#Sphere3D now sure about #Azure, joins Microsoft Cloud Alliance
Our man Trevor says industry-best security claim needs pinch of salt, though
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6 Nov 2015 at 13:01, Chris Mellor
Virtualisation and data management company Sphere 3D says its #Glassware 2.0 and #SnapCLOUD #VirtualNAS products can now use Azure, as the company has joined a #MicrosoftEnterpriseCloud Alliance.
Glassware is, we are told, a "virtual application hosting platform which uses a lightweight containerisation technology to enable compatibility with current generation and legacy Windows apps". Great, that's that sorted then.
Sphere 3D was formed in a complicated financial transaction involving the joining together of Canadian Sphere 3D, with its Glsssware product, and Overland Storage with its tape and NAS products.
Both companies have been perennially loss-making and Sphere 3D has received robust criticism from people who think its Glassware product would be hard to sustain.
Register writer and reviewer Trevor Pott had a look at Glassware's features and said: "OK, I haven't heard of Sphere 3D, but I don't see anything about this that couldn't work. In theory, this sounds like it uses technology similar to application layering to 'capture' an application install."
"It then runs that application in a container. Done right, you can run multiple such applications on a single OS install. Which is what application layering is supposed to do, but application layers has traditionally been used for #VDI only," Pott added.
"Running so-called 'non-Windows applications' on Azure is fairly simple. Doing it the easy way you can run them inside containers in a non-windows VM (a microvisor is a containerisation application, by the way,) and then deliver to the Windows environment via any number of remote protocols," he added.
Sphere 3D previously claimed that Glassware is the "most secure cloud application delivery in the industry."
Pott said he doubted that: "I'm calling bullshit even without having seen it. Give me five minutes in a conference call with their security guy and I'll give him PTSD and the realisation he has to go back to the beginning and do it all over again."
He reckons Glassware's claimed feature that it can virtualise 16-, 32- and 64-bit Microsoft Windows applications is a big deal, and "application layering is one of the only ways you could present those applications securely".
Pott sums up with this: "What the company claims is possible. It's also something a whole lot of very smart people have been working on around the world with only middling success. And every time someone does achieve an incremental improvement, they're bought out for a lot of money." ®
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