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Archives for March 2009

Skytap Taps $7 Million In Series B Financing

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Skytap today announced it completed a $7 million Series B round of funding from Ignition Partners, Madrona Venture Group and Washington Research Foundation. The funds will be used to bolster the company’s product development, sales and marketing efforts.

Skytap’s rapidly growing list of customers utilize its cloud-based virtual lab solution to augment or replace dynamic, high cost IT environments such as those used for application development and testing, IT prototyping, product demonstrations and technical training. By allowing users to scale resources on-demand and pay only for time and resources utilized, customers can immediately reduce costs, increase productivity and improve responsiveness to business demands.

Since emerging from stealth less than one year ago, Skytap has achieved strong customer traction and third-party recognition for its innovative virtual lab offering.

CORAID Announces EtherDrive SAN Host Bus Adapter for VMware ESX 3.5

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CORAID today announced the immediate availability of the EtherDrive Storage Area Network Host Bus Adapter (HBA) that enables VMware ESX 3.5 with AoE technology to deliver affordable, fast EtherDrive SAN solutions to virtualization environments. VMware provides Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program members with tools to develop products that are complementary to VMware virtualization software and help deliver high-value solutions to our joint customers.

CORAID’s EtherDrive SAN Host Bus Adapter for VMware ESX 3.5 helps customers easily embrace VMware virtualization storage with the flexibility and cost savings of AoE-based SAN to ESX hosts. The availability of the new SAN HBA builds on the company’s success in the virtualization market for building innovative, affordable virtualization storage.

With more than 900 members worldwide, the VMware TAP program works with best-of-breed technology partners to provide them a comprehensive set of VMware technical and marketing services, support, tools and expertise to deliver enhanced value to joint customers.

Sun Microsystems Reportedly A $7 Billion Acquisition Target For IBM

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It’s all over Techmeme: the Wall Street Journal and the NY Times report that IBM is in talks with Sun Microsystems to acquire the fledgling technology giant. Larry Dignan over at ZDnet says it makes sense, Dana Garder over at … also ZDnet calls it a red herring. Om Malik says it would make more sense for Cisco Systems to buy Sun, CNET’s Matt Asay says a deal would be good for open source. Meanwhile, Sun’s stock soars.

But Computerworld may have the best commentary we’ve read about the rumored acquisition. Lucas Mearian writes:

“If it purchased Sun, IBM would bolster its storage customer base and eliminate competition, but such a move would also create significant storage product overlap. Rather than boosting its existing product sales, IBM would likely gain more in the form of intellectual property and human resources talent.

While Sun and IBM both sell in the high-end storage market, IBM holds three times the market share of Sun.

Neither Sun nor IBM does well in the midrange storage market, and enterprise-class systems is an area some believe is tanking as a result of an uptick in more-modular, flexible storage platforms based on high-capacity, lower-performance disk drives and commodity hardware.”

To be continued beyond any shred of doubt.

Floss Virtualization Doesn’t Care About Marketing …

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It cares about Quality and Frequent code releases. The Open Source community doesn’t
wait till the week before VMWorld to announe big news, they just code along happily and when the coding is done.. they release their software.

And there was plenty of it last couple of weeks. Here’s an overview ..

  • The New Virt Manager 0.70 is out , it s featuring a Redesigned New Virtual Machine Wizard, a file browser for storage pools and volumes, there are now features to add physical device assignment (PCI,USB) for existing virtual machines.
  • Qemu, the open source processor emulator, has now a 0.10.0 Stable Branch which will be used to receive bug fixes until at least the next major release .
  • The qemu-0.10.0 changelog liss better KVM acceleration support, Bluetooth emulation and host passthrough support , Nokia N-series tablet emulation multiple vnc clients, and much more platform and hardware support. Eventually this might lead to qemu making current kvm-userspace obsolete, but that’s not for tomorrow yet.
  • Reuven announced Enomaly ECP 2.2.3, a maintenance release fixing some bugs .
  • And Matt announced openQRM 4.4 with SOAP Webservices for it’s Cloud , openQRM 4.4 now also implements “persistent appliances” which means that users can now “pause”, “unpause” and “restart” their Cloud appliances via the User-Portal. The internal billing mechanism will only charge active Cloud appliances and now fully provides the “pay-on-demand” Cloud Computing model. Also better integration for Puppet and Sshterm were added. More about it’s new features can be read on the openQRM site ..
  • And last but not least is the new ConVirt project that has just announced it’s 1.0 release .
    ConVirt is a centralized management solution that lets you provision, monitor and manage the complete lifecycle of your Xen deployment.

So that’s it’s for this week’s Open Source Virtualization updates 🙂
Be expecting more updates around the next VMWorld, or when the code is done 🙂

ScaleMP Launches vSMP Foundation Version 2.0

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ScaleMP last week announced version 2.0 of its flagship vSMP Foundation software. This new release offers significantly enhanced performance through support for the future Intel Nehalem processor family when they become available, and enhanced enterprise class features such as increased high-availability, partitioning of single virtual system to multiple isolated environments, extended remote management, enhanced profiling capabilities to improve application performance and support for Emulex LightPulse Fibre Channel (FC) HBAs.

vSMP Foundation aggregates multiple industry-standard off-the-shelf x86 servers (rack mounted or blade systems) into one single virtual high-end system for the High-Performance Computing (HPC) market. vSMP Foundation provides customers with an alternative to traditional expensive symmetrical multiprocessor (SMP) systems, as well as simplified clustering infrastructure with a single operating system.

“vSMP Foundation 2.0 is a major milestone for ScaleMP, and again demonstrates the value of our approach to high-end computing,” said Shai Fultheim, founder and CEO of ScaleMP. “In addition to a number of enterprise-class features that were requested by our growing install base, we are also significantly boosting the performance of high-end virtual systems with the support of Intel’s next generation of processors – essentially setting a new performance standard for large x86 systems. Existing customers will be able to leverage the enhanced capabilities of vSMP Foundation 2.0 immediately.”

vSMP Foundation software supports aggregation of up to 16 x86 servers into a single virtual SMP system. It provides customers with:

  • Up to 4 TB of shared memory for large memory requirements
  • Up to 128 cores virtual SMP, with high memory bandwidth
  • Ease of use and lowest Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for applications, with simplified cluster management and storage architecture
  • Improved utilization through a centralized and consolidated architecture

HEI Systems & Solutions Debuts Integrated Storage and Virtualization Solutions

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HEI Systems & Solutions announced the release of two new products last week targeted at small to mid-sized businesses looking to leverage advanced virtualization solutions at an affordable price. HEI’s Z2 Systems line includes the R3000 Storage Server and the R3000x Integrated Storage and Virtualization Server.The R3000 is a one rack unit (1U) storage server with 3 terabytes of redundant enterprise class storage.Included with the Storage Server is HEI developed software integrated with Citrix XenServer™ to provide configurable snap-shotting, on-disk cloning and roll-back of individual virtual machines, in addition to other virtual machine management and automation capabilities. By providing an orchestration layer between the storage and the virtualization components, the Z2 solution enables organizations of all sizes to implement enterprise level system management and disaster recovery solutions without significant capital investment and ongoing operational costs. The R3000 is capable of expanding up to 96 terabytes using a mixture of Enterprise SATA or SAS hard drives, and is available with redundant, energy efficient power supplies.

The R3000x system is built upon the Supermicro 1U Twin “twin server” architecture that includes a similar storage platform as in the R3000 and an additional dedicated server in the same 1U chassis, providing a platform for virtualization with dual quad-core Intel Xeon CPUs and 16GB of RAM (up to 48GB available). The unique architecture includes a dedicated 10 Gigabit/s Ethernet storage network between the two nodes, providing high-speed and secure data access. 

In general, the Z2 Systems are priced at about 10-25 percent of the cost compared to larger enterprise class storage platforms, but provide the same advanced features required to effectively host a reliable and supportable virtualization infrastructure. The R3000 has a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $5,650 for the basic storage server, and the R3000x is priced at $6,449 with the integrated virtualization platform.