Robin Wauters

Eucalyptus Systems Releases Commercial Eucalyptus Edition For Enterprises

September 10, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Eucalyptus Systems, creator of an open source private cloud platform, today announced the company’s first commercial offering: the Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition (EEE).

EEE enables customers to implement an on-premise Eucalyptus cloud with VMware’s virtualization technologies, including vSphere, ESX and ESXi.

EEE is the only on-premise cloud computing solution available today for vSphere customers, providing a robust, affordable cloud computing solution that leverages their investment in VMware technologies. EEE also supports other hypervisors typically found in a data center, such as Xen and KVM, providing customers the flexibility to configure cloud solutions that best meet their infrastructure needs.

“Eucalyptus Systems’ mission has been to support the open source Eucalyptus on-premise cloud platform while also delivering solutions for large-scale enterprise deployments, and we are proud to launch the Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition as our first commercial offering for the enterprise,” said Dr. Rich Wolski, Eucalyptus Systems co-founder, CTO and former director of the Eucalyptus research project at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). “EEE represents the first step toward broader Eucalyptus-enabled cloud interoperability that leverages multiple virtualization environments and technologies.”

EEE is built on Eucalyptus — an open source software infrastructure for implementing on-premise cloud computing using an organization’s own information technology (IT) infrastructure, without modification, special-purpose hardware or reconfiguration. Eucalyptus turns data center resources such as machines, networks, and storage systems into a cloud that is controlled and customized by local IT. Eucalyptus is the only cloud architecture to support the same application programming interfaces (APIs) as public clouds, and today Eucalyptus is fully compatible with the Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure.

For EEE, Eucalyptus leverages vSphere, ESXi, and ESX virtualization technologies to provide an on-premise cloud in the data center. EEE also includes an image converter that helps users develop VMware-enabled Eucalyptus applications that are compatible with Amazon EC2. Moreover, Eucalyptus supports popular open source hypervisors such as KVM and Xen, enabling EEE customers to choose the most appropriate software stack for each cloud application while maintaining a single cloud API that is Amazon compatible.

Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition is available today and is licensed based on the number of processor cores on the physical host.

Lanamark Teams up With interAct

September 10, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Lanamark recently announced that it has signed a distribution agreement with interAct, the value-added distributor specializing in data center and virtualization solutions.

“Virtualization is a fast-growing market. This is why we were looking for a solution that would be a strategic asset in our portfolio and serve as an enablement platform for helping our resellers deliver desktop and server virtualization solutions that maximize the value to their customers. Lanamark offers the perfect software solution and we are excited to become the first specialized distributor for Lanamark Suite,” said Rudi Lenaerts, CEO at interAct.

Lanamark Suite is a virtualization sales and services automation software platform that enables solution providers to accelerate design and delivery of vendor-neutral desktop virtualization, server virtualization and storage solutions. The partnership enhances the availability of the Lanamark Suite in Belgium and Luxembourg.

Release: Dell PAN System 2.1

September 10, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Egenera and Dell recently reached an important milestone in their partnership with the worldwide availability of Dell PAN System 2.1, available on Dell 11g blades and utilizing Dell PowerEdge R710 servers for its PAN controllers.

Major enhancements in this release include:

— Integration of PAN Manager Software by Egenera with Dell management technology for expanded monitoring capabilities;
— Expanded portfolio of operating environments including VMware virtualization products and Citrix XenServer 5.3 technology with support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and Novell SLES 10-64-bit virtual machine guests;
— Enhanced GUI to further ease scalability;
— Open APIs enabling customers and third-parties to integrate with PAN Manager commands and functions; and
— Support for WinPE 2.1 so customers can utilize industry-standard tools to manage their Microsoft operating system deployments and provisioning.

Pano Logic Appoints Dana Loof as Executive Vice President of Marketing

September 10, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Pano Logic, the leader in zero client desktop virtualization, today announced the appointment of Dana Loof as executive vice president of marketing.

With extensive experience building brands and developing high-impact marketing programs, Loof will be responsible for building the innovative company’s brand worldwide and overseeing all aspects of the company’s marketing activities. Loof previously held senior level positions at Symantec, where she led global advertising, and VERITAS, where she built and promoted the VERITAS storage management brand. Most recently Loof served as the vice president of marketing for EVault, Inc., a data protection company, and transitioned the EVault brand to the new Seagate Technology brand, i365, A Seagate Company.

Loof held her position at Symantec prior to EVault. While at the company, she was responsible for global marketing communications. Previously, Loof was a director of account management at both Smartage.com and Fabrik Communications, where she helped drive sales and exceeded quotas quarter after quarter. She began her career at Oracle and received her Bachelors of Science degree in international business with an emphasis in marketing from San Francisco State University’s College of Business.

LoginConsultants Opens Third Beta for Login VSI 2.0

September 10, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

LoginConsultants is opening up the Beta of its VSI 2.0 application.

Login VSI 2.0 is the second iteration of Login VSI 1.0, the free and specifically designed benchmark for SBC and VDI environments. VSI 2.0 introduces completely new workloads, and an improved and more accurate index called VSImax.

LoginConsultants said that overall, “VSI 2.0 will be a much smoother experience, many best practices and lessons learned from project VRC are now included in this release.”

There will be two versions of VSI 2.0, a free and fully functional version called Login VSI 2.0 Express, and an advanced version called Login VSI 2.0 PRO. These are the same download, however the PRO version will have additional features that are activated with a license file.

Download the Beta of Login VSI 2.0 here.

Industry Moves: PHD Virtual Technologies Ramps Up Engineering Team

September 7, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

PHD Virtual Technologies, provider of the esXpress data protection and recovery solution for virtual machines, as announced that it has expanded its engineering team. To help lead this expanding team, which has doubled in overall R&D capacity in the past month, Vladimir Hrabrov has joined the company as vice president of engineering and Alex Mittell has been named director-senior virtualization architect.

Hrabrov joins PHD Virtual from Hewlett-Packard and has over 30 years of experience designing and developing enterprise-scale configuration management systems in entrepreneurial environments as well as established organizations. As a Certified Scrum Practitioner, he brings valuable experience in building strong, agile engineering teams, as well as a proven, disciplined approach to release, risk, and product quality management. At HP, Hrabrov was an R&D and program manager in charge of OS deployment for HP Client Automation. He joined HP as a part of the Novadigm acquisition where he was a senior architect and project manager. Before his work at Novadigm, Hrabrov worked at Legent Corp, Spectrum Concepts and the Ukrainian Ministry of Standards, where he held key management and development roles. He holds a master’s degree in Computer Science from National Technical University of Ukraine “Kyiv Polytechnic Institute.”

Mittell joined PHD Virtual in 2008 and is a widely known technical expert and thought leader in the virtualization community. He is a co-founder of Xtravirt, the UK provider of virtualization solutions throughout the technology lifecycle. While at Xtravirt, Alex authored many of the free virtualization tools that are available on the PHD Virtual web site. Prior to co-founding Xtravirt, he worked at Oxford University in the UK as a virtual architect, where he designed and configured the university’s virtual infrastructure.