Virtualization.com
News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing
Well spotted by Kevin Tofel: Amazon has knocked of $20 of the price of VMware Fusion, which brings the price down to $59.99 from the $79.99 list price. On top of that is a $20 mail-in rebate which gets the software for $39.99, free shipping included. Pretty hot deal, indeed.
Seattle-based virtualization startup Illumita has changed its name to Skytap and unveiled details around its first product, dubbed Skytap Virtual Lab. The company was started as a project by University of Washington computer scientists.
Skytap raised $6 million in Series A funding last summer from Madrona Venture Group, Ignition Partners, Bezos Expeditions and WRF Capital, and is now also announcing Scott Roza as CEO.
Roza, who joined the company earlier this year after stints at Hewlett Packard, iConclude and ADIC, said he was excited to work with some of the former board members from iConclude on “a product that sits at the crossroads of three hot areas of technology: virtualization, cloud computing and software as a service”.
Skytap Virtual Lab is a virtual lab automation solution available as a service over the Web. It enables application development and test teams to provision lab infrastructure on demand (including servers, software, networking and storage) and utilize a powerful virtual lab management application to automate the set-up, testing and tear down of complex, multi-tiered environments. It also gives distributed teams the capability to collaborate and rapidly resolve software defects using a virtual lab and virtual project environment.
“Skytap provides customers with cloud-based services that enable them to capitalize on the wave of virtualization technology sweeping the industry,” said Scott Roza, chief executive officer of Skytap. “Cloud computing is gaining traction because a growing percentage of companies are demanding solutions that deliver value quickly, scale with business need, and don’t have the risk of an in-house implementation. Skytap’s Virtual Lab, which combines cloud-based virtualized infrastructure with an industry leading lab automation application, has tremendous potential to improve the timely delivery of quality applications to the business while increasing lab efficiency and lowering cost.”
[Source: Seattlepi.com]
In a piece on Channel Insider, Steve Dallman, Channel Chief at Intel, says he and the company’s channel partners are seeing incredible growth in the server market, despite – and even thanks to – the increasing use of virtualization technology which should help reduce the number of servers.
“You would think with virtualization that you’d see fewer servers, but that’s not happening. The need for servers and server capacity is phenomenally large,” especially from the SMB (small and midsize business) market, Dallman said. “SMBs just don’t need to consolidate server farms,” he added.
Research firm Access Markets International said in January that global SMB server spending will reach $19.8 billion in 2008, a double-digit growth over 2007. While growth in the server space is still accelerating, Dallman said without virtualization, the growth in the space might be out of control.
“All virtualization is going to do is to moderate the growth in the server space to a level that’s manageable for both vendors and partners”, he said.
[Source: Channel Insider]
Parallels has released Parallels Server beta 3. The update includes an integrated toolset that includes Parallels Tools, Parallels Image Tool and Parallels Transporter (a P2V and V2V migration tool) to the hypervisor solution for server virtualization.
Built on Parallels’ bare metal hypervisor architecture and award-winning hypervisor-based virtualization technology, Parallels Server for Mac enables organizations to:
- Standardize server hardware platforms
- Effectively consolidate server resources
- Consolidate and support legacy OSes and applications
- Streamline server and application deployment, maintenance and management
- Simplify software testing and development
- Optimize server and application availability
IBM recently announced a breakthrough in safeguarding virtual server environments and introduced new software to help businesses better manage risk. The company said the advances can provide businesses with substantial improvements in securing information, applications, and IT infrastructures around the globe.
IBM, the company that pioneered the concept of virtualization with its mainframe systems, is tackling the security issue with Project PHANTOM, an initiative that’s so secret that IBM won’t even say what the name means. This is part of the announcement that was made:
IBM’s PHANTOM initiative aims to create virtualization security technology to efficiently monitor and disrupt malicious communications between virtual machines without being compromised. In addition, full visibility of virtual hardware resources would allow PHANTOM to monitor the execution state of virtual machines, protecting them against both known and unknown threats before they occur. It is also designed to increase the security posture of the hypervisor — a critical point of vulnerability; because once an attacker gains control of the hypervisor, they gain control of all of the machines running on the virtualized platform. For the first time, the hypervisor — the gateway to the virtualized world and all that lays above it — can be locked down.
Ars Technica had a call with the people at IBM. The company was still not willing to talk in any detail about it, but I did learn some important information that answers the questions I raised in my original post, which I’ve included below in its own section.
For starters, PHANTOM is not one particular technology, but rather a widespread research initiative within IBM that will eventually result in a range of products, services, best practices whitepapers, etc.. The initiative was started two years ago as a collaboration among various hardware and software groups within IBM, and has since expanded to embrace some third parties whose identities IBM isn’t revealing just yet. The internal groups involved in the initiative include IBM’s X-Force Threat Analysis Service (a division of IBM’s Internet Security Systems), IBM Watson research center, and the server platform groups behind the z- and p-series servers, among others.
IBM stressed to me that the initiative will produce results for a wide variety of hardware/software combinations, including x86 systems, Windows, Linux, POWER, and others. So the scope of PHANTOM, broadly defined, includes all virtualization platforms, products, and services.
Clearly, whatever else it is, PHANTOM is also extremely ambitious. It’s also still mostly under wraps, so we’ll have to wait for more announcements before giving further details.
If you have a virtualization success story you would like to share, VMware issued a call for presentations today for the upcoming VMworld 2008.
“Most VMworld attendees have some experience with virtualization and they are eager for insights that go beyond the consolidation of non-mission critical workloads. Are you using virtual machines to build a better disaster recovery solution? Have you virtualized a critical enterprise system? Have you found a creative solution how to charge back business users for virtual machine usage? Have you developed a process for planning VM capacity? Tell your peers about it!
Session proposals should provide an in-depth explanation of the technology and business challenges you have resolved, as well as a description of your architecture – hardware, software and networking setup of your solution. Advice, key success factors, data points and lessons learned while solving technical, organizational and process challenges related to virtualization deployment are always appreciated by your peers.”
If selected to present, you’ll receive a full conference pass for four days, access to all VMworld sessions and hands-on labs, and hotel accommodations for one night.