Robin Wauters

Now That Hyper9 Is Out Of Stealth, Names Get Named

July 16, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Hyper9, formerly known as InovaWave, has only recently come out of stealth mode, and is set to release its first product next September. Today, the company sent word out about its two ‘key product architects’. Using verbs like ‘unveiled’ and ‘revealed’, the names put forward are those of Jim Snyder and Brian Baker.

Prior to Hyper9, Jim Snyder created search-oriented intellectual property and led development of the search platform at 21st Century Technologies. He also created the analytics/reporting platform at Core Metrics and the web-based configuration platform at Trilogy, where he served as principal architect.

Brian Baker is being called a seasoned entrepreneur, carrying more than 20 years of experience creating and delivering enterprise infrastructure solutions. At Hyper9, Baker focuses on the data collection, aggregation and management activities needed to fuel its search engine. Previously, Baker served as a principal engineer at United Devices, and prior to that, Baker founded Journee Software, a real-time enterprise data hub solution which was acquired by Initiate Systems.

Microsoft To Release System Center VMM 2008 Soon

July 16, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Diane Prescott, Product Manager, System Center at Microsoft posted an article on the official SC blog today sharing that the launch of the next version of Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) is imminent, specifically in Q4 2008. The beta was formally introduced by the company end of April 2008.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 will be available as a stand-alone product, while the current version only comes bundled with Server Management Suite Enterprise. Prescott also said something about the pricing structure:

“[SCVMM 2008] will follow the licensing model set forward by the SMSE. It will be sold as a per-device enterprise server management license (ML) and will include rights to the management server. Because we’ll be selling the VMM 2008 enterprise server ML on a per-device basis, which makes sense in the context of virtualization, we’ll be targeting a price which will be approximately 10-15% less than the SMSE at that time it’s generally available. Additionally, because of the new value and functionality being added to the various System Center offerings over the next year, including VMM, Operations Manager and Configuration Manager, we will be implementing a price increase to the SMSE of approximately 10-15% in the same time frame. We’re still working on the specifics regarding the pricing and licensing of VMM 2008 and the SMSE and we’ll have further details to share in early August.”

Next to support for Hyper-V, SCVMM 2008 will also offer management capabilities for VMware ESX environments, allbeit through VirtualCenter.

Microsoft

New Linux Kernel: More Support for Virtualization

July 16, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Nearly three months in the making, the new Linux kernel (version 2.6.26) announced by Linus Torvalds through a mailing list, boasts read-only bind mounts, “big-iron” KVM ports, USB webcam support, 802.11s mesh WiFi, built-in support for remote kernel debugging, and a host of embedded architecture improvements, among other enhancements.

Among the most significant improvements are changes to the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization software, first included in the kernel in February of last year. KVM normally uses the technique of full virtualization, which simulates all the underlying hardware necessary to run a given client system, with the support of virtualization technologies built into AMD and Intel chips. The latest kernel update adds limited support for paravirtualization, a technique that only partially virtualizes the hardware in order to improve performance.

KVM has also, for the first time, been ported to non-x86 hardware platforms Intel IA64 and IBM PPC and S/390, developers said.

[Source: ZDNet UK]

Leostream Puts Jack Hembrough In Charge Of Sales and Marketing

July 16, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Leostream, the young hosted desktop connection broker that recently announced it had raised $3 million in Series A funding, today announced it has appointed Jack Hembrough to the position of Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing. Hembrough has spent over 20 years in the hardware and software business, creating successful start-ups and running profitable businesses.

Hembrough comes to Leostream from Application Security, a venture-backed software security company, where he served from its inception as President, CEO, and later as Chairman of the Board, growing the company to over $20 million in annual sales.

Prior to joining Application Security, Hembrough was Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales for Authentica, and as the fourteenth employee at Raptor systems, Hembrough was part of a highly successful IPO, subsequently leading Raptor’s expansion as Vice President and General Manager of the European operation, based in Amsterdam.

Additionally, he has held senior executive positions in sales and management at Information Resource Engineering (now SafeNet), and Motorola Corporation.

[Source: MarketWatch]

VMware Formally Releases ThinApp 4.0 Into The Wild

July 16, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Only a few days later than anticipated, VMware has released ThinApp 4.0, its first application virtualization solution (formerly called Project North Star) after snapping up Thinstall earlier this year.

ThinApp 4.0 (build 2200) is the next major release of the former Thinstall solution called Application Virtualization Suite 3.2, and has certain new features, such as:

Application Sync: enables you to deploy application updates. Application Sync automatically checks for and installs updates to your packaged applications. Updates might include changes such as a new version, service pack updates, or configuration changes in the package.ini file
Application Link: connects deployed applications. For example, you can establish a relationship between a deployed instance of Microsoft Office 2003 and a new Microsoft Office plug-in. Application Link enables you to establish a link between applications without having to encapsulate them into the same executable package

A trial download is available here.

ThinApp comes bundled with VMware Workstation under the name ThinApp Suite. The company offers a starting package for 50 concurrent clients at $6,050 (including a 12×5 Gold Support yearly subscription), with additional clients starting at $47.19 (including a 12×5 Gold Support yearly subscription).

VMware

Citrix Aims To Make Creation of Hypervisor-Independent Application Workloads Easier with Project Kensho

July 15, 2008 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

Citrix today announced “Project Kensho,” which will deliver Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) tools that allow independent software vendors (ISVs) and enterprise IT managers to easily create hypervisor-independent, portable enterprise application workloads. These tools will allow application workloads to be imported and run across Citrix XenServer, Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and VMware ESX environments.

Citrix boasts this implementation will solve a multitude of interoperability issues between virtualization platforms while allowing automated provisioning and management of applications, rather than just virtual machines. Users will be able to easily install and use any OVF packaged application workload regardless of which virtualization platform they use – whether it be XenServer, Hyper-V, or ESX.

“XenServer delivers the benefits of fast, free, ubiquitous and compatible virtualization, whether from Citrix, Microsoft or VMware,” said Simon Crosby, CTO of the Virtualization and Management Division, Citrix Systems. “Project Kensho highlights the Citrix commitment to interoperability for virtualization, while maximizing price/performance and richness of features at the virtual infrastructure level.”

The OVF specification was originally co-authored by Citrix and VMware, with contributions from Dell, HP, IBM and Microsoft. The companies then jointly submitted the draft to the DMTF standardization process.

Project Kensho will support the vision of the Citrix Delivery Center product family, helping customers transform static datacenters into dynamic “delivery centers” for the best performance, security, cost savings and business agility. The tools developed through Project Kensho will be integrated into Citrix Workflow Studio based orchestrations, for example, to provide an automated, environment for managing the import and export of applications from any major virtualization platform.

A technical preview of Project Kensho tools is expected to be available for free download in September 2008.