Robin Wauters

Funding For CiRBA and Virtual Iron, Dell Completes Acquisition of EqualLogic

January 29, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

More interesting news today:

CiRBA Raises $12 Million With Sigma Partners

CiRBA Inc., today announced that it has raised $12 million in its second round of institutional funding led by Sigma Partners . Existing investors including Edgestone Capital Partners and others also participated in the round. The funding will enable CiRBA to further accelerate growth on a global scale, with investments in sales, marketing and product development.

Virtual Iron Capitalizes on Strong Market Momentum, Raises $20 Million in New Equity Financing

Virtual Iron Software, a provider of enterprise server virtualization software, today announced that it has secured $20 million in new venture equity financing. The funding, provided at an increased valuation, will be used to accelerate product development and expand global sales, marketing and distribution efforts. The investment brings Virtual Iron’s total venture funding to $65 million in invested equity capital and includes Highland Capital Partners, Matrix Partners, Goldman Sachs, Intel Capital and SAP Ventures.

Dell Completes EqualLogic Acquisition

Today Dell completed the EqualLogic acquisition, a leading provider of high-performance storage area network (SAN) solutions designed for virtualization and ease-of-use. The purchase extends Dell’s leadership in simplifying IT for customers.

“Customers face extreme challenges with data growth. Storage solutions that use existing infrastructure, install in minutes not days, manage themselves, can grow easily as needs increase and plug into the virtualized IT ecosystem will help businesses with their storage needs. EqualLogic provides these storage solutions and that’s the incredible value that Dell will now be able to deliver to our customers. With Dell’s PartnerDirect channel, we will unleash the power of iSCSI and virtualization to redefine the economics of storing and processing data.”

VMWare Misses Analysts’ Estimates: While Revenues Go Up, Stock Goes Down

January 29, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Yesterday, VMware reported quarterly revenue that fell short of Wall Street expectations and forecast a slowdown in sales growth, sending its shares down more than 26 %.

The highlights from the official announcement :

Total revenues for the fourth quarter were $412 million, an increase of 80% compared to the year-ago quarter.

GAAP operating income for the fourth quarter was $76 million compared to $37 million in the fourth quarter of 2006. Non-GAAP operating income was $108 million, representing 26% of fourth-quarter revenues and an increase of 72% over the year-ago quarter.

GAAP net income for the quarter was $78 million, or $0.19 per diluted share, compared to $31 million, or $0.09 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Non-GAAP net income for the quarter was $103 million, or $0.26 per diluted share. GAAP and non-GAAP net income for the fourth quarter of 2007 include a $0.01 per diluted share benefit from a change in tax rate.

Total revenues for the full fiscal year 2007 were $1.33 billion, an increase of 88% compared to 2006.

GAAP operating income for the full fiscal year 2007 was $235 million compared to $121 million in 2006. Non-GAAP operating income for the year was $338 million, representing 26% of full-year revenues and an increase of 77% over 2006.

GAAP net income for the year was $218 million or $0.61 per diluted share, compared to $86 million, or $0.26 per diluted share, in 2006. Non-GAAP net income was $295 million or $0.82 per diluted share.

VMware shares had quadrupled in value after an August initial public offering, but have dropped since November.

The company on Monday forecast revenue growth of 50 percent in 2008, versus 88 percent in 2007. That would suggest revenue of $2 billion, shy of Wall Street targets.

“If you miss your numbers in just your second quarter after going public that suggests the stock was overhyped,” said Trip Chowdhry, an analyst at Global Equities Research.

According to the Server Virtualization Blog , the company’s CEO Diane Greene maintained that the company will not lower product pricing in 2008. “We do think we can maintain our pricing,” Greene said on an earnings call with investors. “We anticipate continuing our pricing over the course of the year.”

Internal Memo From VMWare Staff Criticizes Microsoft And Questions Its Partnership With Citrix

January 28, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

When Microsoft issued a long press release last week on its ‘Vision and Strategy to Accelerate Virtualization Adoption ‘, the internal sales channel at VMWare apparently got a memo downplaying MSFT’s announcements and instructing their commercial team to further question the Microsoft-Citrix partnership and its ability to survive Redmond’s plans with virtualization in front of their clients.

Here are some of the quotes a blogger reposted from an obtained copy of the memo (emphasis ours)

…Microsoft announced a hodge-podge of items related to virtualization in a desperate attempt to make it look like it had a new, coherent vision and strategy for virtualization…

…MSFT includes many recycled items in the announcement to make it look substantive. In actuality, they are just rehashes of old items. Microsoft is not delivering anything new, substituting marketing in place of real substance…

…The new items are a collection of loosely connected pieces thrown together to look like a coherent virtualization plan. Microsoft is still talking vision…

…Microsoft’s announcement introduces new conflicts into the Microsoft-Citrix business partnership and begs the question “When will Microsoft dump Citrix and take all of the business for itself?” Is this just a partnership of convenience for Microsoft until it ships its own product?…

…Tell your prospects that are considering Citrix, that MSFT will soon cut Citrix out of the loop…and Citrix is allowing it to happen…

…New Conflict #1: Microsoft System Center or Citrix XenServer for Management…This declaration hits at the heart of Citrix’s stated business model for virtualization – to generate revenue from the management of Windows VMs with Citrix XenCenter. System Center and XenCenter are clearly competitors…

…New Conflict #2: Calista acquisition creates more direct competition with Citrix SpeedScreen (ICA)..This acquisition strikes at Citrix’s core business since ICA is Citrix’s key differentiator and competes with RDP…

Microsoft and Citrix are longtime virtualization partners, but VMware is using Microsoft’s own advances in the market to argue that the two companies are also becoming bigger competitors with each other — despite their recently announced plan to develop interoperability between Citrix XenServer and Windows Server 2008. As Microsoft prepares to launch Windows Server 2008 — featuring the Hyper-V hypervisor — next month, the battle for VMware’s server virtualization market share lead should grow even more intense. Which makes it all more interesting for us, of course 🙂

Call for Papers on Virtualization in High-Performance Cluster

January 26, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

The 3rd Workshop on Virtualization in High-Performance Cluster and Grid Computing (VHPC’08) is calling for papers. This prestigious workshop will be held as part of Euro-Par 2008, at Las Palmas de Gran Canaria on the Canary Island in Spain from August 26 to 29, 2008

Focus on Virtual machine monitors (VMMs)

VMMs are reaching wide-spread adoption in a variety of operating systems as well as scientific educational and operational usage areas. With their low overhead, hypervisors allow for concurrently running large numbers of virtual machines, providing each encapsulation, isolation and in the case of Xen, network-wide CPU migratability. VMMs offer a network-wide abstraction layer of individual machine resources to OS environments, thereby opening whole new cluster-and grid high-performance computing (HPC) architectures and HPC services options. With VMMs finding applications in HPC environments, these workshops aim to bring together researchers and practitioners active on virtualization in distributed and high-performance cluster and grid computing environments. The workshops will be one day in length, composed of 20 min paper presentations, each followed by 10 min discussion sections. Presentations may be accompanied with interactive demonstrations and the accepted papers will be published in the Springer LNCS series. The workshop will be chaired by Michael Alexander (WU in Vienna) and Stephen Childs (co-chair), Trinity College in Dublin and will end with a 30 minute panel discussion by the presenters.

Topics include the following subject matters:

Virtualization in cluster and grid environments

Workload characterizations for VM-based clusters

Virtualization in cluster and grid environments
Workload characterizations for VM-based clusters
VM cluster and grid architectures
Cluster reliability, fault-tolerance, and security
Compute job entry and scheduling
Compute workload load leveling
Cluster and grid filesystems for VMs
VMMs, VMs and QoS guarantees
Research and education use cases
VM cluster distribution algorithms
MPI, PVM on virtual machines
System sizing
Hardware support for virtualization
High-speed interconnects in hypervisors
Hypervisor extensions and utilities for cluster and grid computing
Network architectures for VM-based clusters
VMMs/Hypervisors on large SMP machines
Performance models
Performance management and tuning hosts and guest VMs
Power considerations
VMM performance tuning on various load types
Xen/other VMM cluster/grid tools
High-speed Device access from VMs
Management, deployment of clusters and grid environments with VMs
Information systems for virtualized clusters
Management of system images for virtual machines
Integration with relevant standards e.g. CIM, GLUE, OGF, etc.

Saugatuck Technologies on ‘The Many Faces of Virtualization’

January 24, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Consulting and research firm Saugatuck Technologies published a report last December dubbed ‘The Many Faces of Virtualization – Understanding a New IT Reality ‘, proclaiming that virtualization will have the single largest effect on IT budgets for hardware and support over the next three years and that by 2010, the 3 main vendors (VMWare, Cisco & Citrix / XenSource) will dominate the IT virtualization industry.

Another important finding of the study is that all facets of IT virtualization will see substantial enhancements in functionality and performance, with the most significant enhancements being in microprocessors, hypervisors and operating systems.

The report notes that the general concept of virtualization is usually equated with the specifics of server virtualization, since server and mainframe virtualization have been used in the IT world for decades. But it’s important to note that virtualization can be applied to all IT resources, including servers, storage, networks, and desktops.

“This study is the first attempt that we’ve seen to use real-world expertise and practicality to classify and explain the types and effects of IT virtualisation, in terms that both user and vendor executives can understand, and can profit from,” said Saugatuck founder and CEO Bill McNee. “This is a solid foundation from which executives can educate themselves, and begin planning more effective management of virtualisation.”

To Be Followed: ivi, A Java Virtual Interface

January 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

From the lostcreations team comes:

ivi, which stands for Java Virtual Interface. ivi is currently the beginnings of a single GUI application that allows an IT administrator to manage a VMware virtual infrastructure, Xen servers, KVM boxes, and even OpenVZ systems all from one interface. ivi is currently very alpha and can only connect to VMware VI3 and Xen systems. The l o s t c r e a t i o n s blog will chart the progress of ivi.

[Source: Server Virtualization Blog ]