Archives for December 2009

Vizioncore has announced the availability of vFoglight 6.0, a performance monitoring and capacity planning tool.

vFoglight 6.0 provides an ideal virtualization management solution that enables administrators to better understand the complex relationships and interactions among all the components within a virtual infrastructure.

With vFoglight 6.0, Vizioncore has simplified the process for small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) wanting to manage their virtual infrastructures by providing clarity and expertise to performance and availability issues through architectural representations and relationships. Virtualization management has become critical to the success of virtual infrastructure performance.

Vizioncore is a fully-owned subsidiary of Quest Software, a systems management vendor, with operations spanning the Americas, EMEA, Asia and Australia. The company’s products provide server virtualization management solutions that help customers protect, control and manage their IT systems, while allowing them to extract the maximum return on their investment in virtualization. Vizioncore’s products are built from the ground up to support virtual environments with no legacy encumbrances of products built for physical servers.

vFoglight 6.0 is an integrated solution that provides four critical benefits, including performance monitoring which detects, diagnoses and resolves problems affecting performance and availability in both virtual and physical server environments. It also offers capacity planning to reduce the need for additional resources to support the infrastructure, saving costs while gaining administration efficiencies. It also enables chargeback to provide cost transparency to IT management and business stakeholders that indicates what groups and workloads are consuming resources and allows costs to be recovered proportionately. It also provides Service Level Management to align IT and business by measuring service levels, performing chargeback and reporting key information to stakeholders.

In addition, vFoglight 6.0 offers scenario-based models and predictive alerts to help organizations plan, manage and optimize infrastructure capacity, improving performance and resource utilization. With built-in service dependency models, vFoglight 6.0 also lets administrators define SLA achievement and proactively monitor service health and availability.

vFoglight 6.0 is available for trial and download from the company site.

DataCore Software is stretching the size of its virtual disks from 2 Terabytes (TBs) to 1 Petabyte (PB).

The huge virtual disk requirement arises from two industry trends. As regards the physical storage pool, clients are eager to group multiple disk drives, each exceeding 1 TB, into Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) sets. With this release, DataCore storage virtualization nodes can control pools consisting of numerous RAID sets, each well over the previous 2 TB maximum.

Demand has also been strong from applications seeking to update and analyze very large datasets that in the foreseeable future will grow well past the 2 TB cap.

The pace of DataCore’s noteworthy innovations is indicative of its uniquely extensible software architecture. Unbridled by hardware, DataCore rapidly adapts its storage virtualization products to harness the power of bigger, faster, and cheaper equipment within weeks of the technology becoming generally available. That puts customers in the best position to take advantage of future hardware advancements.

The new software release is available immediately.

Red Hat yesterday announced financial results for its fiscal year 2010 third quarter (ended November 30, 2009).

Total revenue for the quarter was $194.3 million, an increase of 18% from the year ago quarter. Subscription revenue for the quarter was $164.4 million, up 21% year-over-year.

GAAP operating income for the quarter was $19.8 million, including a previously announced charge of $8.8 million for a litigation settlement, compared to $21.0 million in the year ago quarter. After adjusting for stock compensation, amortization expenses and the charge for the litigation settlement as detailed in the tables below, non-GAAP operating income for the quarter was $46.1 million, up 20% year-over-year. GAAP operating margin was 10.2%. Non-GAAP operating margin was 23.7%, up 50 basis points from the year ago quarter.

GAAP net income for the quarter was $16.4 million, or $0.08 per diluted share, compared with $24.3 million, or $0.12 per diluted share, in the year ago quarter. The current quarter GAAP net income was reduced by $0.03 per diluted share due to the charge for the litigation settlement. Non-GAAP adjusted net income for the quarter was $33.5 million, or $0.17 per diluted share, after adjusting for stock compensation, amortization expenses and the charge for the litigation settlement as detailed in the tables below, as compared to $36.9 million, or $0.18 per diluted share, in the year ago quarter.

Operating cash flow totaled $54.1 million, compared to $59.1 million from the year ago quarter. Due to record billings, accounts receivable increased $24 million compared to last year even as days sales outstanding (DSO) improved to 54 days compared to 59 days last year. At November 30, the company’s total deferred revenue balance was $618.7 million, an increase of 23% on a year-over-year basis. Total cash, cash equivalents and investments as of November 30, 2009 were $959.1 million after repurchasing $52.3 million, or 1.9 million shares, of common stock.

Waltham-based Viewfinity, which came out of stealth mode with its first product earlier this year, has reported a $8.6 million Series B round that includes a new investor, Longworth Venture Partners.

Viewfinity, founded in 2007 by former XOsoft executives, reported the new funding in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The company’s technology, also called Viewfinity, is a management toolthat works with virtualization software layers, called hypervisors, provisioning persistent desktops and providing single-image management of applications through an agent that enables system administrators to do rules-based provisioning without letting desktop images proliferate, according to the company.

The SEC filing indicated that the total offering is $9.1 million, including a portion outside the U.S., and that Viewfinity is selling $6 million in Series B preferred shares and lists $3.1 million in loans converted to Series B preferred shares.

Expand Networks today announces increased market penetration and global customer growth, as deployment of Expand technology reached record numbers. Expand now has over 50, 000 units deployed across a customer base of over 4,500 enterprises and corporate customers, continuing its drive into the global WAN Optimization market in 2009.

Expand is seeing heightened interest amongst its customer base for the deployment of its Virtual Accelerator (VACC) at the datacenter. The ability to seamlessly integrate a virtualized WAN Optimization solution within this environment, coupled with the ability to achieve visibility and control of virtualized applications gives Expand a unique differentiator in the market and a strong value proposition. Furthermore, as cloud-based services become more prevalent, whether private or public, the provision of an end-to-end software solution for virtualized WAN Optimization from the data center, to the branch office and mobile users is an extremely compelling offering.

In support of its continued R&D activity, Expand surveyed a focus group of senior global IT decision makers to sense market sentiment for advanced WAN Optimization. 75% of those questioned had deployed, or planned to deploy some form of virtualization in the next 12 months. Key findings include:

• 67% cited WAN Optimization technology as an enabler to a successful virtualization project and high-performing virtualization environments.
• 85% considered it important to deploy a Virtual WAN Optimization solution within a virtualized environment.
• 76% would consider adopting a WAN Optimization-as-a-Service strategy if offered at a compelling price point, with 44% citing ongoing cost efficiency and reduction in OPEX as a key driver for this.
• 59.3% are considering cloud computing to host data and applications.

The OpenNebula team announced that they have reached a stable state for the new 1.4 series of the OpenNebula Toolkit.

Downloads are available as source code as previous version but they also have created binary packages for RedHat/CentOS, Ubuntu, openSUSE and Fedora.

Highlights of OpenNebula 1.4 are:

• EC2 Query API interface for building OpenNebula-based clouds
• OCCI interface for building OpenNebula-based clouds
• Support for the VMware Hypervisor family
• Multiple user support and access-right control for Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks
• Advance contextualization support to integrate VM packs and implement multi-component services
• Easy integration with your data-center services and procedures with a new hook system
• Support block devices as VM images.
• Support for LVM storage
• Many bug fixes, and scalability and performance improvements in several components of the OpenNebula system
• A whole new set of documentation pages, guides and examples