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Archives for October 2008

Enomaly Unveils Elastic Computing Platform After Years of R&D

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Enomaly today announced Enomaly Elastic Computing Platform (ECP), after having released an Alpha version in March of this year. ECP is an open source, programmable, cloud computing infrastructure for businesses looking to design, deploy and manage virtual applications in the cloud. With its official product launch, Enomaly is shifting its business from a services organization to a software products and support company.

Enomaly’s ECP is designed to work alongside a company’s existing virtual data center providing time and money savings. An intuitive, browser-based dashboard makes it easy for IT personnel to efficiently plan deployments, automate VM scaling and load-balancing; and, analyze, configure and optimize cloud capacity.

The Enomaly ECP is available for immediate download. Proprietary enterprise licenses of the software are available. With the release of the Enomaly ECP, the company is offering paid Web-based and phone support packages. The three plans are: Silver — Web-based support for up to 25 incidents per year; Gold — Phone and Web-based support for up to 50 incidents per year; and Platinum — Phone and Web-based support for up to 100 incidents per year plus assistance and advice with cluster architecture and virtual machine and application design.

Industry Moves: Kathryn Rose Joins Hyperic As CFO, Ron Oglesby Leaves Glasshouse for Dell

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Open source web infrastructure management provider Hyperic (earlier coverage) today announced it has named Kathryn Rose as chief financial officer (CFO). In this newly created position, Rose will be responsible for the company’s financial operations plan as well as being part of the executive team that sets strategic direction.

Rose brings nearly 20 years expertise in financial management and capital markets at both large public companies and smaller, privately held startups—much of that in the tech sector—to Hyperic. Her CFO-level roles include successful tenures at global consumer products company Leapfrog as well as at Autodesk, Sage Systems and Foresight Energy Company. She has also held high-level financial positions at Merrill Lynch and Chevron. Rose’s work ranges from raising $200 million in venture capital, to tight integration of financial and strategic functions across global enterprises to increase profitability.

Rose holds an MBA in finance from the University of California at Berkeley, and a BA from the University of Texas, Austin.

Glasshouse Technologies has lost its Director of Virtualization and Architecture Services, Ron Oglesby, after just one year. Oglesby co-authored two best seller books about VMware Infrastructure: VMware ESX Server: Advanced Technical Design Guide and VMware Infrastructure 3: Advanced Technical Design Guide and Advanced Operations Guide. Rumor has it Oglesby was hired by Dell.

Wachovia Analyst Downgrades Ratings for VMware (VMW)

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Wachovia’s Philip Rueppel this morning was the latest analyst to take a machete to his EPS estimates for the software sector, reducing numbers for most of the companies he follows.

“We are reducing estimats for a majority of companies in our universe, as we believe typical Q4 budget-flush will be muted this year, and growth prospects for new licenses next year will be muted,” he writes.

As part of his call, Rueppel downgrades his ratings on VMware (VMW) to Market Perform from Outperform, asserting that the company has “particularly acute issues due to their customer base segmentation, and/or growth expectations.”

In today’s trading VMware is down 67 cents, or 3%, to $21.90.

Marathon Enters Into Distribution Agreement with Ingram Micro

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Marathon Technologies, provider of high availability software for physical and virtual servers, today announced that it has entered into a distribution agreement with the exclusive Citrix XenServer distributor in North America, Ingram Micro.

Under terms of the agreement, Ingram Micro will offer Marathon’s everRun high availability and disaster recovery software to its resellers in the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Included in the distribution agreement is Marathon’s everRun VM, the world’s first fault-tolerant, high availability software for server virtualization that is integrated with Citrix XenServer. Citrix XenServer is a dynamic virtualization software platform that virtualizes application workloads across any number of servers in the datacenter as a flexible aggregated pool of computing resources. The combination of Citrix XenServer high-performance, easy-to-use virtualization hypervisor with the proven automated availability of Marathon’s everRun software, enables more organizations to deploy virtualization across a much broader array of applications.

Marathon’s everRun software is for IT professionals who want to prevent outages and data loss in their physical and virtual infrastructures. everRun provides fault-tolerant, high availability for Citrix XenServer and Windows Server to deliver uninterrupted availability, 100 percent data protection, and rapid recovery through a “one-click” operation. Unlike bolt-on failover, cluster, or data replication products that place the burden on the IT professional, everRun software is completely automated. It makes high availability and disaster recovery easy to manage and cost effective for both midsize companies and enterprises.

Hostway Research: Virtualization Boosts Adoption of SaaS

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Three-quarters of organizations believe that server virtualization will drive adoption of software-as-a-service (SaaS), according to new research released today by web hosting firm Hostway.

Over 60 per cent of respondents said that they plan to adopt SaaS in some form over the next five years, and 45 per cent believe that the technology had not taken off until recently because of the lack of available virtualization technologies. Prior to server virtualization, SaaS providers found it difficult reliably to offer software on demand, according to Hostway.

“Without virtualization the business model for SaaS would not be viable,” said Hostway director Neil Barton. “The business model for SaaS means you need to get a high level of utilization from the servers that the applications in the cloud sit on. Virtualization enables this. The message to application vendors is that you need to either SaaS-enable your applications yourself, or partner with people who can allow your applications to be offered as a service.”

Source: VNUnet

F5 Networks Preparing New File Virtualization Software and Hardware Products

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File virtualization specialist F5 Networks is set to announce a pair of new products next week for moving and managing unstructured data.

The first of the planned products is the F5 ARX4000, a switch that provides global namespace and data management policies through an operating system common across all ARX models. The ARX4000 is also the first of the company’s file virtualization switches to support 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) networking.

The second new offering is the F5 Data Manager, a software-based management platform that runs on a Windows machine and interfaces directly with all file storage devices and ARX switches. The Data Manager gathers file storage statistics and provides graphical reporting and trending functions, all of which is designed to help customers plan for future growth.

Nigel Burmeister, director of product marketing at F5 Networks, says the ARX4000 fills a scalability and performance gap in the company’s current product line, while the Data Manager will give customers more control over how they manage and grow capacity for file storage.

The Data Manager software interfaces with back-end file systems and F5’s ARX file virtualization switches to monitor data in both physical and virtual environments. Data Manager collects a range of statistics, including file type, age, size, and more, using an optional File System Inventory Module (FSIM). The software rounds up that information and generates cumulative reports across a customer’s entire virtual infrastructure.

Customers can now download a free, 40-day trial version of Data Manager. The base price for the software is $1,500 and the cost of the FSIM is $10,000. The ARX4000, also available now, can support approximately two billion files and features 12 1GbE ports or two 10GbE ports in a 4U-high rack for $185,000.