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News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing

Robin Wauters

Gluster Names Rob Bearden To Its Board

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Gluster, provider of open source storage solutions, has announced that Rob Bearden has joined the company’s board of directors. Gluster provides open source storage solutions for public, private and hybrid clouds.

Throughout his 20-year career, Bearden has made significant contributions in the open source community.

He is currently president and COO of Hortonworks, company focused on adoption and maturation of the open source Apache Hadoop project. Previously, he served as president and chief operating officer of SpringSource until its acquisition by VMware, as COO of JBOSS through its acquisition by RedHat, and as chairman of the board of Pentaho.

Bearden will support Gluster’s continued growth and will provide guidance to help further develop its open source community.

Prior to SpringSource, Bearden served as entrepreneur in residence at Benchmark Capital, a venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley.

He was also COO for OpenSpan, a desktop integration software provider.

Silver Peak Announces ‘Virtual Acceleration Open Architecture’

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Silver Peak Systems, provider of data center class wide area network (WAN) optimization solutions, recently announced its Virtual Acceleration Open Architecture (VXOA), a combination of software and flexible pricing options that enable customers, partners, and service providers to deploy WAN optimization more conveniently than ever.

VXOA takes the underlying software that is used to power the entire family of Silver Peak NX, VX, and VRX WAN optimization products and introduces a new software development kit (SDK), an application programming interface (API), and new pricing options to facilitate WAN optimization deployments on a variety of industry standard hardware platforms and hypervisors.

This allows for tight integration with third-party hardware, including stand-alone servers, blades, storage arrays, and routers.

The growing use of virtualization, cloud services, and distributed applications is gated by an underlying WAN infrastructure plagued by bandwidth limitations, latency, and packet loss. This has driven a need for more flexible WAN optimization that can be cost-effectively deployed across private and public networks — from the cloud, to data centers, to branch offices.

Proprietary and fixed hardware-based offerings have been unable to service this market effectively because they are tightly bound to the underlying hardware in a closed architecture, limiting deployment flexibility and scalability. Silver Peak’s open architecture, via its software-based approach, dynamically leverages the performance of standard CPUs, general-purpose hardware, and standard hypervisors to provide customers the most comprehensive options for deploying WAN optimization on any platform.

Silver Peak’s VXOA supports the integration of data center class virtual WAN optimization with third-party products. Silver Peak VXOA allows for Silver Peak to be deployed, virtually, on any platform that meets the minimum system requirements.

This includes virtual machines, stand-alone servers, storage arrays, and blades on a router or multi-function device. The Silver Peak VXOA also includes an SDK with open application protocol interfaces (APIs) to allow technology partners to integrate Silver Peak’s data center class WAN optimization into their own products.

CopperEgg Raises $2M, Bring Real-Time Analytics To The Cloud With RevealCloud

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CopperEgg has announced that it has secured $2 million in Series A funding and launched RevealCloud, a SaaS-based performance monitoring solution that helps companies accelerate the delivery of applications and services across public and private clouds.

RevealCloud is the latest addition to CopperEgg’s suite of real-time performance monitoring solutions, including RevealStorage, launched earlier this year to help IT organizations optimize the efficiency of critical datacenter resources.

Silverton Partners led the first-round investment in the company, which includes the appointments of Kip McClanahan and Morgan Flager to CopperEgg’s board of directors.

The company is led by software industry veteran CEO Scott Johnson, founder of Thomas-Conrad Corporation (acquired by Compaq Computer in 1995) and Surgient Networks (acquired by Quest Software in 2010).

RevealCloud provides split-second monitoring of the operating and performance metrics of cloud instances that support critical application services, enabling customers to accelerate time to market during the development phase, optimize deployments as they learn customer usage patterns, and identify early warning signals of service degradation.

RevealCloud standard edition is available for free install. Advanced features will be available on a tiered-pricing basis for a monthly subscription.

App-DNA Names Former Microsoft Exec As Chairman of the Board

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App-DNA has named Patrick De Smedt as Chairman of its Board of Directors as part of the new expanded executive team.

De Smedt was previously a non-executive member of the App-DNA Board and former Chairman of the Microsoft EMEA organization.

In this new role, he will support the continued growth and global expansion of App-DNA.

De Smedt is a 23-year veteran of Microsoft and former Chairman of the Microsoft Europe, Middle East and Africa organization. As one of the first European employees for Microsoft, De Smedt held several roles as Microsoft expanded. He joined Microsoft in 1983 as one of the pioneers in Europe.

He was General Manager of Microsoft Benelux, Vice-President of the Enterprise Group in EMEA and Vice-President of Western Europe. He was appointed as Chairman of the EMEA region in 2003. When Patrick left Microsoft at the end of 2006, the EMEA region generated revenues of $12 billion with a headcount of 12,000 employees.

Patrick currently serves on the boards of a number of public and private companies.

App-DNA analyzes the ‘DNA’ of an application, using insight about applications to guide decisions about application migration, management and evolve application portfolios long term. The App-DNA AppTitude software platform helps enterprises worldwide save time, cost and risk in managing applications for Windows 7, Internet Explorer, Microsoft App-V, Citrix XenDesktop XenApp, VDI and Windows Server 2008 initiatives.

App-DNA is a CitrixReady Core Partner, Citrix Technology Partner, Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, a member of the Microsoft System Center Alliance and a Microsoft Jumpstart partner.

Dell To Acquires Datacenter Solutions Company Force10 Networks

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Dell this morning announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Force10 Networks, a provider of high-performance datacenter networking solutions.

Force10’s networking capabilities complement Dell’s datacenter solutions portfolio, enabling it to offer customers a broader range of enterprise offerings.

Force10 is a leader in datacenter, service provider, and enterprise networking. It is nearly a $200-million company, based on trailing 12 months revenue, with approximately 80 percent of its business in North America and operating in over 60 countries worldwide.

Force10’s Open Cloud Networking is based on open standards, automation and virtualization, and basically allows customers to transform their network infrastructures into an open, reliable and scalable datacenter and cloud computing fabric.

Much like past acquisitions of Compellent and EqualLogic, Dell says it is committed to maintaining and growing Force10’s channel program.

Force10’s customers include Web companies, Internet portals, carriers, research laboratories and government organizations.

Force10 was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in San Jose, California, with research and development operations based in Silicon Valley.

Dell says it plans to keep Force10’s existing operations in Chennai, India as it continues to invest in additional engineering and sales capability to grow this business.

The transaction was approved by the board of directors of each company. Additional terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

The transaction remains subject to customary conditions and is expected to close in late summer.

AppSense Enhances Its User Virtualization Platform

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User virtualization technology company AppSense has announced the latest release of the AppSense User Virtualisation Platform (UVP), which features significant enhancements aimed at both improving performance and enabling the next generation of user virtualisation capabilities.

AppSense UVP provides a complete solution to unlock the user layer and allow for IT to manage thousands of users as easily as managing a single user instance, while freeing users to work with the devices and applications that permit them to maximize productivity.

Enhancements of the latest AppSense UVP include a new modular architecture, expanded policy and personalization capabilities, enhanced management and control and end-user experience improvements.

This latest version of the AppSense UVP is released as AppSense Environment Manager version 8.1 and is available through AppSense’s 350+ global network of Certified Solution Partners.

You can also download an evaluation version of the software by visiting the AppSense website.