Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance enables organizations to extend their datacenter storage to the cloud. With the appliance, users have the ability to aggregate both Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, creating a highly available virtualized storage pool that offers enhanced scalability and performance in the cloud.

This news comes on the heels of Red Hat’s announcement of its Storage Software Appliance in December 2011.

Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for AWS features both synchronous and asynchronous file replication, assuring data availability across AWS Availability Zones. Synchronous replication provides users with redundancy and protection within a single datacenter or multiple datacenters and availability zones in a region, while asynchronous geo-replication offers data availability across all AWS Regions.

Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance is POSIX-compliant, meaning that no application modifications are required for data access in the cloud.

VMware also announced that nearly 90 service provider partners now offer services that have met VMware criteria as VMware vCloud Powered, an almost 3x increase since Q3 2011.

VMware vCloud Integration Manager software will allow service providers to quickly create and deploy cloud service offerings.

VMware vCloud Integration Manager is expected to be available in Q1 2012 and will be priced on a usage-based subscription model familiar to vCloud Service Providers.

Almost 90 service providers have launched vCloud Powered services since VMware introduced the program in February 2011. The VMware vCloud Powered program requires VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP) partners to offer services based on VMware vSphere and vCloud Director while exposing the vCloud API and supporting the Open Virtualization Format (OVF).

For customers using VDI technologies, F5 offers a unified approach to manage and accelerate network traffic, optimize performance, and centralize access and security policies. Unlike other proprietary solutions, F5 BIG-IP products do not require changes to the delivery infrastructure, thus offering a complement to all VDI deployments.

Support for VDI solutions is available today in version 11 of various BIG-IP products, including BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager, BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager, BIG-IP Access Policy Manager and BIG-IP Edge Gateway.

Integrated web interface service and support for Citrix Multi-Stream ICA are new features of BIG-IP version 11.1 products, also available today.

No additional licensing is required to support VDI.

Fresh out of stealth mode, Nicira has already attracted AT&T, eBay, Fidelity Investments, NTT and Rackspace as customers.

From the official company pitch:

NVP was designed to address the shortcomings of traditional networks by offering a platform that provides the operational model of a virtual machine. While applications have been decoupled from servers through compute virtualization, they have not yet been decoupled from the network through any type of scalable network virtualization. As a result, virtualized data centers face limits to what applications they can support and where the workloads can be placed.

These limitations restrict workload mobility, thus lowering resource utilization of servers, a primary cause of operational overhead. Legacy approaches can leave as much as 20%-30% of the server capacity in data centers under utilized and drive up networking costs several fold, based on Nicira’s work with the largest cloud data center operators.

NVP forms a thin software layer that treats the physical network as an IP backplane. This approach allows the creation of virtual networks that have the same properties and services as physical networks, such as security and QoS policies, L2 reachability, and higher-level service capabilities such as stateful firewalling.

These virtual networks can be created dynamically to support VM mobility anywhere within or between data centers without service disruption or address changes.

Will people really call it the ‘VMware of networking’, then? Likely.

NVP software is delivered through a usage-based, monthly subscription-pricing model, which scales per virtual network port. Customers only pay for what they use, and pricing scales accordingly.

Nicira was founded by networking research leaders Martin Casado and Nick McKeown from Stanford University and Scott Shenker from University of California.

The company has raised $50 million in funding to date, from the aforementioned venture capital firms as well as individual investors including VMware co-founder Diane Greene and Benchmark Capital co-founder Andy Rachleff.

The SPECvirt virtualization benchmark measures the ability of a system to host virtual machines that are running a set of typical server applications and is modeled to look like a customer’s real environment.

The SPECvirt_sc2010 metric is derived from a combination of the performance of the virtualized applications, noting the number of virtual machines used in the test, and a Quality of Service (QoS) requirement.

The combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 and its integrated KVM hypervisor and the HP ProLiant DL980 G7 has established new leading results – 7,424@456VMs and 76 tiles – setting the best virtual performance mark and highest number of tiles, or set of six virtual machines running an application, of any published SPECvirt result.

Including today’s record-setting result, 11 of the 18 published SPECvirt 2010 benchmark results published at Spec.org were achieved using KVM technology.

CyberlinkASP will implement its turnkey virtual private cloud and Citrix-based technologies to support the mission critical IT component(s) of firms across Europe.

CyberlinkASP currently hosts, manages and supports virtual desktops for hundreds of SMBs and thousands of end users across the United States. The company owns and operates a Dallas-based call center that is always available to assist end users with anything from printing and scanning to installing new applications.

Customers can now use CloudStack to deploy and build a cloud, and then effectively manage it with the Citrix Ready verified ScaleXtreme.

Users can sign up for the free ScaleXtreme Xpress product, which offers systems management for an unlimited number of private cloud and public cloud servers.

“CloudStack is driving emerging cloud standards and bringing order to chaos of multiple hypervisors and APIs. It has had impressive success because it helps companies construct clouds quickly and reliably”
“We want to offer our customers choice as they build cloud infrastructures while ensuring that their cloud solution of choice easily integrates with other cloud technologies,” said Sameer Dholakia, group vice president and general manager, Cloud Platforms Group at Citrix. “ScaleXtreme’s support of CloudStack will enable our joint customers to effectively manage the entire lifecycle of machines within their clouds.”

ScaleXtreme makes managing complex systems easy. It provides a single, unified view to provision and manage servers throughout their entire lifecycle. Customers can access and control all their servers, whether local or hosted, in public or private clouds, through a single cloud-based service. Given that ScaleXtreme is hosted entirely in the cloud, there’s no need to deploy expensive software on-site.

Citrix CloudStack provides customers with the fastest path to the cloud by providing the most advanced software technologies for building highly scalable, highly reliable cloud computing environments. More than 60 large-scale production clouds have been deployed using the open source CloudStack, including GoDaddy, GreenQloud, KT, Nokia, Tata Communications and Zynga.

“CloudStack is driving emerging cloud standards and bringing order to chaos of multiple hypervisors and APIs. It has had impressive success because it helps companies construct clouds quickly and reliably,” said Nand Mulchandani, co-founder and CEO of ScaleXtreme. “We look forward to working with Citrix to benefit our joint customers, nurture our growing relationship and help users manage the entire server lifecycle.”

ScaleXtreme’s support of CloudStack follows its recent support of OpenStack and fulfills its ongoing commitment to give customers a choice in emerging cloud platforms. It makes clouds easy to create and easy to control.

Supporting Resources

Get additional ScaleXtreme information on the web at:

Signup For Free Edition: ScaleXtreme Xpress
ScaleXtreme Blog
ScaleXtreme App Store

Veeam also added 5,000 new customers in the quarter.

In the third quarter, the company unveiled the next version of its flagship product, Veeam Backup & Replication v6, which will be available in Q4 and incorporates new functionality.

Veeam has also strengthened its leadership in Canada with the appointment of Dirk Vanderwal as regional sales director. Veeam also promoted Doug Hazelman, long-time Veeam employee and VMware vExpert, to Vice President of Product Strategy and Chief Evangelist.

Central to the company’s new SMB initiative is the release of an all-new version of Citrix VDI-in-a-Box, the all-in-one virtual desktop solution designed specifically for SMBs.

VDI-in-a-Box 5 is the first Citrix release of this desktop virtualization product following the acquisition of Kaviza in May 2011. In addition, Citrix announced a new solution combining Citrix VDI-in-a-Box and the Citrix GoToManage cloud-based support offering, making it easy for managed service providers and IT staff to remotely monitor and support virtual desktop deployments at multiple sites or customer locations.

Citrix also announced a new channel partner specialization for the Citrix Solution Advisor Program, called SMB Specialist. They will have access to an extensive set of sales tools, free online training and pre-sales support focused specifically on helping them successfully engage and service SMB customers.

Citrix VDI-in-a-Box 5 will be released this quarter. A free technology preview trial is available here.

With support for VMware View 5, you can get better performance with reduced bandwidth options as well as more resilient connections to your desktop than previous versions. Get it here.

With added support for background multitasking, you can jump from your Windows desktop to another iPad app and then right back into the Windows desktop to where you left off. VMware View Client for iPad 1.2 also works well with iOS 5 and takes advantage of Apple AirPlay and an available AppleTV to use your big screen TV as a display for your View desktop.

You can now also use an external monitor or AirPlay in iOS 5; the iPad display will turn into a trackpad / keyboard while the external screen shows your View desktop.

The latest VMware View client is now available in English, French, German, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, and Korean. When working multi-byte Asian languages, the new local input mode enables you to type in full lines of complete multi-byte words and then send them to your View desktop.

VMware also released production Android clients for Android tablets and the Cisco Cius.

The VMware View Client for Android Tablets is the first Android client to support the PCoIP display protocol for best performance with VMware View 4.6 and View 5 users.

The new VMware View Client for Android Tablets is available in Android Market and the VMware View Client for Cius will soon be available in Cisco’s AppHQ.