Robin Wauters

VMware Announces Availability Of VMware vSphere 5

August 25, 2011 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VMware today announced the general availability of VMware vSphere 5, delivering nearly 200 new and enhanced capabilities to help customers transform IT by driving greater efficiency from existing investments and improving operational agility.

The foundation of VMware’s cloud infrastructure suite, VMware vSphere 5, includes new features and enhancements to deliver better application performance and availability for all business-critical applications. It also introduces advanced automation capabilities to free IT from manual processes and allow it to be more responsive to changing business requirements.

VMware vSphere 5 supports virtual machines (VMs) that are up to four times more powerful than previous versions — VMs can now be configured with up to 1 terabyte of memory and 32 virtual CPUs. When combined with VMware vSphere 5’s enhanced High Availability, these gains in VM scalability and performance enable customers to virtualize any business-critical applications with confidence in the application’s continued performance and availability.

VMware vSphere 5 and the cloud infrastructure suite are supported by more than 25,000 partners, including technology partners, independent software vendors (ISVs), solution providers, service providers, and systems integrators, as well as every major global hardware manufacturer.

VMware vSphere 5 is currently available in packages and prices that address the widest range of customer requirements, starting at $83 per processor.

Ixia Launches Testing Solution For Virtualized Data Centers

August 25, 2011 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Ixia, provider of converged IP and wireless network test solutions, will unveil IxLoad-VM – a solution for testing virtualized data centers and their infrastructures – at VMWorld 2011.

IxLoad-VM measures the quality and capacity of cloud data center components, applications, and networks to deliver effective cloud-based services. Ixia will use IxLoad-VM and other Ixia products to demonstrate the testing of a fully virtualized data center with virtual security elements, virtual router/switch nodes, and actual web infrastructure.

The IxLoad-VM solution assesses application performance across the virtualized data center in conjunction with IxNetwork-VM, which assesses layer 2/3 network performance in virtual environments.

The combination of Ixia’s virtualized test solutions provide the essential tools to ensure that cloud service will perform with high availability and security, allowing enterprises and cloud providers to independently validate service level agreements (SLAs). Ixia’s virtual tools isolate portions of the virtual data center to pinpoint security flaws, performance bottlenecks, and operational issues.

FlashSoft Introduces Application Acceleration Solution for VMware Environments

August 25, 2011 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

FlashSoft, the “Flash Virtualization Company”, today announced the immediate commercial availability of FlashSoft SE-V, the company’s solution for accelerating application performance on Windows Server in virtual machine environments based on VMware vSphere 5.

The new solution is based on FlashSoft SE, the company’s software that enables enterprise flash as a server-tier cache, and is already used today in numerous business-critical production environments.

Today FlashSoft brings the same performance benefits to applications running on virtual machines (VMs) based on the VMware ESXi software platform. The solution is available for free evaluation through a 30-day “Try Before You Buy” program.

FlashSoft SE-V is designed specifically for Windows Server instances running on VMs supported by the VMware ESXi platform. In performance tests, a standard OLTP application suite based on MS-SQL was accelerated by more than 3X — the same kind of performance acceleration that FlashSoft SE provides in non-virtual server environments.

FlashSoft SE-V for Windows Server/VMware is available for evaluation and purchase now. T

The new FlashSoft SE-V product is licensed for use in multiple Windows Server VMs running on a single VMware server. License cost is based on the number of virtual machines on the server and the SSD or PCIe flash card used to host the cache.

Desktop Cloud Company Wanova Scores $10 Million In Series B Funding

August 24, 2011 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Wanova, a turn-key desktop cloud provider, has announced a $10 million Series B venture round by Greylock Partners, Carmel Ventures and Opus Capital.

The financing will be used to build global sales and support teams to for Wanova’s flagship product, Mirage.

Wanova’s patented centralization technology provides layered, single image management of PCs in the network, local execution of the image on the PC, and optimized synchronization between local and centralized images.

With Mirage, PC images including personalization settings run locally on a PC allowing users to take advantage of PC native performance — including the ability to run multimedia applications and work while disconnected from the network.

Virsto Software Adds Another $5 Million To Series B Round

August 24, 2011 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Virsto Software, a provider of VM-centric storage-hypervisor software, has landed a follow-on investment to the tune of $5 million to its June 8 Series B round of $12 million, bringing the total investment in the round to $17 million.

Southern Cross Venture Partners and Correlation Ventures join as new investors – InterWest Partners, August Capital and Canaan Partners backed the company earlier. Southern Cross was an investor in EvoStor, an Australia-based developer of storage solutions for the VMware market, which Virsto acquired earlier this year.

The additional funding will be used to accelerate growth, broaden industry partnerships and expand hiring to support continued innovation in Virsto’s products that bring performance, functionality and cost back into line for storage in virtual environments.

The company also plans to use the proceeds to enter the VMware market this year.

Founded in 2007, Virsto has developed the first multi-platform VM-centric storage hypervisor. A partner of Citrix, Microsoft, and VMware, Virsto’s software lets organizations change the economics of storage in server and desktop virtualization, increasing performance and management flexibility while lowering storage costs.