Archives for October 2008

Compellent Technologies Introduces Live Volume for Business Continuity Automation

October 13, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Compellent Technologies today announced it will provide continuous, coordinated access to all data stored on Compellent SANs between remote locations with a new automated business continuity feature, Live Volume.

Live Volume will allow enterprises to manage their disparate storage sites around the world as one virtual data center. As customers move applications from one physical or virtual server to another for maintenance, local site issues or disaster recovery, Live Volume will enable IT managers to proactively and automatically migrate the associated storage volumes. By not requiring investments in third-party tools or mirroring of storage resources, Compellent‘s live transfer of data will make it easier and cost-effective to manage all resources regardless of the physical location.

Based on Compellent‘s Dynamic Block Architecture, Live Volume is designed to eliminate downtime for enterprises that need to migrate servers and storage for disaster recovery or onsite maintenance. Each data volume will be present and automatically available on Compellent SANs at either site at all times.

Compellent‘s Live Volume integrates with the industry‘s leading virtual server platforms, enabling servers to share centralized storage resources regardless of the actual location or OS virtualization platform. The new virtual storage technology will complement server virtualization to help further reduce costs and simplify data management.

Compellent Storage Center with SSD is currently being evaluated by select beta customers. Compellent plans to offer SSD to all markets in Q1 and Live Volume in Q2 of 2009 exclusively through the company‘s growing international network of channel partners. Additional product information and pricing details will be announced at launch.

Alternative Technology Launches Suite of Virtualization Protections Solutions with Double-Take Software

October 10, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Alternative Technology, an Arrow Electronics company is launching a suite of virtualization protections solutions with Double-Take Software, an infrastructure software company.

Alternative Technology will leverage its virtualization presence in the North American channel and its education and technical resources to offer a host of Double-Take Software solutions, including Double-Take Virtual Recovery Assistant, Double-Take for VMware Infrastructure and Double-Take Livewire.

Industry Moves: Promotions at Quest Software

October 10, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

After announcing that its board of directors has authorized a modified “Dutch auction” tender offer to repurchase between $135 million and $400 million of its common stock, Quest Software has announced some promotions as well.

The company has appointed Doug Garn as the company’s chief executive officer. Garn, who was also appointed to the company’s board of directors, will continue in his role as president. As CEO and president, Garn will be responsible for the day-to-day operations of Quest. He joined Quest in 1998 and has served as the company’s president since February 2005. Prior to that, he served as Quest’s vice president of worldwide sales.

The company has also announced that Vinny Smith has been appointed to the newly created full-time position of executive chairman of the company’s board of directors. In this role, Smith will be responsible for leading the strategic direction of Quest. As executive chairman, Smith will play an active role in managing Quest’s product direction and will continue to be responsible for Quest’s corporate development strategy. Smith joined Quest as a director in 1995 and was appointed chief executive officer in 1997. In 1998, he was appointed chairman of Quest’s board of directors.

HP ProLiant Virtualization Blade Server To Be Equipped With Samsung Solid State Drives

October 10, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Samsung Electronics has announced that its 32 gigabyte (GB) and 64 GB solid state drives (SSDs) have been selected, after extensive testing, for use in the HP ProLiant BL495c virtualization blade server. This represents the first time that an SSD has been qualified for use in a server optimized for virtualization. The server is the world’s first server blade designed specifically to host virtual machines, and is designed for use in virtualized environments that require significant memory, data storage and network connections to optimize server performance.

By using SSDs instead of hard disk drives, HP is able to free up a significant amount of physical space which can then be allocated for additional DRAM capacity—further improving system performance. The BL495c has 16 DRAM sockets.

The HP ProLiant BL495c virtualization blade eliminates performance bottlenecks in virtual machine hosts. Engineered with more memory and I/O than any other two-processor blade server, the new server has a maximum processor speed of 2.3 GHz and a maximum front-side bus speed of 1 GHz, according to HP, and comes with the option of two SATA SSD storage drives (either 32 or 64 GBs).

The Samsung single-level-cell (SLC) SSD has a (sequential) read speed of 100 megabytes per second (MB/s) and a (sequential) write speed of 80 MB/s. The SLC SSD’s power consumption is as little as a miniscule 0.5 watt (one-twentieth that of a conventional 15K enterprise rpm hard drive) in active mode and 0.1 watt in sleep mode.

Quest Software Intends To Buy Up to $400 Million of Its Common Stock

October 10, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Quest Software recently announced that its board of directors has authorized a modified “Dutch auction” tender offer to repurchase between $135 million and $400 million of its common stock at a price per share expected to be not less than $13.25 and not greater than $15.50.

Based on the midpoint of the price range, this would represent between 9 percent and 26 percent of the shares of Quest common stock currently issued and outstanding. The company anticipates obtaining debt financing in an aggregate principal amount of up to $300 million to provide financing for a portion of the repurchase. If Quest is unable to secure such financing on acceptable terms, Quest still expects to proceed with the tender offer or to commence an open-market repurchase program, but the repurchase would be funded from cash on-hand, subject to applicable California corporate law limitations, and the aggregate size of the repurchase would likely be at the low end of the range stated above.

In light of the recent extreme volatility of trading in the company’s common stock and because the size of the prospective tender offer has yet to be determined, the company’s board of directors will decide the actual price range for the tender offer when such offer is commenced based on all of the circumstances at that time. Quest intends to commence the tender offer or other repurchase program and to announce the final number of shares, the timing and other details of the offer or other program later this month.

The modified “Dutch auction” would allow Quest’s shareholders to tender some or all of their shares at a price within the specified range. Based on the number of shares tendered and the prices specified by the tendering shareholders, Quest will determine the lowest price per share within the range that will enable it to purchase the total number of shares subject to the offer, or such lesser aggregate amount of its common stock that is properly tendered. All shares accepted in the tender offer will be purchased at the same price per share even if a shareholder tendered at a lower price. Vinny Smith, executive chairman of Quest, intends to tender three million shares in the tender offer, which constitutes approximately 9% of the shares beneficially owned by him. We cannot yet determine the extent to which our other directors and executive officers may participate in the tender offer.

With the assistance of the company’s executive management and outside advisors, Quest’s board of directors has evaluated the company’s operations, strategy and expectations and has determined that repurchasing a portion of Quest’s shares of common stock is a prudent use of the company’s financial resources. Quest believes that its current stock price levels do not reflect the current performance or long-term growth prospects of its business. Accordingly, Quest believes that an investment in its own stock at the range of offered prices represents an attractive strategic transaction.

The tender offer, when commenced, will be subject to a number of terms and conditions, including any applicable corporate and regulatory requirements and, in the event of a leveraged tender offer, the receipt of financing described above, all of which terms and conditions will be specified in an offer to purchase to be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on the date the offer is commenced.

VMware Buys Blue Lane (Updated)

October 9, 2008 by Robin Wauters 3 Comments

VMware went shopping and came back home with Cupertino-based Blue Lane Technologies. Despite the lack of press releases, this transaction was confirmed by Mary Ann Gallo, VMware’s head of Global Public Relations. Unfortunately she could not disclose the financial details.

Update: according to Brenon Daly from The 451 Group, the price was around $15 million, and Blue Lane was in search for a buyer since last Summer because of lack of sufficient capital. He also mentions Blue Lane raised “some $18.4m in two rounds of funding”, but our information keeps it at $13.4m.

The acquired company provides solutions that secure virtual and physical data centers. Its solution secures servers and VMs by controlled code execution in the network and taking appropriate countermeasures against traffic aimed at known software vulnerabilities (without signatures).

Blue Lane was quite silent after releasing VirtualShield 4.2 last April. We interviewed Greg Ness, former VP of Marketing with Blue Lane (and avid blogger) and Thierry Evangelista, Technical Director Europe for the company at VMworld Europe earlier this year.

This acquisition confirms VMware’s commitment to virtualization security or VirtSec in short.

Blue Lane was founded in 2002 and has raised $13.4 million to date in two financing rounds from Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures and Matrix Partners. According to Greg Ness, who left the company last July to join Infoblox, Blue Lane has around 40 employees.

Below, you can find 3 embedded videos encompassing a long interview we did with Ness last June when he was still with the company.

Interview BlueLane Greg Ness 1/3 from Toon Vanagt on Vimeo.