Robin Wauters

Force10 Networks Unveils Exascale E-Series Switch / Router Family

March 23, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Force10 Networks today introduced the ExaScale E-Series family of switch/routers to meet the requirements of today’s virtualized data center and cloud computing environments. As enterprises transition to virtualized data centers and adopt cloud-based services, the network is increasingly required to be more dynamic and responsive to changing resource demands. The Force10 ExaScale E-Series is designed to deliver the performance, availability, resiliency and flexibility essential to power these new dynamic environments while significantly lowering total operating and management costs.

With support for the industry’s leading line-rate 10 Gigabit Ethernet densities, the Force10 ExaScale E-Series reduces capital costs and simplifies management to reduce ongoing operational expenses.

The ExaScale E-Series also extends Force10’s history of enabling cost-effective network ownership with an energy-saving, eco-efficient power and cooling design that provides the industry’s lowest power consumption per line-rate port. Patent-protected advances in backplane and chip design as well as custom designed power components reduce overall system power consumption and lower per port consumption by as much as 70 percent versus comparable competitive platforms.

Enabling Force10’s Virtualization Framework to Fuel Competitive Advantage
The ExaScale E-Series is the foundation for Force10’s Virtualization Framework and provides the multi-terabit platform required to power advanced data centers and cloud computing environments. As budgets have come under pressure, enterprises are turning to virtualization technologies that increase business critical application availability while lowering the total cost of IT infrastructure ownership.

Utilizing the management flexibility of the ExaScale E-Series, Force10’s virtual technology suite, including VirtualScale, VirtualControl and VirtualView, enterprises and service providers can build, manage and monitor network and application performance as well as automate business processes. These technologies enable organizations to build more agile virtualized environments that can dynamically respond to changing business requirements, increasing process efficiencies and fueling a sustainable competitive advantage.

The Force10 Virtualization Framework utilizes open, standards-based data center automation and orchestration technology to promote greater efficiency and agility within the data center. By integrating standards-based technology for real-time network traffic analysis and management, enterprises can maximize existing networking resources while building in the flexibility they require to rapidly respond to changing application requirements.

Force10 also partners with leading vendors to provide complete solutions that optimize data center infrastructure. For additional information on the Force10 data center partner ecosystem, please visit the company’s Technology Alliance Partner Program web page, including its computing alliance with IBM.

The ExaScale E-Series delivers an industry-leading total throughput of more than two billion packets per second across a switching fabric capacity of up to 3.5 Tbps or 250 Gbps full duplex per slot. Utilizing the capacity of the switching fabric, the ExaScale E-Series delivers continuous non-blocking, line-rate throughput that eliminates network bottlenecks, regardless of packet size or enabled features.

Leading Technology for Next Generation Environments
The Force10 ExaScale E-Series is purpose-built for demanding network environments, including:

Virtualized data center and cloud computing networks with multiple switching or routing domains in local or geographically disparate environments
High-performance computing networks with non-blocking and deterministic management and storage I/O requirements
High-density 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching and routing in high-performance Layer 2 and IP core or aggregation networks

The ExaScale E-Series also provides the key technologies and functionality to facilitate seamless interoperability for tomorrow’s converged fabric and MPLS-ready networks, including:

IPv4 unicast and multicast routing for advanced services networks
IPv6 ready for native and dual stack next-generation IP networks
MPLS ready with P router and VPN functionality
40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet ready

The half-rack Force10 ExaScale E1200i chassis bundle starts at $89,000 and is available today.

Network Instruments Upgrades Observer Monitoring Platform, Supports Analysis Of Virtualized Environments

March 23, 2009 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Network Instruments announced today that its Observer monitoring platform now provides complete visibility and in-depth analysis of application performance and traffic within both virtualized and physical environments. The Observer platform is the first analysis solution to close this visibility gap and extend the power of real-time and retrospective network analysis to virtualized environments.

Observer’s expanded virtual monitoring capabilities go beyond traditional analysis tools which provide limited views of virtualized networks. Network teams using Observer can now access a complete, integrated view of virtual traffic traversing physical networks, between different virtual machine hosts, and between virtual machines on the same host. Further, all virtual traffic and communications flowing within the virtual machine host can be copied and sent to a GigaStor appliance for back-in-time analysis or the Observer Reporting Server for enterprise-wide performance reports.

Complete Performance Tracking
Central to any performance monitoring effort is the ability to monitor seamlessly across physical and virtualized environments. Using the Observer platform, organizations obtain enterprise-wide views of virtualized resources and performance within virtualized and physical environments.

Availability
The Network Instruments Virtual TAP is a key component within the expanded Observer virtualized offering. To obtain this functionality, a user installs a Network Instruments software probe into their VM host environment, where they can copy and send the data to their retrospective analysis device, analyzer console, or a third-party purpose-built device. Current maintenance customers gain these capabilities at no charge.

Virtualization 3.0 According To Pioneer Kevin Lawton

March 20, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

A must-read article from Kevin Lawton, self-proclaimed “pioneer in x86 virtualization, serial entrepreneur, business and technology visionary, prolific idea creator, news and business book junkie”.

The full article is here, but we give you an excerpt:

To get to where virtualization needs to go, we need to be able to look at virtualization as a fabric, stretching or overlaying numerous physical sites. And Cloud Computing will absolutely exacerbate this need. Many things that we’ve contemplated on a small scale (e.g. load balancing, power management, down-time maintenance), need to be brought to a larger context of a virtualization fabric stretching across physical sites. Virtualization needs to stretch to the cloud. To be sure, there are a number of issues to solve to make this happen, including networking and storage continuity. But I’d like to present a part of this next evolutionary step, virtualization 3.0, which is critical to its success yet unanswered elsewhere to my knowledge.

Memory density in servers continues to go up following its own exponential path. And as virtualization is used for increasingly higher-end workloads, the size of per-VM memory will continue to rise. Just imagine if you piled up all the RAM from all of your data centers, in one spot! Yet, to enable a fluid and dynamic virtualization 3.0 fabric, we need to rapidly allow all kinds of intra and inter-site VM migrations to occur, often driven automatically. That requires a whole new approach to how we manage VM memory; huge volumes of it effectively need to be transported rapidly. On the storage front, there are a number of technologies afoot, which are enablers of virtualization 3.0. But, I’ve been working for some time on concepts for making VM memory a 1st class citizen of the virtualization 3.0 vision.

Full post here.

VKernel Releases Another Free Tool, SnapshotMyVM

March 20, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VKernel has released another free tool, SnapshotMyVM, a utility that makes it extremely easy to quickly document and inventory all of your VMs.

SnapshotMyVM automates the time-consuming documentation process, collects dozens of important VM attributes, and creates detailed reports. You can export your documentation to XML, so that you can save it, edit it, archive it, and share it with others.

Here’s a sampling of the information you can get with SnapshotMyVM:

VM name
Guest operating system
Host hardware type, manufacturer, and version
VM resource (CPU, memory, storage, network) configuration
VM resource utilization statistics (saves a week of historical data)

Video:

Dennis Hoffman Joins Neocleus’ Board of Directors

March 20, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Neocleus today announced that Dennis Hoffman has joined the Neocleus Board of Directors.

Hoffman has worked in both entrepreneurial and general management capacities at numerous information technology companies and is an executive at EMC Corporation where he leads the company’s global sales engineering organization.

Hoffman’s leadership experience spans more than 20 years in the high technology industry. He boasts a strong track record of building and growing companies and motivating teams. He has successfully cultivated strong client and investor relationships. In his most recent role he was responsible for the strategy development, execution and financial performance of RSA’s Data Security business unit, as well as strategic planning, strategic partnerships and business development for the greater RSA Division.

“The client computing environment has become increasingly complex to manage and secure,” said Dennis Hoffman, vice president and general manager, EMC. “Neocleus’ innovative approach in applying client-hosted virtualization to address IT hassles is at the forefront of the software industry. I look forward to working with the company to help them expand their industry leadership.”

Before starting his role at RSA, Hoffman led the team at EMC that developed and initiated the execution of the company’s information security strategy. In his prior position at the company he led product marketing for EMC Software Group. Previously, he served as CEO and co-founder of Storigen Systems, a pioneering developer of distributed storage networking software that was acquired by EMC in October 2003. Hoffman also spent six years at Avid Technology, where he was responsible for the marketing and business development of its storage and networking products. He has held strategy consulting and engineering roles at companies including Marakon Associates, Eastman Kodak and Polaroid Corporation. Hoffman received an MBA from Harvard University and holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering.