Archives for April 2009

StorMagic Launches Channel Program for StorMagic, VMware Partners

April 13, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

StorMagic last week announced details of its enhanced channel partner program, which targets resellers and system integrators in the VMware community. Through this program, StorMagic channel partners get access to a unique promo key, which their customers can use to download a free copy of the StorMagic SvSAN with no expiration date and management of up to 2 TB of data. SvSAN is a storage virtual appliance that enables the deployment of a high-availability shared storage solution for VMware environments for less than US$2,000.

Benefits of becoming a StorMagic channel partner include:

Two levels of membership (Preferred and Premier) with generous discounts
Qualified sales lead generation and lead distribution to partners
Customized marketing campaigns for lead generation, follow-up and renewals
Joint marketing and selling with the StorMagic team
Sales training and access to dedicated StorMagic sales representatives
Opportunity protection through deal registration with incremental margin
Referral fees for non-reseller partners
24X7 access to the StorMagic partner website with useful tools, information, as well as case entry and management
Ongoing web-based and onsite training.

StorMagic SvSAN works with VMware vCenter Server so that administrators are able to manage datastores, the StorMagic iSCSI SAN, and the internal RAID controller from one interface. With capacity that starts at 2 TB and scales to unlimited storage, the SvSAN enables administrators to create, manage and provision datastores through a single-operation, which allows them to rapidly deploy datastores without managing multiple applications. Add-on features include active-active mirroring for high-availability and capacity management upgrades.

HP Announces Enhancements to its Business Service Automation Software Suite

April 10, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

HP today announced new enhancements to its Business Service Automation (BSA) software suite to help customers better manage and reduce operational costs associated with virtualized data centers.

Enhancements within the HP BSA software suite include updated versions of:

HP Storage Essentials, a standards-based storage resource management software, helps customers manage the increased storage requirements of virtualized data centers by optimizing capacity allocation and utilization.
HP Operations Orchestration, a run book automation software that automates incident resolution, change orchestration and routine maintenance tasks in the data center. This new release allows customers to reduce operational costs by better provisioning and repurposing servers and storage without service downtime.

HP also launched HP BSA Essentials, an online community and subscription services offering that helps customers maximize the value of their HP BSA software investments.

HP Storage Essentials software helps customers lower costs for managing, visualizing and reporting on heterogeneous storage infrastructure. It can automatically baseline, configure and provision storage resources to match changes in virtual infrastructure. Using HP Storage Essentials, customers have reduced the amount of time required to provision storage by up to 90 percent.

New enhancements to HP Storage Essentials software help customers:

Optimize storage capacity allocation and utilization by allowing IT organizations to discover and map VMware hosts to storage and storage area network (SAN) dependencies. This enables IT staff to remove storage from virtual machines that are not being fully utilized, making it available to areas that need it most.
Improve storage administration efficiency and reduce task errors by automatically provisioning storage to a VMware hypervisor or guest operating system.
Deliver better business service visibility and automated change execution across application, server and storage domains through new integrations with HP Operations Orchestration workflow software and across the HP BSA software suite.

HP Operations Orchestration software saves customers time and money associated with managing routine IT operations by standardizing processes. The software automates incident resolution, change orchestration and maintenance tasks in the data center.

New enhancements to HP Operations Orchestration software help customers:

Provision and repurpose additional servers and storage capacity without service downtime through an automated workflow.
Reduce virtual server deployment time from hours to minutes through enhanced integration with the HP BSA suite.
Manage heterogeneous virtualization technologies with a single solution through new integrations with VMware Virtual Infrastructure, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V.

HP BSA Essentials helps customers maximize the benefits of automation and virtualization. The online portal connects customers to BSA Essentials Subscription Services and the BSA Essentials Community.

BSA Essentials Subscription Services provide access to security alerts and updates to regulation policy templates used for compliance auditing. This helps customers reduce risk by assessing and correcting security or policy violations that affect the technology infrastructure.
The BSA Essentials Community allows customers to find updated product information, share best practices and get new content, such as virtualization management workflows for HP Operations Orchestration software.

HP BSA Essentials is available now here. Access is available to HP BSA software customers with a current maintenance contract. HP Software Professional Services provides consulting services for BSA software to help customers maximize the value of their BSA virtualization solution.

HP Operations Orchestration and HP Storage Essentials software are available now from HP and select channel partners.

Veeam Announces Enhancements To nworks Product Line

April 10, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Veeam Software today made available version 4.5 of its nworks Management Pack (MP) for VMware for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager and its nworks Smart Plug-in (SPI) for VMware for HP Operations Manager. Both products now use VMware vCenter custom attributes to offer the ability to segment VMware environments by line of business, SLA (service-level agreement) terms, or any categorization of the customer’s choosing. This allows customers to manage virtual machines in accordance with their criticality to business needs, and to group virtual machines for management by department or location.

Version 4.5 of both products also includes significant enhancements in scalability and performance. Veeam developers, working closely with VMware’s scalability lab, enhanced the nworks Collector version 4.5 to support larger VMware environments and reduce vCenter processing requirements. A single Collector now supports more than twice as many ESX hosts and virtual machines as before, with far less performance impact on the vCenter server. With this breakthrough in scalability and performance, enterprise customers gain operational efficiency while monitoring their ever-growing virtual environments.

The nworks MP and SPI from Veeam have both been qualified through the VMware Ready testing process and are certified as VMware Ready Optimized products. This key designation from VMware validates the Veeam products as being architected and tuned for VMware Infrastructure, as well as for the next-generation VMware vCloud. The nworks MP and SPI are VMware endorsed solutions for VMware management per the VMware Ready Management program, providing customers assurance that these Veeam products not only offer lower integration costs today but also will support VMware Infrastructure future directions.

The Veeam nworks MP and SPI 4.5 are both available immediately, with North American pricing remaining at $450 USD per socket for the MP and $690 USD per socket for the SPI.

IDC: Virtual Server Management Software Revenues to Reach $2.3 Billion in 2013 Thanks To Large-Scale Deployments

April 10, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

The ramp up of large-scale virtual server implementations around the world will drive tremendous demand for a newly defined competitive market – virtual server management software – for distributed systems (principally Windows, Unix, and Linux platforms), according to new research from IDC.

IDC says the worldwide distributed virtual server management software market had revenues of $871 million in 2008 and will approach $2.3 billion in 2013; a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.3% over the forecast period.

Additional findings from IDC’s research include the following:

Many customers have not yet integrated virtual and physical resource management processes or aligned virtual server management activities with IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL).
Over the next five years, the distributed virtual server management software market will evolve and mature, creating significant opportunities for new competitors.
A strong spirit of “coopetition” will permeate this market over the next several years.

This study, Worldwide Distributed Virtual Server Management Software 2009-2013 Forecast: A First Look (IDC #217485), presents IDC’s preliminary top-down sizing of the worldwide distributed virtual server management software market in 2008 and a forecast of worldwide growth in this market for 2009-2013. This analysis is IDC’s first sizing and forecast for this emerging competitive market. Only top-line total market data is shown in this study. The study specifically excludes software related to mainframe, storage, network, or desktop virtualization management. Vendor market share data, as well as data for geographic regions, will be provided in subsequent IDC publications.

Teradici Raises $17 Million Series C Financing Round

April 10, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Teradici Corporation today announced completion of a US $17 million series C funding round for its PC-over-IP network-delivered computing technology. With network-delivered computing, users can work at inexpensive computer stations at any site, with all operating systems, applications, and data residing in central datacenters.

Teradici will use the new funds to continue to market its ground-breaking enterprise PC-over-IP technology around the world and to develop a new offering for consumers and small businesses. Customers of the future service would be able to sit at any workspace in the office, remote office, or user’s home, log in to access their system and files from the central datacenter. Customers would have the option of using their own equipment or receiving terminals as part of their contracted service. They receive exceptional graphics, multimedia, audio and USB connectivity without having to purchase, manage or maintain a PC.

Investors in the over-subscribed funding round include TELUS Ventures, the venture arm of TELUS, as well as Alloy Ventures, GrowthWorks Capital, Skypoint Capital, BDC Venture Capital, and Alta Berkeley Venture Partners.

Teradici also announced that Kevin Salvadori, Executive Vice President of Business Transformation & Technology Operations at TELUS, will assume a seat on its board of directors. Mr. Salvadori brings to the board extensive strategic and operational experience in Information Technology systems architecture, application development and maintenance, technology operations, and physical and technology security.

The investment by TELUS supports the organization’s efforts to partner with high-potential companies that offer unique technologies and innovative products that will accelerate growth initiatives within TELUS.

Sun Releases VirtualBox 2.2, Comes With OVF Support

April 10, 2009 by Robin Wauters 3 Comments

Sun Microsystems today announced the availability of Sun VirtualBox 2.2, the latest release of its free and open source virtualization software. VirtualBox 2.2 introduces support for the new Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard, as well as significant performance enhancements and updates.

OVF is a Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) standard that enables virtual machines or appliances to be imported and exported. Virtual appliances are one or more virtual machines that are pre-installed and configured so they can be shared, published and distributed. VirtualBox 2.2 software enables users to build virtual machines or appliances and effortlessly export them from a development environment and import them into a production environment. Support for OVF also helps to ensure VirtualBox 2.2 software is interoperable with other technologies that follow the standard.

A key component of Sun’s industry-leading desktop-to-datacenter virtualization portfolio, VirtualBox software has been rapidly growing in popularity, surpassing 11 million downloads worldwide, 3.5 million registrations since October 2007, with in excess of 25,000 downloads a day. A mere 50 megabyte download, VirtualBox software is incredibly compact and efficient and installs in less than five minutes.

Additional features of VirtualBox 2.2 software include:

Hypervisor optimizations to make this the fastest VirtualBox release available to date
3D graphics acceleration for Linux and Solaris applications using OpenGL, allowing a whole new class of applications to run in a virtual machine
Support for Snow Leopard, Apple’s forthcoming 64 bit platform
Increased maximum memory size of guests to 16Gb RAM
New host-interface networking mode, which makes it easier than ever before to run server applications in virtual machines

VirtualBox software is free of charge for personal use. For wider deployments within an organisation Enterprise subscriptions are also available, starting at $30 (USD) per user per year, which includes 24/7 premium support from Sun’s technical team. Discounts are available based on volume.