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Archives for August 2009

SpringSource Snapped Up By VMware

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(We’re playing catch-up on news due to holiday, apologies for the late notices)

VMware recently announced a major step forward in its journey to help simplify IT by entering into a definitive agreement to acquire privately held SpringSource, a leader in enterprise and web application development and management.  VMware and SpringSource, itself an acquiring party earlier this year when it purchased Hyperic, plan to deliver compelling new solutions that enable companies to more efficiently build, run and manage applications within both internal and external cloud architectures.

VMware will acquire SpringSource for approximately $362 million in cash and equity plus the assumption of approximately $58 million of unvested stock and options. The acquisition has been approved by SpringSource’s stockholders and is expected to close in the third quarter of 2009, subject to customary closing conditions.

SpringSource is the innovator and driving force behind some of the most popular and fastest growing open source developer communities, application frameworks, runtimes, and management tools.  In just five years, SpringSource has established a presence in a majority of the Global 2000 companies, and is rapidly delivering a new generation of commercial products and services. VMware plans to continue to support the principles that have made SpringSource solutions popular: the interoperability of SpringSource software with a wide variety of middleware software, and the open source model that is important to the developer community.

Together, VMware and SpringSource plan to further innovate and develop integrated Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions that can be hosted at customer datacenters or at cloud service providers.  These solutions will allow customers to rapidly build new enterprise and web applications and run and manage these applications in the same dynamic, scalable and cost-efficient vSphere-based internal or external clouds that can also host and manage their existing applications, providing an evolutionary path to the future.

Wanova Leaves Stealth Mode With $13 Million In Series A Funding

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Wanova has exited stealth mode and launched a “new era in desktop virtualization” with $13 million in A-round funding from Greylock Partners, Carmel Ventures, and Opus Capital.

Founded by experienced entrepreneurs, the company has launched an architecture called Distributed Desktop Virtualization (DDV), which addresses the need for enterprises to improve the management, support and protection of distributed endpoints.

Wanova’s new architecture is designed specifically to address the endpoint management challenges presented by distributed remote and mobile workers. The Wanova DDV solution centralizes the entire desktop contents in the data center for management and protection purposes while distributing the execution of desktop workloads to the endpoints for superior user experience.

The founders of Wanova – Kessler and CTO, Dr. Issy Ben-Shaul – also co-founded Actona, which was acquired by Cisco and became the foundation for Cisco’s Application Delivery Business Unit. Prior to founding Actona, Kessler was vice president and general manager for Qualcomm Israel and a research staff member at IBM in New York.

Ben-Shaul was the CTO of the Application Delivery Business Unit at Cisco and led its technology and vision. Prior to Actona, he was a tenured faculty member at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, where he worked on wide area distributed systems.

Wanova is headquartered in San Jose, California with a development center in Netanya, Israel. The company’s solutions are currently in field testing with customers.

(via Venturebeat)

Oracle Dumps Virtual Iron

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When early march this year we talked about Oracle eying Virtual Iron we noted that Oracle needed to fill the VM Management gap that RedHat was leaving on Xen level by moving to KVM.

Turns out that that indeed was their main target, late last month Oracle announced their key virtualization strategy to their old Virtual Iron customers,
Oracle is clear that they want too provide a Xen based next generation Virtualization architecture has zero license cost and zero key management.

They will be providing official application certification , they were already providing their customers with different OracleVM templates which gave them different Oracle based Appliances and earlier this month they announced they will be providing the community with their own Open Source Virtual Appliance builder, based on yet another JeOS, (Just Enough OS) platform, this time one based on Oracle Linux.

But more importantly was their message to the old Virtual Iron customers, Virtual Iron Products sales has been stopped, software download availability will be discontinued , also replacement media won’t be available anymore. there won’t be any more upgrades , support for the different Virtual Iron products will end in February 2010 at last (that’s for the last 4.5.16 release)

Oracle is giving the old Virtual Iron Customers 3 options ..

– When they continue to run Virtual Iron’s existing platform they will get support from Oracle they then can migrate at their own pace with migration tools provided by Oracle, Oracle realizes there will be some effort involved but they will do their best to make it easier.

– Another option is to already start running OracleVM today side by side with Virtual Iron, that way users can gain experience with the platform quickly. Oracle will be providing V2V conversion tools that can convert VHD virtual disks to Oracle VM disk images.

– And the third option is to move to OracleVM today, at no additional license cost, customers only need to pay for OracleVM

Looking at the time Oracle still wants to support the Virtual Iron platform to us that translates to .. you have 12 months to migrate, better do it fast. off course there’s already plenty of VM management frameworks that support Xen around , so Virtual Iron customers can choose to migrate to another platform if they want to.

Have a look at Convirture

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The guys over at Convirture have a mission .. “Enterprise-grade management for OSS hypervisor & cloud platforms.”. They want to close the gap between the Command Line based Linux Admins and the CIO’s that want to have nice administration interface

Late june they released a Convirt 1.1 version which apart from some bug fixes and some new features such as support for Virtual Network Management, a preview of a commandline interface that can be used to automate a lot work , and the ability to add disks to a running VM (Xen) They also added a number of fresh Linux distros to their list of supported distributions namely the latest RHEL and Centos 5.3 and Ubuntu 9.04

Their first major release 1.0 targeted to have Virtual Center alike features for Open Source software such as Xen and KVM, with their software being availably in only as GPLv2 , so as of Version 2 they plan on having a Dual License model offering both a Community Edition fully Open Source and an Enterprise Edition. Their biggest eye cathcher was the drag and drop support for KVM Live Migration

I ran into Convirture already ages ago, back when it was still called XenMan and they have progressed a lot so I decided to have a chat with Arsalan Farooq, currently CEO at Conviture joining them in 2006 from Oracle where he served as Director of Development for over a decade.

When asking Arsalan about how he felth about competing tools such as openQRM he replied that “openQRM was different from their approach but very strong in provisioning” , “other tools focus on just on single platform that needs to be managed” and others are absolutely not Open Source …

Today they are talking directly to the Xen API and to KVM. The future might bring more API’s to that list probably some of them in the cloud.

Convirture obviously is one of the platforms you should look at when your manager wants a nice an easy GUI for your virtualization platform ! But it does much more for you , it manages your storage pools , does intelligent VM placement provides you template based provisioning and much more.

ParaScale Forecasts Cloud Storage Opportunities for Service Providers and Hosting Companies

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Cloud applications, computing, and storage are just emerging on the scene, yet there is a rapid heightening of interest in all things cloud. Google and Amazon popularized the concept, now businesses of all sizes and types are interested in its potential. With the availability of cloud storage-enabling solutions, many service providers and hosting companies are investigating new cloud storage service offerings.

Sajai Krishnan, CEO of ParaScale, a start-up company developing cloud storage software, believes the impact of cloud technologies will be transformational and cloud will be a major way by which IT is consumed in the future. For service providers, this presents tremendous opportunity, as well as challenges.

Krishnan asserts that the public cloud storage service provider market is beginning to segment. Segment one includes the mass-market cloud service providers like Amazon S3, Google, Rackspace, and a few others. Segment two consists of the sophisticated enterprise cloud service providers who are rapidly creating new services that are combining virtualization, multi-tenant storage cloud and compute cloud service and private hosted clouds. Segment three is comprised of the giant telcos such as AT&T, Verizon Business, and Deutsche Telecom.

“Most manage hosters and service providers will need to determine their strategy for winning business in the second segment of contenders,” said Krishnan. “While the cloud services market is going to provide upside for many years, service providers must have a well thought-out entry strategy to succeed. Surprisingly, a number of mid-sized new entrants are considering a “build and they will come” approach and launching into segment one. This is a recipe for a “build and you will get run-over” scenario, as the goliaths of segment one already have first mover advantage and tremendous economies of scale.”

Krishnan identifies several considerations for service providers and managed hosting companies as they develop their cloud storage services offering. These include:

  • Evaluate your customers and their data needs.
  • What amount of data do you intend to store for your customers?
  • What sustainable differentiator should you base your business on?
  • What cloud services are already available and how will you compete?
  • If you succeed, is the business and architecture going to scale?

Regardless of how the service provider answers the above business questions, the systematic approach to evaluate cloud storage technologies remains the same:

  • A cloud storage solution has three key parts. Research the options to ensure a full storage cloud solution.
  • Choose a cloud solution that can start small with a few TBs and scale up.
  • Avoid proprietary interfaces and APIs.
  • Determine if your preferred cloud storage solution can offer data access via familiar enterprise protocols.
  • Do you have an opportunity to offer differentiated cloud storage integrated application services? Can your cloud storage platform help you deliver this high value service?
  • Cloud is about scale. Ensure that your cloud data access protocol can scale as your business grows.
  • Always perform a proof of concept within your own environment.

Rackspace Private Cloud Leverages VMware For Enterprise Computing Offering

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Rackspace Hosting, has announced its new Private Cloud offering, which allows customers to run the centrally managed VMware virtualisation platform on private dedicated hardware environments.

Rackspace recognises the demand from enterprises for a more flexible and scalable hosting solution. Although multi-tenant cloud solutions are very flexible and cost-effective, they are not always right for every segment. The Rackspace Private Cloud’s single-tenant architecture offers increased control and security, while still maintaining the scalability, flexibility and resource optimisation that make shared cloud offerings so compelling.

Rackspace Private Cloud is an evolution of its popular dedicated virtual server (DVS) offering within the managed hosting business unit. In the last year, revenue from virtualisation solutions has grown substantially, driven mainly by the increased flexibility, improved asset utilisation and lower capital and operating costs that VMware’s virtualisation provides.