Lauren Ramsey

Citrix's desktop virtualization customers are still using VMware's server hypervisor on the back end, but a Citrix executive claims a shift away from VMware is afoot. Best desktop virtualization software Recently, Burton Group analyst Chris Wolf said most Burton Group clients that have deployed Citrix's virtual desktop infrastructure are still using VMware ESX servers to host the desktops. Citrix is widely acknowledged as a major player in the desktop virtualization market, but faces an interesting competitive challenge in that many or most Citrix XenDesktop customers are using technology from rival VMware on the back end. That's primarily because VMware offers a memory overcommit feature that allows greater density and consolidation levels, he said.

In the most recent customer engagements, only about 40% to 50% of new XenDesktop customers are using VMware on the back end, according to Humphreys. Citrix's John Humphreys, senior director of marketing for virtualization and management, acknowledged this problem in an interview Wednesday, but said the trend is shifting. "A year ago, about 90% of our sales of XenDesktop were hosted on VMware [servers]," Humphreys said. "Through the second or third quarter, that percentage is down around 60% to 70%." That proportion is even lower with Citrix's latest round of sales. Citrix maintains an agnostic approach that lets customers use any server hypervisor on the back end, Humphreys notes. Future versions of XenServer will optimize use of memory, and work more closely with Citrix's HDX technology to provide a better user experience, Humphreys said. Still, Citrix would prefer that customers use the XenServer hypervisor to host virtual desktops, and is planning upgrades to make that option more appealing. Citrix also offers its basic hypervisor for free, a tactic aimed at getting XenServer into as many organizations as possible.

Just as businesses use numerous operating systems, customers are often choosing to use multiple hypervisors, he said. Humphreys acknowledged that VMware has a large install base for its server virtualization technology, but said it's not a one-horse race. Humphreys discussed several other desktop virtualization topics this week, giving a preview of Citrix's plans for 2010. In May of this year, Citrix unveiled Receiver for  iPhone, a lightweight software client that lets IT shops deliver virtual desktops and applications to the iPhone. Citrix is also working on XenClient, a bare-metal desktop hypervisor that will let users run multiple operating systems in complete isolation from one another. In December, Citrix plans to make Receiver available for the BlackBerry, and will do the same for Android-based smartphones early next year, Humphreys said. XenClient will go into beta in early 2010 and be available in the middle of the year, Citrix said.

Already, Citrix is seeing many virtual desktop deployments of several thousand seats. "The last few years, most organizations have been sitting on their hands when it comes to upgrading their desktop operating environment," Humphreys said. "They've taken a 'let's keep XP around as long as possible' approach." But Citrix is betting that companies will switch from physical to virtual desktops at the same time they upgrade to Windows 7. "We feel like Microsoft has gotten it right with Windows 7," Humphreys said. "It's a much faster, sleeker and more robust operating environment." Follow Jon Brodkin on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/jbrodkin Fueled partly by Windows 7, desktop virtualization is on the verge of taking off with IT customers, Citrix believes.

PC makers looking to boost sales in recent years have increasingly zoned in on rural China, a vast and largely untapped source of new PC users. But other Chinese and foreign PC makers are also building their distribution networks in those regions in a bid to boost sales. "Most vendors have realized the importance of this market," said Simon Ye, a Gartner analyst. Lenovo and Hewlett-Packard are the major PC makers that have made the most progress in rural China, a term often used to describe everything from mountaintop villages to cities of a few hundred thousand people.

But not all PC makers are ready to tackle rural China, said Ye. The HP and Lenovo cases suggest that catered marketing tactics and a major investment in expanding a company's retail outlets are required for a rural sales push to succeed. The vendor further extends its reach by selling PCs out of vans that it sends around the country. HP this year has partners running 7,000 retail stores for its PCs in China, and it aims to expand that network to cover 10,000 Chinese towns next year. HP also has a van that visits universities, clients and IT expos to show off PCs and teach people how to use them. HP staff gave talks and showed the animated movie "Kung Fu Panda" as they displayed the company's PCs to students.

In June the bus visited a rural elementary school near Chongqing, an inland Chinese metropolis. Lenovo has also used movies to promote its PCs in rural areas. HP has grown to become the second-largest PC vendor in China, where it took 14.2 percent of the market in the second quarter, according to IDC. Lenovo, a Chinese brand, led the market with a share of 28.5 percent. The company arranges screenings of current films that it precedes with Lenovo ads. Many potential PC buyers remain untapped in rural China. Chinese authorities launched a subsidy scheme for rural residents early this year that grants a 13 percent rebate on the purchase of PCs and other electronics.

Just over one in four PCs sold in China in the same quarter were sold in tier-one and tier-two cities, a category that includes cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and some provincial capitals, according to IDC. "The remainder obviously shows you the big opportunity in the lower-tier cities," said Bryan Ma, an IDC analyst. The scheme, an effort to drive domestic economic growth amid the global recession, sold nearly 580,000 computers by the end of September, according to China's commerce ministry. More than 40 percent of the PCs sold in the scheme were from Lenovo in September. But those sales have been dominated by Chinese companies like Lenovo and Founder, another PC maker that has targeted the rural market. HP took just 3 percent of the sales, while Dell and Acer both had less than 1 percent. Both companies equip the PCs to function through the electric voltage fluctuations common in rural areas.

Both HP and Lenovo tweak PCs for rural buyers. They also load the machines with programs such as agricultural databases for farmers - and the companies' own entertainment suites. Lenovo is pitching its PCs as wedding gifts with slogans like, "Lenovo wedding computers, one step to a happy life." The marketing makes use of a traditional preference in China to give gifts that appear prestigious. Lenovo has tailored its ads for the rural market, where the company is building nearly 8,000 new sales outlets. Another slogan targeting businesspeople calls Lenovo PCs the "golden key to information wealth." Dell is another PC maker that hopes to crack China's rural market, but the company has only recently begun seeking the distribution partners it will need to do so, said Ye of Gartner. HP's success has largely been driven by its use of different resellers in each region of China, he said. "It will take two to three years to see if Dell can reproduce HP's success," said Ye.

Attendees packed into a presentation by Salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff at Oracle's OpenWorld conference Tuesday, but those hoping the executive would deliver some of his trademark trash talk toward Oracle left the room disappointed. But Benioff made no response to Ellison's jibes on Tuesday, instead referring to the companies' "fantastic relationship" and thanking Oracle for being "magnanimous" enough to let Salesforce.com appear at OpenWorld. Some sort of throwdown seemed possible, even likely, given that during a shareholder meeting last week, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison mocked Salesforce.com's offering as a "little itty-bitty application" that is dependent on Oracle's own technology.

Salesforce.com is a sponsor of the show. Since then, the two executives have repeatedly slammed each other's business model, with Benioff declaring on-premise software a dying model and Ellison famously mocking cloud computing on a number of occasions, even as his own company tests those waters. Ellison was an early investor in Salesforce.com, but left the vendor's board after he and Benioff had a falling out. Their history caused surprise and curiosity among some observers, who questioned why Oracle would allow such a direct rival to tout its products at OpenWorld. And during the shareholder meeting, Ellison said he could provide a long list of customers who once used Salesforce.com but "chucked it out" in favor of Oracle's own on-demand CRM (customer relationship management) software.

Indeed, beyond slamming Salesforce.com's technological achievements, Ellison has made it a point during recent earnings conference calls to cite deals it won against the on-demand vendor. But in the end, Benioff seemed more intent Tuesday on building bridges than burning them. The two companies announced a partnership on Monday for selling Salesforce.com CRM and related services to small and medium-sized businesses. At one point, he was joined onstage by Dell CEO Michael Dell. Salesforce.com and Dell already had close ties, having used each other's products for some time. Dell said its experience running Salesforce.com will give it an edge when working with new customers.

Reports that Apple will produce a $2,000 tablet next year fit the company's historical pattern of going for the luxury end of the technology market, an analyst agreed today. Component manufacturers in Taiwan and China told the publication that Apple will launch a pair of tablets in the latter half of 2010, one sporting a 10.6-in. According to reports from Asian component makers, Apple will push back the release of its long-rumored tablet into the second half of the year, in part because it plans to introduce a 9.7-in. model featuring an OLED (organic light emitting diode) display, Taiwan-based DigiTimes said today.

TFT-based display, the second a smaller OLED screen. The retail price most often bandied was somewhere between the $200 of the iPhone and iPod touch, and the $1,000 of Apple's lowest-priced MacBook notebook, with an in-between price of $800 favored by many. Previously, talk about Apple and a tablet had centered around a ship date in the first half of next year, perhaps as early as February 2010 . Apple would probably use an iPhone-esque two-stage launch that pre-announced the hardware, a strategy that would give developers time to create applications or tweak existing iPhone software, said analysts. Ezra Gottheil, an analyst with Technology Business Research, admitted he's as uncertain as anyone about the validity of the DigiTimes report, but said both the delay and a high-priced model made sense, given Apple's history. "I don't think a delay would cost them much," Gottheil said today. "It's not like someone else is stepping in and snarfing up the tablet market. OLED screen.

And a delay fits a life-long pattern for the company, which likes to wait to get things right." So it goes with the talk of an OLED-based tablet, which DigiTimes ' sources estimated would cost Apple between $1,200 and $1,700 to make, with about a third of that going toward the 9.7-in. Those costs would put the retail price of the device at around $2,000, although by partnering with wireless carriers - which would bundle the tablet with long-term data plans, as they do currently with the iPhone - Apple could reduce consumer up-front costs somewhat. "Apple doing a luxury, top-end tablet is quite reasonable," said Gottheil. "They've done that many times before." In mid-2007, when Apple launched the original iPhone, it priced the smartphone at $599 , significantly above rivals' devices and triple what it now charges for its iPhone 3GS when customers sign up for a two-year data plan. "Coming up with a high-margin, high-priced tablet is something that Apple would love to do," Gottheil opined. "The quad-core iMacs, for example, have put a terrible hurt on the Mac Pro, just as the lower-end MacBook Pros have on the 17-in. Those moves have significantly reduced the sales of their top-end hardware." That's one reason why a $2,000 tablet, with a correspondingly high margin, has to look attractive to Cupertino, Gottheil added. MacBook Pro.

Data Robotics today released its first iSCSI SAN storage array that, like its other low-end arrays, manages itself and allows any capacity or brand of disk drive to be mixed, matched and exchanged without any downtime. The new system extends the number of Smart Volumes - Data Robotics' thin provisioning that pools capacity from all eight drives - so users can now create as many as 255 virtual storage volumes, up from 16 volumes in the current Drobo model. Data Robotics' DroboElite offers automated capacity expansion and one-click single- or dual-drive (RAID 5 or 6) redundancy for Windows, Mac and Linux machines.

The latest addition to the Drobo family of arrays is aimed at the small to mid-size business market and resellers selling into the virtual server space, according to Jim Sherhart, senior director of marketing for Data Robotics. "Virtual servers tend to use a lot of small LUNs (logical unit numbers)," said Jim Sherhart, senior director of marketing for Data Robotics. For example, if a user were to initially set up DroboElite for dual drive failure, he could switch to single-drive failure with one mouse click. The DroboElite is also able to drop from higher to lower levels of RAID with no manual intervention. Users can also change out drives, adding higher-capacity models, in 10 seconds - with no formatting required, according to Sherhart. Tarun Chachra, chief technology officer at marketing company KSL Media , has owned two Drobo USB arrays for about a year and a half. DroboElite can support VMware environments and advanced functionality including VMotion, Storage VMotion, snapshots, and high availability.

He purchased four DroboPro arrays in June for use in two offices for Microsoft Exchange replication and backups for about 16 servers. Chachra said he was impressed that he could simply go out and buy a 1TB, 7,200 RPM SATA drive for $69 and stick it in the DroboElite, saving him money on total cost of ownership on pricier SAS drives. He's also beta testing the DroboElite, which he plans to purchase for backing up his VMware servers because of its higher throughput with dual Gigabit Ethernet ports and greater number of creatable volumes. Chachra has been comparing his existing DroboPros, which can be configured with up to eight 2TB drives, to what he'd previously been using for backups: a Hewlett-Packard AiO400R array with four 500GB drives. The HP array runs the same iSCSI stack as the DroboPro, but it uses Windows 2003 Storage Server as a backup and replication application.

Chachra said the DroboPro cost about $3,500 compared with the AiO400, which cost $5,219. The HP array was set up for RAID 5 right out of the box and couldn't be changed; the DroboPro offers both RAID 5 and 6 interchangeably. The HP has forced Chachra to reboot his backup server every three days or so because it would hang up and couldn't handle bandwidth, he said. "We don't have huge IT teams looking at servers, so it's better for us to have something that can tolerate a higher driver failure rates," he said. "We also don't stock a lot of hard drives. The DroboElite also offers a non-automated thin provisioning feature called Smart Volumes that allows users to create new volumes in seconds and manage them over time by pulling storage from a common pool rather than a specific physical drive allocation. The main thing, though, is redundancy and having Exchange available all the time." "I don't know that an enterprise is going to run out and deploy this for 2,000 or 3,000 [users], but for small or mid-size shops, this is cost effective and it works as well as it should," Chachra added. Smart Volumes are also file system aware, which allows deleted data blocks to be immediately returned to the pool for future use.

Geoff Barrall, CEO and founder of Data Robotics, said the DroboElite can deliver cost savings of up to 90% compared to other iSCSI SANs "by combining cost-effective hardware with robust iSCSI features." The DroboElite is currently available starting at a price of $3,499, with multiple configurations selling for up to $5,899 for a 16TB configuration (using eight 2TB drives).

A global Internet governing body last month approved new languages for use in domain names, but at least in China some Web sites have hesitated to rebrand into Chinese from their well-known names written in Latin characters. China was one supporter of the recent move by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to allow countries and territories to apply to show the country-code part of domain names in their native language. Chinese regulators have long promoted the use of Chinese-language domain names and forecast that their spread would boost Internet use in the country.

The change would, for instance, let a Web site owner register a domain ending in the two Chinese characters for "China" rather than .cn, the country code for China. Domains in Chinese script could appeal mainly to users who are elderly or live in rural Chinese areas, said Sam Flemming, founder and chairman of CIC, an Internet word-of-mouth research company in Shanghai. But local companies seem less excited than Chinese authorities about the change. Those are the main users that may not be used to typing Web addresses in English or in Pinyin, a phonetic spelling system often used online to replace Chinese characters with Latin ones. "For people that are currently online, they're much more used to it," said Flemming. Those domains can only be visited within China, or by computers using Chinese DNS (Domain Name System) servers.

The ICANN decision has not yet taken effect, but Chinese regulators have already allowed local companies to register domain names that have Chinese characters throughout their names, including at the country-code level. Local portal Tencent, for instance, can be visited by typing in the Chinese characters for "Tencent-dot-China". But the portal can also be reached at qq.com, which takes fewer strokes to type. Many Chinese companies use numbers in their domain names that are widely associated with their brands. A Chinese domain name might not make sense for some Web sites. Local portal NetEase keeps its Web site at 163.com.

The name of one local travel site, 51766.com, sounds similar to the phrase "I want to go travel" when the numbers are pronounced in Chinese. In some cases the numbers also have intentional second meanings. Internet users are also widely familiar with Latin-character domains, so big Chinese Internet companies may not need to change them. Baidu.com, China's leading search engine, declined to comment on questions about Chinese domain names. Taobao.com, a major retail and user auction Web site, has registered variations of its domain name in Chinese but has not decided yet if it will use them, a company spokeswoman said. But typing the Chinese script for "Baidu-dot-China" into a browser calls up a Web site that does not immediately appear to belong to the company.

The company has registered variations in Chinese including "Youku-dot-company". But perhaps the most important domain, "Youku-dot-China", is held by someone else who registered the name first, Liu said. Youku.com, the country's top video streaming Web site, will use Chinese versions of its domain but is not sure if they will help draw more users, said company chief financial officer Liu Dele in an e-mail. That may not matter. Still, Youku would like to buy the domain back for a reasonable price. "At least this will prevent confusion," Liu said. "But we don't think it's a big deal for our traffic and brand." Users who are not used to typing English often visit Youku via a search engine rather than directly typing its Web address, said Liu.

Apple's move to slash the price of one its Apple TV models and discontinue another lower capacity model have many scratching their heads. At the same time, the price of the 160GB version was slashed by one hundred dollars to $229 from $329. Fulfillment of a prophecy? Monday morning the 40GB model of the Apple TV disappeared from U.S. retail locations and online. In the days before Apple's September 9 media event, where the company unveiled new iPods and a revamped iTunes, many analysts believed the Apple TV was due for a refresh.

In light of Monday's development, however, it may be Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster who is the most prescient, according to MacRumors. Speculation revolved around the possibility that Apple TV could be overhauled, and earlier speculation wondered if the device might morph into a gaming machine. Munster earlier this month noticed the shipping window-the time it takes for a product to go from factory to sales floor-for the Apple TV had slipped to one to two weeks. At the time of this writing, a new model has not been introduced to the Apple TV lineup. This development prompted Munster to suggest Apple would cut the 40GB model from its inventory and slash the price of the 160GB version to make room for a new model.

So what does this mean? It's possible, but since Apple TV is not a particularly high selling product, the move could be meant to boost sales. Will there be a new model coming soon? A price cut could entice people to pick up the set-top box for a relatively cheap price, thereby encouraging more video downloads and rentals from Apple's iTunes Store. Is this just a price cut to boost sales across North America or has Apple got something big planned for the Apple TV up its sleeve?

So what do you say?