Robin Wauters

Red Hat, HP Optimize RH Enterprise Virtualization for HP BladeSystem Matrix

September 3, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Red Hat and HP today expanded their collaboration to drive the next generation of converged server, storage and networking infrastructure solutions with the launch of open source software designed to improve administrator productivity, lower costs and maximize resource utilization.

Yesterday, Red Hat announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, the foundation of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio of solutions. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 is now available on HP BladeSystem and HP ProLiant servers. With this combination, customers can take advantage of an open source, standards-based virtual infrastructure that provides scalability and security capabilities. Additionally, enterprises will be able to leverage management capabilities offered by both companies. In the future, customers can expect increasing levels of management integration between the system and operating environment to further drive administrator productivity.

The HP BladeSystem Matrix is a “cloud infrastructure in a box” that brings the economics, scalability and response times of the cloud to diverse applications across customers` data centers.

Customers can obtain increased performance improvement and cost savings by deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and JBoss Enterprise Middleware on HP ProLiant G6 platforms. They also can get a single point of accountability for the purchase and support of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on HP systems. With its comprehensive range of world-class support services, HP offers customers complete confidence to grow their businesses while controlling costs.

Virtustream Raises $25 Million Equity Financing

September 2, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Virtustream a privately held infrastructure services firm, today announced the completion of new equity financing with total commitments of $25 million led by Virginia based Columbia Capital and Miami based Blue Lagoon Capital.

Virtustream is an infrastructure services firm committed to helping clients actualize the enterprise cloud by providing strategy, integration and managed services leveraging deep virtualization experience, and its own proprietary platform. The infusion of funding is part of Virtustream’s growth strategy and will be used to continue accelerating its platform development, build international presence and expand domain expertise.

Virtustream also recently completed the acquisition of VirtualizeIT, the premier European consultancy practice dedicated to the advancement and adoption of virtualization technologies, and Brigh Technologies (Brigh), the leading North American provider for the design and deployment of custom solutions in the virtualization space. The union brings together pioneers in enterprise computing including being one of the first VMware professional services partners in North America and the 2008 VMware EMEA Partner of the Year. The stockholders of both acquired companies will have an equity interest in Virtustream, and all employees will continue their employment with Virtustream.

Vizioncore Offers vConverter SC and vControl Multi-Hypervisor Management as Freeware

September 2, 2009 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

Vizioncore today announced that vControl’s multi-hypervisor management capability will now be available for free.

Customers who have VMware ESX infrastructures, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix XenServer infrastructure can now manage these environments through a single console – helping to reduce administration costs and improve management consistency.

vControl Multi-Hypervisor Management provides a browser-based interface that enables control of multiple platforms, allowing administrators to leverage easy-to-trigger workflows for task-based administration of VMs. Furthermore, vControl Multi-Hypervisor Management provides a cost-effective solution for high availability in the data center.

In addition to vControl Multi-Hypervisor Management, Vizioncore offers vControl Self-Service Provisioning for $399/socket. With this product VM consumers can build and provision VMs for themselves through customizable VM templates.

Furthermore, the company has also announced that vConverter SC (Server Consolidation) will now be available for free as well. Customers may use the tool to accelerate towards a virtualized environment, making the most of maintenance windows and reducing downtime on current physical machines.

vConverter SC offers an intuitive GUI to enable rapid simultaneous conversions of single or multiple servers without disruption to the source system. By combining cutting-edge disk and networking technology with extensive automation of pre- and post-conversion tasks, it boasts the ability to successfully migrate more servers per conversion window, saving valuable maintenance time. Furthermore the product is compatible with hypervisors from leading vendors such as VMware, Microsoft and Citrix, making it the perfect fit for almost every environment.

Release: IBM Smart Business Desktop on the IBM Cloud

September 1, 2009 by Robin Wauters 3 Comments

IBM today announced the availability of the industry’s first public desktop cloud.

The new IBM Smart Business Desktop on the IBM Cloud subscription service helps clients virtualize desktop computing resources, and provide a logical, rather than a physical, method of access to data, computing power, storage capacity and other resources. This service requires no up front capital or one time expense and will provide the highest levels of security, resiliency, reliability, and quality for virtual desktops. The service offers flexible delivery models, including three standard cloud-based offerings, dedicated infrastructure, and customer premise solutions, while providing the necessary safeguards to minimize the risk of data theft and loss, centralize data protection, and eliminate unauthorized access.

Through key technology and business partnerships with Citrix, Desktone, VMware and Wyse, along with IBM tools for customer assessment and strategic planning, IBM is helping financial organizations, public sector and academic institutions around the world address PC replacement dilemmas, deliver resilience and reliability for critical information, and resolve Internet access parity problems, all at competitive subscription service pricing.

Supported by government funding, the Hispanic Information and Telecommunications Network is partnering with IBM on a grass roots project called CBO Connect to provide desktop computing to over 200 sites nationwide. The CBO Connect is a coalition of community based organizations consisting of non-profits, schools and libraries where visitors have access to 21st century classrooms that offer desktop cloud computing, interactive video conferencing for distance learning, video distribution system with digital signage, and other classroom and administrative services.

The IBM Smart Business Desktop on the IBM Cloud service will be available in the Americas and Europe starting October 2009.

Research: Hardware Server Sales Slump as IT Pros Bet On Virtualization and Consolidation

September 1, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

TheInfoPro, an independent research company, today released new real-time data from its pending Server Study (final results due in October, Q3 2009) indicating that more than 50% of new servers being installed in 2009 will host virtualization, and future progressive growth indicates 80% by 2012.

Announced at VMworld 2009, TheInfoPro’s Server Study has conducted interviews with 195 IT pros wherein initial spending data indicates that 22% expect increases this year in server spending, but an additional 34% of the group indicates they’ll experience decreases. The IT pros range from Fortune 1000 (F1000) organizations to midsize enterprises (MSEs) in North America and Europe, and the interviews were completed between June and August 2009.

TheInfoPro Server Study also captures data about the rise of desktop virtualization, offers highlights on spending in each area of server management by vendor, and gives an in-depth look at VMware’s benefits and challenges in the current IT marketplace. For more information, visit TheInfoPro at booth #1322 or call the contact number below for a real-time briefing.

TheInfoPro’s network of IT pros stated that virtualization and consolidation is a critical lifeline to optimizing the current capacity of their existing physical servers. Virtualization deployments will continue to expand in the coming months, with 70% of the respondents citing it as critical to meeting their business objectives. Though hardware spending continues to show little growth, more than 50% of respondents do expect to resume hardware acquisition once the economy stabilizes. For now, Hewlett-Packard is positioned as a strong vendor in future choice of spending and faces the lowest vulnerability to customer switching when compared to competing vendors.

In software, despite the revenue-dampening effect of enterprise licensing, Microsoft remained steady in its category, with 22% of respondents indicating they would spend more throughout the remainder of 2009. VMware and Red Hat remain strong in their respective categories, with 41% and 30% spending more in 2009, respectively.

Zoho Partners with VMware to Bring Private Cloud Software-as-a-Service Solutions To Enterprise Customers

September 1, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Zoho today announced a relationship with VMware designed to give customers a streamlined approach to running Zoho applications in their own data centers, leveraging the industry-leading VMware platform, which has been adopted by thousands of customers.

For enterprises that want to run Zoho online applications on-site, Zoho historically delivered its applications as appliances, via racks of servers that were exact replicas of the hardware running in Zoho data centers. The rack solution, however, forced companies to use Zoho’s unique hardware configuration if they wanted to run Zoho on-site.

The VMware platform will minimize the hardware limitations of the Zoho rack, while increasing the availability, resilience and flexibility of the underlying infrastructure. Customers who want their Zoho applications to execute locally will have the choice of running Zoho applications on their internal cloud based on VMware vSphere 4, which runs on a broad range of hardware and is widely deployed in enterprises today.

The VMware relationship will give enterprises an improved approach for running Zoho on-site as an internal cloud and keeping their data behind the firewall, which has been a concern of customers. Zoho applications can also be integrated with a company’s existing applications. Users get the best of both worlds — data stays in-house, and cloud applications are deployed with complete control.