Robin Wauters

Rackspace Adding Virtualized Service Offering

January 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

As of yesterday, San Antonio-based hosting provider Rackspace is adding a virtualized service offering. Citing increased flexibility, market demand, and a desire to better address customer needs, Rackspace will be offering customers their own, non-shared ESX environments to complement traditional 1×1 server platforms.

Rackspace’s virtualization platform was built on VMware ’s third-generation virtualization software suite, and according to the company “pushes virtualization to the next level in order to support mission-critical, production systems.” The fast-growing hosting provider employs five VMWare Certified Engineers with ten more in training for certification.

“Our product development approach focuses first and foremost on Fanatical Support® readiness,” said John Engates, chief technology officer, Rackspace. “We also ask ‘Is the technology ready to use in a production environment?’ We believe that our new virtualization offering now meets these requirements and pushes the envelope, giving customers a virtualized environment ready for mission-critical applications, supported by our wealth of experience, expertise and Fanatical Support.”

Rackspace’s new virtualization platform will be based on dedicated physical hardware for each customer and will include the option of hybrid virtual and physical hosted environments.

[Source: press release ]

To Virtualize or not to Virtualize (Windows Vista),That’s The Question

January 22, 2008 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

Just in case you haven’t heard, Microsoft flip-flopped its earlier decision not to allow users to run Vista Home Basic and Vista Home Premium as guest operating systems on a virtual machine. Mac users, and virtualization software vendors such as Parallels can rejoice over the news, which has been extensively covered all over the web , with the best commentary coming from:

CNET News , ZDNet blogs, Ars Technica and The Register .

Acquisition Mania: Quest Software Snaps Up Vizioncore

January 22, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Ain’t no stopping the flurry of acquisition spree we’re witnessing lately in the virtualization space. As reported by many media already, Quest Software Inc . has completed its acquisition of Vizioncore Inc. , a provider of disaster recovery and other products for virtual infrastructure management.

Quest already took a controlling stake in the company in 2005, but now moved to snap up the remaining interests. In 2007, Quest had already broadened its virtualization product portfolio by buying Invirtus , a provider of virtual machine optimization, conversion and automation products, and Provision Networks , a provider of virtual client and desktop management solutions.

Vinny Smith, CEO of Quest, said: “We see virtualization as the next great frontier within IT. The completion of the Vizioncore acquisition along with the recent additions of Provision Networks and Invirtus to the Quest family combine to position us as one of the leading pioneers in this emerging market space.”

[Source: press release at TradingMarkets.com ]

Microsoft Betting Big on Virtualization; Acquires Calista Technologies. Citrix Up Next?

January 21, 2008 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

Microsoft plans to announce today what it calls a companywide strategy to accelerate broad adoption of virtualization by its customers. As part of the its new approach, the Redmond-based software giant unveiled a suite of services aimed at reducing the number of servers businesses need to use, separating applications from operating systems, reducing costs and lowering carbon emissions.

Microsoft announced that it competed acquisition of Calista Technologies , a California-based startup that makes computer graphics for virtualized computers, and an expanded partnership with Citrix Systems, a VMware competitor based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Microsoft and Citrix will jointly market services that virtualize computers, operating systems and applications.

Microsoft wouldn’t disclose how much it paid for Calista, but Roger Kay, President of technology research firm Endpoint Technologies Associates, speculates that the price tag was likely south of $100 million. He also says Microsoft may be interested in acquiring Citrix. “Citrix, on its own, has a small market share,” Kay says. “VMware was cleaning its clock.” A Microsoft-Citrix combination could present formidable competition to VMware, he suggests. Buying Citrix, however, would be a significant deal: The company has a market cap of $6.4 billion.

[Source: Forbes ]

Xkoto Going for Continuous Database Availability Through Virtualization

January 21, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Derrick Harris over at GRIDToday writes about Toronto-based startup Xkoto (a transliteration of two Greek words which taken together convey the idea of “out of darkness, out of chaos”), a database load balancing provider and their flagship product Gridscale . In essence, Gridscale is a middleware appliance that sits between the application and the database and allows for multiple active copies of the database to run simultaneously, as opposed to traditional high availability or disaster recovery solutions that normally run in an active-passive model.

Read the article .

PortableApps Following In Thinstall’s Acquisition Footsteps?

January 19, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Joe Foran is speculating a future acquisition of application virtualization provider PortableApps on the Server Virtualization Blog .

“There are, of course, differences, but the overall business models are very similar. PA is an open-source outfit, which makes them a bit more transparent than Thinstall, which has a mix of OSS and proprietary products. Since PA is purely open source, and relies a lot on the community to deliver portable-ized apps, their list of of programs is smaller and limited to open source and other freely-licensed software. Still, with the recent focus on OSS in the enterprise, one can’t help but see the value of a PortableApps version of OpenOffice sitting on a Citrix Server for thin-client and virtual desktop users to access.”

The virtualization space is continuously heating up, and no doubt we will see more acquisitions of these types of technology providers in 2008, but will PortableApps really be the next one? Time will tell.