some detailed information about the apps before buying or downloading.

This could also help Facebook’s larger mobile strategy, as the social network could add more mobile users, which will help the company to target monetization through a budding ecosystem across mobile devices.

For installing apps from a mobile device, you can follow Goldman’s instructions as posted on the blog:

“All apps built for iOS, Android, and the mobile web have a “Send to Mobile” button on their app detail page. Once people click “Send to Mobile,”” they’re logged into your app and we immediately send a Facebook notification to their mobile device. By clicking the notification, they’ll be redirected to your mobile web app or the respective install page in the Apple App Store or Google Play.”

China Mobile App Store – An alternative to Google Play

Google Play service isn’t yet available in China because of censorship concerns, despite the fact that more than two-thirds of the smartphones sold in China run on Google’s Android OS.

China Mobile Ltd. saw that as an opportunity, opening its Mobile Market store for Android apps in 2009. Since then, the app store has gained 158 million registered users and more than 630 million apps have been downloaded, making it world’s largest carrier-operated app store.

“Without having to compete with the official Google store, China Mobile has an opportunity that operators in other countries don’t have,” said Kent, a London-based analyst. “China Mobile’s relationship with subscribers leaves it well- placed to take advantage.”

China is a huge market for any mobile vendor. Smartphone shipments are projected to increase 52 percent this year to 137 million units, according to a March estimate from market researcher IDC.

China’s censored web content and online stores selling apps, games and e-books are helping local players to drive and promote their other businesses.

“If a developer makes a very good app, then it will help boost traffic on our network and help our growth that way,” said China Mobile’s Chief Executive Officer Li Yue.

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In the same vein:

Louisville Gas & Electric Chooses Vblock Infrastructure, VMware for VDI System

Bert Latamore — Thu, 24 May 2012 14:01:49 +0000

Louisville Gas & Electric is moving to a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) from stand-alone laptops, in part to support a more mobile workforce and computing environment. And it has chosen Vblock and VMware as its infrastructure, replacing a Citrix infrastructure in the process.

“We looked at HP as well but chose Vblock because of the all-in-one support model,” said Laura Mattingly, manager of client support services in an interview on the SiliconAngle Cube at EMCworld 2012. This is LGE’s first Vblock experience, and overall it has been good.

The Vblock decision came after a year-long proof-of-concept pilot with 100 users divided between internal IT and the business and purposely including the financial decision-makers for the eventual go-ahead. That was on existing infrastructure with Citrix, she said.

One piece of advice she gives for others planning VDI trials – include the decision-makers in the pilot user group. It makes approval for moving ahead much easier to win.

The move to Vblock has a few rough moments, she says, when some shipments were not correct. “But all the players stayed involved with us to make sure everything was fixed.” At the time, she said, VCE was growing very fast, and at times their contacts seemed distracted. However, that has settled down as the VCE organization has matured, and LGE has been happy with the service it gets overall. Happy enough that it has subsequently stared replacing its Tier 3 NetApp cluster with EMC Isolon. “NetApp wasn’t partnering with us,” Mattingly said. “EMC is. It understands our business, and we see them regularly. That didn’t happen on NetApp.”

Another happy experience came when the Vblock system went live and performance jumped. That convinced Mattingly that they had made the right decision.

One reason for going to VDI is to support mobile users, particularly exterior service personnel who were being equipped with iPads to replace their laptops. VDI lets IT put the company desktop image and the applications supporting those service workers on the iPad. This has lead to one internal political problem, she says. “People think that if they get VDI they will get an iPad, or vice versa if they buy an iPad they will automatically get a VDI image for it. We have to make them understand that that isn’t true.”

One of the early groups to get VDI were the service dispatchers. They can run their VDI from home on their personal laptops or even mobile phones. “One many completed a trouble ticket during dinner from his home on his iPhone,” she said.

One reason for this program is that in a disaster staff may not be able to get to the office, but they can run the service operation from home. That experience confirms that expectation.

Today LGE has 100 users in the production VDI environment. Overall it has 1,500 employees, and it plans to have about 1,000 of those on VDI eventually, split evenly between two Vblocks, each in a different location. This will give it backup in the case of a large disaster such as a major storm.

Louisville Gas & Electric Chooses Vblock Infrastructure, VMware for VDI System is a post from: SiliconANGLE
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In the same vein:

No Suits Allowed at hBase Con2012

Harmony Tapper — Thu, 24 May 2012 13:01:22 +0000

hBase Con2012 was the first industry conference for Apache hBase users, application developers, contributors and administrators, offering participants the ability to network, learn and train. Charles Zedlewski is Cloudera’s Vice President, and is responsible for the strategy, design and road map of Cloudera’s products: CDH and Cloudera Enterprise. At hBase, Zedlewski spoke with Christophe Bisciglia, who is currently the co-founder and CEO of WibiData and is the founder of Cloudera, which hBase writes is “the leading provider of Apache Hadoop-based softare and services.” In their keynote address, they spoke on “Why hBase is Becoming the Platform of Choice For Big Data Applications,” and the wide scale adoption that Hadoop has given organizations in order to collect and analyze more data than ever previously available.

No “suits” at hBase

The goal of hBase Con2012 was to bring the community together while downplaying the “suit factor,” which is typically found at conferences with the aim of the conference being “by developers, for developers.” In an interview with John Furrier to discuss hBase in general as well as some of the highlights of the conference particularly focusing on many aspects of both hBase and Cloudera.

Zedlewski also pointed out that hBase is operating in a very real time mind-set. hBase offers a higher level of extraction on top of Hadoop and the next higher level of extraction on top of hBase will open it up to more applications with a focus on recommendations being popular. Zedlewski is basically saying, why not give a semi-built mechanism for recommendations in real time, instead of having to analyze the data and then go from there?edlewski, in speaking about Cloudera, said that he always believed that they are a platform company and one that should be open sourced and to remain that way because “it’s just smart business.” He pointed out that Dell recently announced that they’re going to be releasing a “developer-driven Linux” laptop which will be open sourced, allowing programmers the ability to do with it as they please. Cloudera, like other developers, has their own ideas on how to save on space, power and cooling and being able to collaborate with others to make such goals attainable.

Who uses hBase?

Speaking about the people involved in the development of such programming, Zedlewski said that there are three classes of people who get involved in such a program: people who were already a part of the Hadoop community; the people who have been toying around with SQL databases and utilize hBase because they believe it’s the best option available; and the guys like him [Zedlewski], looking at the future of data management and the enterprise. Yet, you need apps for that to be possible – hBase represents the platform that the most commercial apps will be produced on. He pointed out that more ISVs certify hBase, 40-50 compared to the six or so ISVs that certify against the map/reduce API.

Zedlewski also talked about their strategy of development – learning as they go in terms of data. He said, “the more management of data that you foist onto the application developer, the smarter your app developer has to be, the higher the bar is, the more brains that person has to have and the narrower range of applications that are feasibly easier to do.” There are only a handful of applications that a person can realistically overlay the needs of a file system, and a larger set that seems to work on hBase, but an even larger one, such as adding another layer over hBase would open it even bigger leaving the bar for skill lowered. This would open the door for more developers who are able to build more interesting and useful applications. By following the more “on the fly,” or “learning on the go,” means of educating and expanding Zedlewski is clearly thinking outside the box and inviting innovation into Cloudera.

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In the same vein:

Intel Cloud SSO And The Quest To Secure The Entire Cloud

Matt Weinberger — Thu, 24 May 2012 00:30:36 +0000

Today saw the general availability of Intel Cloud SSO, a single sign-on tool built on Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform and designed to simplify user access to cloud and SaaS applications and enhance identity and access management for the IT pro both. It may seem a strange, given Intel’s reputation as a hardware player. But it all makes perfect sense in the larger scheme.

As you may guess from the fact that it was built on Force.com, Intel Cloud SSO and Salesforce are tightly integrated to the point where you can (entirely optionally) use a Salesforce identity as that single login across platforms. There’s also an (also optional) on-premises tool for integrating Active Directory identities into the Intel platform. Outside of the Salesforce.com ecosystem, Jain says that Intel Cloud SSO supports logins for over 200 SaaS applications and counting, mainly via open login standards like SAML and OpenID.

Obviously, Intel doesn’t have the only cloud SSO product out there. But Jain says that what really sets Intel’s apart is its McAfee technology backend, a context-aware layer that can “sense” what kind of device is using the portal, and the fact that it integrates with what Intel refers to as “seamless two-factor authentication,” where the processor itself generates the unique keycode with no user intervention, a feature available in Intel’s most recent enterprise processor product line.

But that’s all just a sidenote to Intel’s real master plan here. Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT), the chip giant’s trusted computing play for cloud and virtual infrastructures, Intel pervasive encryption, McAfee Application Control for cloud/virtualized applications – Intel’s goal is simply to be all things cloud security to everyone, no matter which layer you’re working with.

From the processor through virtual machines through applications, Intel’s made it its mission to secure each slice of the cloud as best it can. It may seem strange, but it’s creating a complete security ecosystem that seems especially designed to assist service providers as they move up the stack from simple hosting to application delivery, where the real margins are.

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