Robin Wauters

Apparent Networks, a provider of network fault and performance management solutions, today announced that it has released an updated version of PathView Cloud, its popular hosted network management service.

The new version includes unique features for managing end-to-end network performance in virtualized environments.

With PathView Cloud’s virtualization-enabled analytics, IT and operations teams can, for the first time, understand network performance from the perspective of applications running on virtual machines. With this extended visibility, PathView Cloud lets IT teams quickly find and fix network performance problems, regardless of whether they occur in physical or virtual infrastructure.

PathView Cloud is a hosted, next-generation network management service. It measures the performance of complete network paths from source to destination, regardless of who owns or operates each of the network segments in that path. PathView Cloud is unique in its ability to test network performance to any endpoint in a virtualized infrastructure, including physical hardware resources and VMs. Other virtual machine management products on the market today focus only on monitoring how VMs interact with their virtual operating systems. Unlike those products, PathView Cloud provides information about the networking aspects of VMs.

Along with the ability to test to a virtual target, PathView Cloud can now also test the performance of network paths from a virtual machine. Specifically, the PathView Cloud component that conducts network path tests can be installed on virtual machines. This capability is initially available for VMware ESX and ESXi hypervisors. With no hardware required, this feature makes deployment of PathView Cloud easier, more flexible and less expensive.

In developing the new release of PathView Cloud, the Apparent Networks development team took into consideration the results of recent research conducted by the company. That research consisted of a survey distributed to roughly 30,000 network managers at companies of all sizes. Results of the survey validated that network performance implications remain a major concern that curbs or delays the roll-out of virtual environments. Sixty percent of respondents said that virtual machine performance and infrastructure bottlenecks are the biggest issues they are facing with regard to virtual infrastructure, yet less than ten percent have adopted tools specifically designed to help with these issues.

The latest version of PathView Cloud is available immediately. Apparent Networks is offering a free, five-path version of PathView Cloud. Pricing for additional paths is $4.95 per path per month.

LiveTime Software, a provider of Web based ITIL 3 Service Management and Help Desk software, today announced the release of the LiveTime Virtual Appliance 6.0.

The new virtual appliance has been specifically designed for SaaS-based Service Management providers, offering full isolation and a simple menu driven interface. Each appliance can operate in as little as 512Mb of RAM and can scale the number of virtual processors and memory to meet the needs of any customer.

As a standalone platform, the LiveTime Virtual appliance also includes an auto update facility so customers can automatically remain current with the latest LiveTime release. Simply choose the update option and LiveTime will automatically download and install the latest release direct from the console.

Designed around open standards the LiveTime Virtual Appliance includes Apache 2.2, Tomcat 6.0, Java 6 and LiveTime 6.0, optimized for LiveTime service delivery. Version 6.0 includes an updated kernel and support for VMware vSphere 4.0 and Citrix XenServer 5.5 with guest tools for each environment. In addition, LiveTime supports the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) and Microsoft’s Hyper-V environment.

Organizations can now leverage LiveTime’s highly scalable ITIL Service Management software with the ease of installation of traditional software. The virtual appliance provides the necessary scalability and security that is difficult to achieve when deployed on existing hardware and operating systems. Since the system has been hardened at the operating system layer, LiveTime provides Just Enough Operating System for its needs. This makes the system easy to update and maintain and provides a very small footprint and a 200Mb download.

Emulex Corporation and BLADE Network Technologies have announced that the two companies are delivering essential networking components for IBM BladeCenter Virtual Fabric.

BLADE’s BNT Virtual Fabric 10G Switch Module combined with Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapter CFFh for IBM BladeCenter provide an end-to-end converged networking solution for IBM BladeCenter H and HS22 blade servers.

Virtual Fabric for IBM BladeCenter provides flexible Ethernet connectivity, virtual port switching and support for future converged networking with iSCSI or FCoE. Unlike the physical port switching employed by conventional switch fabrics, the Emulex-BLADE solution provides a virtual fabric for IBM BladeCenter supporting 1Gb/s or 10Gb/s that can be configured into up to eight virtual ports with bandwidth allocation in 100Mb/s increments.

BLADE’s switch-resident and hypervisor-agnostic SmartConnect with VMready software is the industry’s first shipping product to enable network policies to move along with Virtual Machines to maintain application performance, availability and security.

The Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapter CFFh for IBM BladeCenter provides the fastest and most flexible blade server Ethernet connections in the industry, offering two physical 10Gb/s Ethernet ports that can be configured into up to eight virtual ports with bandwidth allocations in 100Mb/s increments. Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapters are field upgradable to iSCSI or next-generation Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). BLADE’s 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches support iSCSI and can be upgraded with new firmware to support FCoE, allowing a converged networking infrastructure to support diverse application requirements within the data center.

BLADE’s BNT Virtual Fabric 10G Switch Module for IBM BladeCenter (Part number 46C7191) and Emulex’s Virtual Fabric Adapter (Part number 49Y4235) will be available in November from IBM.

Vizioncore has announced the launch of vReplicator 3.0, a scalable virtual machine (VM) replication solution that enables disaster recovery and business continuity at a considerably lower total cost of ownership (TCO). Vizioncore has overhauled vReplicator in response to increasing demands from customers worldwide.

Organizations of all sizes are striving to meet recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) while keeping costs to a minimum. vReplicator 3.0 helps administrators meet shorter RTOs and RPOs for critical applications to support business continuity objectives through its new Advanced Replication Engine by facilitating faster replication times and greater reliability. However, unlike many array-based solutions available on the market today, vReplicator provides replication to all VMs at a much lower TCO, bringing previously unattainable levels of technology to budgets of all sizes.

At the heart of vReplicator 3.0, patent-pending Active Block Mapping (ABM) technology and Change Block Tracking (CBT) optimize data transmission by simply replicating only changed blocks of data and not the unnecessary “white space” that often causes inefficient lag times. Customers can use vReplicator to reduce the performance impact on production systems through Asynchronous Data Transfer regardless of where the target disaster recovery site is located: domestic or even intercontinental.

Univa UD, a provider of cloud management software products, today announced UniCluster 5.0, a major new version of Univa’s infrastructure and workload management software stack that provides the underpinnings of Univa’s cloud computing solutions.

UniCluster 5.0 features:

• Truly heterogeneous support: With UniCluster 5.0, a single cluster can support OpenSolaris and Linux compute nodes with a common management framework. Further, software profiles can be created and deployed for multiple operating systems (OS) and computing environments. Thus, users can create one Kit for deployment across resources running a variety of OS’s and also across multiple hardware profiles.
• Scalability: UniCluster 5.0 easily scales to over 7,000 nodes through subordinate installer nodes.
• Robust Web-based API: UniCluster offers a unique, well defined web-based API to allow interfacing with the UniCluster core framework.
• Integrated management console: System configuration is consolidated into a single management application.
• OpenSolaris support: UniCluster 5.0 is a native OpenSolaris version, functionally equivalent to the Linux

UniCluster provides the framework for Univa’s cloud computing solutions. Used as a building block for HPC clusters in internal or external computing environments, it is the open source component of Univa’s infrastructure management suite. UniCluster features Sun Grid Engine software and Oracle Enterprise Linux, and is the leading solution for many top commercial companies who are migrating from expensive job schedulers in Aerospace, EDA, Oil and Gas and Life Sciences.