vCloud Express March 2010 Feature Release
Tue, 23 Feb 2010 18:23:00 GMT | Add Comment
Valued vCloud Express customers,
We are happy to announce that we are preparing for our March 2010 feature release for vCloud Express, tentatively scheduled for production availability on Wednesday March 3rd. This release contains some new enhancements that you will be able to take advantage of immediately upon production availability. The following is a summary of the changes contained in the vCloud Express March 2010 release:
New Enhancements
Sign-up Support for Most Major Countries - We are no longer restricting new user signups to just US and Canada based customers. Our signup and credit card processing forms now support most major countries.
Past Due Payment Notification - If you have a past due amount on your account you will recieve an account alert when you log into vCloud Express.
Windows License Key for Custom Servers - Customers are now presented with an option to enter a Windows Product Key when they copy a server that was custom built using the Blank Server feature.
Account Reset - The Terremark vCloud Express support staff now has a feature to reset account credentials when a customer is not able to reset their own account through the "Forgot Credentials" link on the signin page.
Bug Fixes
Console Connect Window Size in Internet Explorer 8 - The console connect feature within vCloud Express was not correctly rendering the viewable window size in Internet Explorer 8. This release will fix the bug.
If you have any questions about the features contained in our March 2010 release please don’t hesitate to post your questions or feedback on the vCloud Express Product Q&A section of our Community (https://community.vcloudexpress.terremark.com).
On behalf of the entire vCloud Express team I want to thank you for your continued business.
Sincerely,
Tony Savoy Director, Product Management
Terremark Helps Drive Adoption of vCloud API
Wed, 20 Jan 2010 16:15:00 GMT | Add Comment
Terremark is actively working with key VMware vCloud partners to help drive adoption of the vCloud API, a key feature embedded in our vCloud Express platform. The availability of a standards based vCloud API allows us to accelerate the integration of open source projects for the developer ecosystem and provides a flexible, high performance, cloud computing environment to deliver highly valued solutions.
By working with VMware and the developer ecosystem Terremark is able to offer additional value to our vCloud Express users by layering these integrated solutions on top of our service. In a highly competitive market our goal as a service provider is to offer tools and solutions that improve the delivery of our customer’s applications and solutions to their end consumers; resulting in organic growth for both Terremark and its customers. Participation in the vCloud developer ecosystem makes this possible because it gives customers exposure to innovative new ideas and tools beyond the feature sets that are native to our vCloud Express product.
In recent months Terremark has partnered with VMware, Cloudera, and WebAppVM to kick start an ISV momentum program in an effort to drive new vCloud adoption. As seen in a recent press release from VMware (http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vcloud-api.html) Terremark has been successful working with each of these partners to make Open-Source Java and Python SDKs available for the VMware vCloud API. Cloudera is an active libcloud contributor and uses libcloud in its Hadoop offering for vCloud Express, and WebAppVM leverages jclouds for its vCloud Express solution.
The Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop allows users to store, integrate and analyze data inexpensively and easily by leveraging vCloud Express and the vCloud API to dynamically provision resources, process jobs and deprovision resources.
The WebAppVM solution enables users to configure and scale a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering on vCloud Express so they can rapidly on-board and monitor cloud-based applications. These solutions are currently available through Terremark’s vCloud API and will be available as global deployment templates by the end of January 2010.
Terremark expects to keep the ISV momentum program going and will continue to help drive adoption of the vCloud API by working with VMware and the developer ecosystem. Please don’t hesitate to share your interaction with our vCloud Express product by posting your experiences to the Developer’s Corner Forum in the vCloud Express Community (https://community.vcloudexpress.terremark.com/en-us/discussion_forums/f/60.aspx).
Sincerely,
Tony Savoy
Director, Product Management
vCloud Express December 2009 Feature Release
Thu, 03 Dec 2009 17:28:00 GMT | Add Comment
Valued vCloud Express customers, We are happy to announce that we are preparing for our December 2009 feature release...(read more)
Blog postings and a Community update
Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:22:00 GMT | Add Comment
Cloud Computing Blogs
I thought I'd share a little bit of the interesting blog content that I've found while looking around the web these last three months. A few of these guys are my old standbys from years back, and a couple of them are people who became prolific bloggers just after I left VMware. What I will try to do with this blog posting is launch you into the varied and interesting universe that is the VMware blogging scene.
VMware technology (and cloud computing because of it) has a very healthy blog scene, partially because of the community-centric mindset that VMware has always had. The community outreach guy, John Troyer (@jtroyer on Twitter), is the man of the hour at VMware, making sure their blog has a healthy contribution rate and many contributors. He writes a blog posting himself now and then too. From the main VMTN blog page, there are many employee as well as other virtualization related blogs. You can find the VMTN blog aggregate at:
One of the main contributors to the VMTN blog has his own blog site as well. One of the most prolific bloggers about VMware I think I've ever seen, Duncan Epping (@DuncanYB on Twitter):
Jason Boche (@jasonboche on Twitter) is a nuts and bolts guy with a lot of experience with VMware and virtualization technology. He's been around since the early days of ESX Server:
One of the cloud computing blog aggregates that I find really useful (although I don't read every article, they come out quite fast):
Those are just a few to get started on blog reading. There are countless other blogs out there dedicated to virtualization and Cloud Computing in general. Those four links will launch you straight into the center of virtualization blogging on the VMware side of things. From there, the sky's the limit.
Community Update:
This community site has been live for about four weeks now, and in that short time I have collected a lot of feedback, both positive and negative, about the community site. Some of the feeback has caused me to act from time to time, including making major page changes. This week, a lot of changes were made to the community site, most of which were suggestions from people who want the community to be as easy to use, and useful to navigate, as possible. The changes that have been made this week include:
-We removed the "status update" messages from all pages. These updates were not as useful as we thought they might be, and in fact caused longer page load times in a lot of cases.
-I got a lot of feedback that the vCloud Express Blog didn't really look like a blog. Some amount of wrangling with the administrative tools later, it looks a whole lot more like a blog than it did. There is still some room for improvement, but I will have to do a customization in order to make it happen.
-I got a decent amount of feedback that the forum area was too difficult to navigate. We removed some of the less-useful elements from this page, and put a navigation box in the right hand sidebar. We also put an aggregate of all forum postings across forums on the forum index list, to make looking at the most recent thread or comment a very easy clickthrough.
-The Wiki-style Documentation area has been cleaned up significantly. Page elements were removed to the point where most of what remains is documentation, and an area to comment on documentation if the solution or advice didn't help you. In a month or so, we'll be moving the table of contents over into the right sidebar so that there's more space to actually read documents. Stay tuned.
For those that do come back to this site often, thanks for coming back! One of the things I'm working on for you is to stir up a little bit more discussion in the general Cloud Computing forum. I'm going to start posting news stories from around the cloud, and commenting on them myself. I'm hoping that stirs up a bit more of the cloud computing discussion that I think would really contribute to a healthy community feel.
Thanks for reading folks. I will post another blog update soon!
vCloud Express Launch: A Success Story
Tue, 15 Sep 2009 18:44:00 GMT | Add Comment
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Now that VMworld 2009 has come and gone I wanted to share some of our highlights and recent buzz. The event was a huge success for Terremark and proved to be the ideal venue for launching our new cloud computing platform, vCloud Express. With a captive audience, executive exposure from VMware, and an impressive trade show booth, VMworld 2009 will likely go down in Terremark History as one of our most compelling product launches to date. |
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For those of you that attended the event you are probably aware that Terremark's vCloud Express platform was showcased during the opening keynote speech delivered by VMware's CEO, Paul Maritz. Paul and the VMware team provided a demo of our new product to more than 8000+ people and exposed how quick and simple it is to deploy and manage vSphere Virtualized servers using our platform. It was an honor to have our technical leadership recognized by one of the industry's thought leaders at such a key time during the event. |
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The Terremark booth saw a constant flow of traffic by people eager to learn more about our new vCloud Express product. The buzz after Paul's speech lead to countless conversations, plenty of live interaction from our 8 demo stations, and numerous people signing up for Terremark's vCloud Express while at the event. The hot topic was of course vCloud Express but quickly expanded into other areas such as Terremark's advanced security services delivered by our SIS team and disaster recovery solutions for virtualized platforms - all capabilities that Terremark has been recognized as an industry leader in. |
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Following the keynote address our CEO, Manny Medina, was invited to participate in a conference for industry analysts and the press. Moderated by VMware executive, Dan Chu, the conference panel was assembled to discuss the Cloud Computing industry at large. Manny was accompanied by other cloud computing leaders from AT&T, Savvis, Verizon, RightScale, and Springsource and gave persuasive insight about the future of virtualization and what it means to Terremark. Jason Lochhead, CTO of Managed Hosting, also took center stage to provide a full feature demo of our vCloud Express product. |
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Moving past VMworld our product launch is now starting to cause a "buzz-wave" of press annoucements, media coverage, interviews, and blog and Twitter followers. Terremark, our vCloud Express product, and our partnership with VMware can be seen in print and online publications such as Forbes, InformationWeek, PC World, ZDNet, MarketWatch, Fox Business...and the endless list continues. |
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This is a very exciting time for Terremark and goes to show how far you can take a product with one of the most talented development and virtualization teams in the industry and the vision to deliver the types of services that consumers like you deserve. |
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Regards, Tony Savoy |
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All Aboard
Tue, 01 Sep 2009 11:00:00 GMT | Add Comment
On behalf of everyone at Terremark, I’m delighted to announce the launch of our new cloud computing platform, vCloud Express. Virtualized by VMware, vCloud Express delivers flexible, high-performance computing the way you need it, when you need it by giving you the control to configure resources exactly the way you need them – and pay for only as much capacity as you use.
Complementing our Enterprise Cloud platform, vCloud Express delivers flexibility and power through a no-term, no-minimum, pay-as-you-go model; all while leveraging the same high performance infrastructure powering some of today’s most demanding cloud applications. We think it’s a great platform for development teams, interactive media firms, departmental needs and anyone looking to harness the power of cloud computing right now in an accessible, no obligation manner.
A brief post as most of our team is out in San Francisco at VMWorld 2009 for today’s official product launch, but watch this blog for updates on the product and analysis of all that’s going on in the cloud industry. Explore the whole community, which includes forums for cloud discussion as well as product support. If you’re out in SF this week, swing by and see us at booth 1514.
For more information please visit the new vCloud Express website and sign up to become a member of the vCloud Express Community.
First 24 hours at VMworld 2009
Tue, 01 Sep 2009 09:40:00 GMT | Add Comment
Hello all!
I took some photos during the day yesterday of various things, and I thought I'd share the quick story of my first 24 hours at VMworld.
It started off about this time yesterday. I arrived at my hotel, sorted out what was going on, called home really quick, and then decided to hoof it the 7 or 8 blocks to the show and get all my stuff.
I snapped a couple of quick pictures from my hotel window down Post Street in each direction. This one has the best view of the city I think:
I noticed it wasn't a huge downhill walk to the Moscone, but it WAS downhill. Only about a 10 minute walk though, and right through union square dead in the center of the shopping district. Once I started getting really close, it got pretty obvious since there were a ton of people with the huge conference passes hanging around their necks. The front entrance looks good:
Before I even found the registration desk, I saw The Datacenter. What a great display of huge amounts of computing power in a small footprint. It actually made me wonder how much computing power (and the cooling that goes with) could you install on something the size of, let's say a semi-truck trailer? Could this whole thing fit in there? It'd be close, but maybe...
I looked around a fair bit, and then the welcome reception started - grabbed a quick bite to eat, took a full spin around the area and met up with a couple of my old friends in the virtualization industry - Robert Dell'Immagine and John Troyer from VMware. I found out that John is doing regular podcasts of VMworld events every day at the blogger's lounge. Stop by and see him!
It got crowded though, and I still had site work to do that I knew I'd never get done. So I grabbed all of my stuff and headed back to the hotel to finish my work. Like, when I say it was crowded, I mean it. There had to have been 5000 people down there; maybe more. Here's one of the aisles. Most of the aisles looked about like this:
I got to sleep around 2:45am. Couldn't sleep, so I watched sports for a long time after I was done working. The alarm rang at 6:15 and it was back to work!!
Today I went to the keynote speech by Paul Maritz at the main General Session room. This room is HUGE.
I also spent some more time wandering around the show floor, looking for a couple of other guys I know should be there. I'm sure I'll find them this afternoon when I head to the community lounge. I did find my old friend Kris from VMware tech support days, back when we were only a couple hundred employees. It was nice to see him and reconnect with him once again :)
Cheers to everyone at VMworld, I'll post again tomorrow about the next 24 hours.
Back in the Social Media Saddle Again
Thu, 27 Aug 2009 15:41:00 GMT | Add Comment
A Community Guru Once Again!
It sure is nice to be back into the community builder role again! After a six year stint at VMware, three of which were spent founding and building up the user community there, I got out of the crazy California housing market and moved my family across the country. I spent a good deal of time doing contract work and the like, and then ended up with a contract project management job for over a year.
I was quite pleased when I started talking to Terremark about their needs for a technical user community, built from the ground up, revolving around a product that's sure to have not only a good following, but also uses the VMware technology at it's core. It took me all of a month, after I started work with VMware way back in 2001, to figure out that virtualization was the wave of the future, and that VMware was riding right on the top of the wave and looking down at everyone else.
Why a Community for vCloud Express?
I ask this question every time I talk about building or maintaining a user community for someone. Do you have a captive audience? Do you have something people will want to talk about? Do you have a good reason for people to visit your site other than the above? If you can answer "yes" to all three questions, you have potential for a good user community. This community, although we're starting small, has all of the right ingredients for success:
- A captive audience: We have positioned the user community as a central point of support for the people who use this product. All of the documentation is inside of our community wiki, and we plan on building it up. One of the easiest ways to get support and make product suggestions and feature requests will be to post on the forums. Our blog engine is being run from the community site, and is well linked on the vCloud Express application site as well.
- Enticing subject matter: Cloud computing is a great subject. There's a ton of debate on what type of cloud service is the best (IaaS, SaaS, private clouds, public clouds, underlying technology). There's also a lot of interest in cloud computing in general and there aren't a ton of discussion areas where people can hash out their thoughts. I'm hoping they come here to talk about some of that stuff, and we've built a cloud computing general discussion area for just those types of discussions.
- Interest from within Terremark: There are a lot of people inside the building here at Terremark that are interested in seeing the new user community succeed. I have started and advised people on starting user communities for years, and I have rarely seen so many people on board with wanting to participate in the user community than I have seen in my short time here at Terremark. This is a recipe for success. Employee participation in an outwardly-facing user community is a huge bonus. Fair warning, Terremark employees!! I'm good at hassling people to participate.
Connecting with people at VMworld 2009
If you are going to be at VMworld 2009, I will be there and I would love to talk to you! I'm going to be spending a lot of time at the Terremark booth, and also going and looking for all of my old friends in the virtualization space. I will also be posting regular twitter entries and will be posting to this blog every evening from my hotel room. Come by the Terremark booth and say hello! You can also follow me on Twitter (@dswager). I'll make sure to post a link to my blog entries on Twitter whenever I update.
How often will Daryll blog and what will he blog about?
To take a page from the mighty Scott Herold (who said this about 14 times at the last "Ask the Experts" panel discussion I chaired) - it depends. On days when there aren't a whole lot of other things going on, I will shoot out some blog entries. If this community gets really busy though, I might not have as much time to blog as I'd like. I guess we will have to wait and see.
As far as blog topics, there will be two topics I cover the vast majority of the time: One, social media and what's going on with this community site. I will always share what I'm working on with everyone, because transparency is the cornerstone of good community management. Two, what's going on in the cloud computing universe. I like to stay on top of all of the news in my current line of work, and have in fact been on top of virtualization news for years because of the jobs I've been doing. A lot of my blogs will center around cloud computing and the latest news and info from our little corner of the cloud.
Thanks for listening folks. I'm sure to see you floating around in the cloud somewhere!
-Daryll
