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Archives for April 2008

IDC: Australian Server Market Reaches $1 Billion, Mainly Thanks To Virtualization

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The Australian server market reached $US1.001 billion during 2007 according to analyst firm IDC, reports iTWire. Although volume only grew by 2 %, that figure masks the huge increase in spending driven by strong growth in the high-end enterprise market.

That segment grew by an amazing 30.2 % due in part to the interest in virtualisation.

“Virtualisation helped boost server revenue numbers in 2007 with richer configurations of servers being deployed to drive space, utilisation and energy efficiency,” says Matthew Oostveen, research manager of Asia/Pacific enterprise servers and workstations research at IDC.

Spending growth in the midrange enterprise and volume segments also contributed to the overall 17 % growth.

“Virtualisation was also one of the key underpinnings for the 40 percent increase in x86 blade server shipments in 2007,” said Oostveen.

Differences in market segments resulted in IBM being the number one vendor in terms of revenue (followed by HP and Dell), but IDC’s analysis by volume puts HP at the top of the list followed by Dell. Sun came in at number three for revenue, but was the only leading vendor to achieve year-on-year revenue growth, according to IDC.

[Source: VMBlog]

Avocent Releases DSView 3 Power Manager, Lets You Track Power Consumption In Your Data Center

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Avocent has introduced new power management software that enables users to monitor and measure the power consumption and energy usage of IT equipment in data centers in real time. DSView 3 Power Manager is an add-on “plug-in” to Avocent’s DSView 3 management software that provides centralized management for physical and virtual IT assets. DSView 3 Power Manager adds the ability to gather and aggregate power information, whether that be a power distribution unit, rack, or row of racks, to “help data center managers improve operating efficiencies, reduce outages, and reduce overall energy consumption costs”.

Avocent

The news release cites a recent IDC study, which found that the expense to power and cool the worldwide installed base of servers will grow to $44.5 billion, equivalent to 70 % of new server spending, by 2010.

Avocent’s claims its new DSView 3 Power Manager is able to provide energy consumption level data for a consolidated view of energy use within the data center. It aggregates electrical usage by kilowatt (kW) and converts it into kilowatt hours (kWh) – how companies are charged for electricity. Through the software’s cost calculator, users can enter their utility charges to calculate power costs making it possible for IT departments to monitor and chargeback power usage costs.

The Avocent DSView 3 Power Manager offers a number of reporting and alarm features to further help IT managers track power consumption, including:

  • Consumption Reports: track power and energy consumption for user-defined time periods for data centers, power source busses, racks
  • Trend Reports: tracks power consumption over time and aggregates data for customized usage reports
  • Thresholds: set warning and critical level thresholds with customizable actions for when thresholds are exceeded
  • Alarms: customizable alarms provide preemptive notification when thresholds are approached

The DSView 3 Power Manager is compatible with the latest revision of Avocent DSView 3 software and both will be available in July. The new revision of DSView 3 software, version 3.6, will feature improved functionality and ease of use with simpler deployment and maintenance, more thorough device support, and enhanced VMware support for combined access and control of both virtual and physical servers.

Tideway Announces Availability Of Tideway Foundation 7.1

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Tideway, a London-based provider of IT automation software, today announced the availability of Tideway Foundation 7.1. The latest version of Tideway’s application dependency mapping (ADM) solution allows users to identify what has changed in their IT environment and why, view authorized, approved and expected changes, and carve out slices of data for more individualized and powerful reporting.

Tideway

From the press release:

“Developed in collaboration with Tideway’s customer advisory board, Foundation 7.1’s new change control capabilities enable users to define a baseline “approved” state for their environment and compare all observed changes to the approved and expected states of that environment. This sophisticated change intelligence goes beyond merely providing data and offers users suggestions about what action should be taken to reconcile and explain discrepancies between the approved environment and the “as is” state captured by Foundation. Users can delve deeper into Foundation data to troubleshoot and determine the authorization status of specific lifecycle changes.”

“Foundation 7.1 also offers enhanced capabilities for managing virtual environments and controlling virtual machine (VM) sprawl. The cross-platform and vendor-agnostic solution allows users to monitor the appearance, disappearance and migration of virtual hosts and reconcile those changes directly with their authorization status to help eliminate unnecessary outages and excessive license charges.”

[Source: Virtually Speaking]

DataCore Raises $30 Million In Equity Investment

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DataCore Software Corporation, a US-based vendor of storage virtualization software, today announced that it has accepted a $30 million equity investment from Insight Venture Partners and Updata Partners.

DataCore

DataCore is a global, privately-held company that was founded in 1998 and has offices in the Americas, Europe and Asia. They are the makers of SANMelody (storage management platform for larger scale networks), SANSymphony (converts PC servers into expansion “disk servers”) and SANMaestro (a “spreadsheet simple” approach to monitoring, analyzing and reporting critical storage and Windows events).

“Insight Venture Partners has built its reputation on finding and investing in companies poised for tremendous success in the industries in which we specialize,” said Jeff Horing, Managing Director, Insight Venture Partners. “DataCore is perfectly positioned as the virtual storage foundation for all server and desktop virtualization platforms, regardless of vendor. We believe that storage virtualization will eventually be as big as server virtualization and that DataCore will be the big beneficiary of this trend.”

DataCore had previously raised around $85 million over four rounds of funding, from firms like Flagship Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Scale Venture Partners, Intel Capital, Van Wagoner Capital Management and Vista Equity Partners.

Most of those institutions remain minority investors, but they did receive partial liquidity via this new round of financing.

[Source: peHUB]

KVM Forum 2008 Schedule Has Been Announced

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The schedule for the upcoming KVM 2008 forum in Nappa, CA is up.

Qumranet, as the main KVM sponsor, is inviting all KVM developers to their second KVM summit on June 10 to 13th at the Marriot Napa Valley, California.

Many of the world’s top kernel developers will gather to discuss the state of the union on KVM and virtualization technology in general. More specifically, the group will plan the technology roadmap and future of KVM.

Avi Kivity will be keynoting, and off course Qumranet will also talk about KVM in Solid ICE. Apart from that, there will be a variety of presentations from Red Hat, IBM, Transitive and Intel representatives.

Gerd Hoffmann of Red Hat (SUSE in a previous role) will be talking about mixing Xen and KVM with xenner, which is a utility able to run Xen paravirtualized kernels as guests on Linux hosts, without the Xen hypervisor and using kvm instead.

Different IBM people will be discussing the state of KVM on Big Iron and PowerPC. And there will also be some talk about Open-ovf , an open source software project around the Open Virtual Appliance Format.

Stay tuned for more!

(Full disclosure: Virtualization.com is a media partner of the KVM Forum 2008)

Xen 3.2.1 Released

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Keir Fraser has announced the availability of Xen 3.2.1 and 3.1.4, both bugfix releases in the Xen 3.1 and 3.2 series.

The 3.2.1 release contains architectural improvements and new user-visible features including:

  • Xen Security Modules (XSM)
  • ACPI S3 suspend-to-RAM support for the host system
  • Preliminary PCI pass-through support (using appropriate Intel or AMD I/O-virtualization hardware)
  • Preliminary support for a wider range of bootloaders in fully virtualized (HVM)guests, using full emulation of x86 real mode
  • Faster emulation of standard (non-super) VGA modes for HVM guests
  • Configurable timer modes for HVM guests, depending on how the guest OS manages time-keeping
  • Many other changes and enhancements across all supported machine architectures

As usual downloads are available at Xen.org