Archives for January 2010

LPI Level Platforms has announced the availability of Managed Workplace 2010, marking a milestone in the evolution of its agentless platform for solution providers offering managed services to their small and mid-sized customers.

These features include:

Onsite Utilities providing one-click access to a collection of troubleshooting and remote access.
Website Console allowing one-click remote access to web-based administration interfaces for network devices and applications.
Significant new Intel vPro productivity enhancements including remote imaging of non-functioning devices
Roaming Devices allowing a roaming laptop to be managed as if connected to the LAN
66 new best-practices Policy Modules
158 partner-requested productivity improvements.

Fortisphere, a Virtual Service Management software company, today announced the completion of a successful implementation for DAI, assisting the international development firm in evolving its virtual management approach to more confidently support quickly increasing business critical workloads.

With nearly 2000 staff worldwide, DAI confronts development challenges in a wide range of practices and in countries. Even shortly after taking occupancy in a new Washington, DC-area facility several years ago, DAI’s rapid growth soon meant the data center was running out of space.

In an effort to alleviate constraints around space, power and climate control, DAI leveraged VMware ESX. The technical success and initial savings encouraged DAI’s IT team to extend virtualization further across the infrastructure. Soon, over 50% of DAI’s servers had been virtualized. But as resources reached their limits, and with no reliable view into precisely how virtual resources supported their respective services, whenever application performance issues reared their head, virtual servers became the de facto scapegoat.

DAI’s IT team had used VMware’s Virtual Center with some initial success to maintain individual virtual machines (VMs) at a very granular level. But because the team didn’t have the visibility required to associate each VM with the particular business services each supported, virtual administrators had no way by which to prioritize which issues to tackle first. As the infrastructure grew, this bottom-up, manual process for problem resolution increasingly led to shortfalls in service delivery.

In early 2009, DAI turned to Fortisphere Virtual Service Manager (VSM) to transform its approach to virtualization management, with the mantra in mind that all VMs are not created equal. Firstly, VSM provided a visual inventory of all VMs, with extensive drilldown capabilities. But VSM also went beyond mapping, furnishing administrators the ability to intelligently tag each VM and associate the services it provides with specific business functions or projects. Once worked with business stakeholders to define mutually agreed service levels, VSM in turn furnished role-based views that display filtered data on only those VMs relevant to each stakeholder.

As a result of the implementation, DAI solves issues leveraging a new level of visibility, control and automation across its entire virtual environment. Fortisphere VSM has enabled the IT organization to reduce administrative costs, by optimizing virtual administrators’ productivity through an approach that prioritizes issue resolution based on service impact. This means its business users receive better service, and overall IT has earned much greater stakeholder confidence.

KEMP Technologies today announced the launch of its Virtual LoadMaster (VLM).

This new virtual-appliance application delivery controller (ADC) will be sold under a Service Provider Licensing Agreement (SPLA) starting at $99 per license per month with no startup or setup fees. The SPLA pricing model enables managed hosting providers (MHPs) and managed service providers (MSPs) to offer a dedicated server load balancer with the same functionality as KEMP’s hardware appliances at a price point affordable to a much broader range of business customers while significantly reducing operating costs.

As a virtual appliance, the Virtual LoadMaster removes the need to maintain hardware and reduces or eliminates costs associated with power consumption, cooling, rack space constraints and other environmental dependencies of hardware-based appliances. The VLM can be quickly configured and deployed, accelerating service provisioning and simplifying ongoing management, which aids in further reducing operating expenses and increasing ROI.

MHPs and MSPs implementing the Virtual LoadMaster are able to reduce the risk associated with stranded investment when customers disconnect services and leave the provider with hardware that has not yet been fully depreciated. Furthermore, the MHP is better positioned for aggressive marketing with the lower-priced software-based solution compared with hardware-based ADCs. When deploying the VLM, MHPs can then maintain margins while pricing their high-value services low enough to attract a new base of customer such as small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that previously thought the benefit of ADCs were out of reach.

Akorri announced today that it achieved its best fourth quarter in the history of the company, with Q4 2009 revenues increasing 134 percent over Q4 2008 and 82 percent over the previous quarter.

In addition, Akorri experienced significant customer expansion in 2009, added 33 new US national and regional partners within its newly launched PartnerPoint channel program, and expanded into international markets by opening regional offices in the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Australia.

To lead the company during its next phase of growth, Akorri has appointed technology industry veteran executive Allan Wallack as President and CEO. Allan has spent the last 40 years leading high-profile startup companies through their early stages to IPO or acquisition.

Previously, Allan served as President and CEO of Spring Tide Networks, an IP services company purchased by Lucent Technologies; was Chairman, President and CEO of Chrysalis Symbolic Design, an electronic design automation software company purchased by Avanti Corp.; was President and CEO of Synernetics, a communications company which was bought by 3COM; was COO of COGNEX Corporation during its IPO; and Vice President of Marketing for MASSCOMP during its IPO.

Company highlights in 2009 include:

· Released BalancePoint 3.0 – the latest version of the company’s award-winning virtual infrastructure management software, with richer virtual machine and storage analysis, broader interoperability, and user interface improvements
· Acquired new customers in a variety of industries including Christian Broadcasting Network, Epsilon, Kronos, Merkle, Sandridge Energy, SCI, and VistaPrint that are using BalancePoint’s powerful analytics to optimize both virtual and physical server and storage environments
· Appointed three seasoned executives to its management team: Bill Simpson and Warren Mead to lead Worldwide and Channel Sales, and Jim Comstock to lead Marketing
· Won Gold in the SearchServerVirtualization Product of the Year Awards
· Named a “Visionary” within Gartner’s SRM Magic Quadrant
· Named as one of the “Ten Virtualization Vendors to Watch” by CIO Magazine
· Named as one of the Top 20 Storage Products from VMworld by ChannelWeb
· Named a top-rated virtualization management tool by Searchvmware.com.