Virtualization.com

News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing

Robin Wauters

Leostream Launches Connection Broker 6.4

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Leostream Corporation, a developer of virtual hosted desktop software, today announced enhancements to its vendor-neutral connection broker bringing greater support, management flexibility and branding control to hosted virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI).

The Leostream Connection Broker enables companies to deploy enterprise-class hosted VDI easily, while achieving the greatest return-on-investment from existing technology resources.

For IT managers, the Leostream Connection Broker deploys quickly, providing a rich set of policies for exact implementation of business rules for users and machines, while consolidating resources into a “single-pane-of-glass” view. It easily integrates existing management infrastructure, adding only the hosted VDI-specific policies necessary to complement established corporate ones.

No changes to certified systems such as authentication services and SSL VPNs are required.The Leostream Connection Broker is the software management layer that ties desktop images in the data center to appropriate end-user devices – thin clients, laptops, workstations or Web pages – delivering a user experience as good as or superior to that of a conventional desktop. The Leostream Connection Broker is vendor-independent, providing support for VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and Xen.org hypervisors, as well as for hosted applications and sessions, physical desktops, dedicated blades and other systems.

For IT decision makers, the Leostream Connection Broker offers the strategic flexibility to mix and match various solutions within a hosted VDI without fear of vendor lock-in: a key trait as virtualization technologies mature and new vendors continue to enter this rapidly expanding market.

Highlights among the new features of the Leostream Connection Broker 6.4 include:

  • Updated SQL Server Support: The Connection Broker now fully supports external databases stored in Microsoft SQL Server 2008.
  • Optimum Branding and Custom Web Browser Look-and-Feel: Custom logos and favicons can be specified on the Leostream Web Client and Administrator Web interfaces, allowing for seamless appearance and greater branding control. Leostream Connection Broker “skins” provide additional controls to specify colors used on forms, including all text and links.
  • Greater Flexibility for Resource Assignment:
    • Policies: Desktop Filters can now be applied across all pools in a policy or on a pool-by-pool basis, providing fine-grained controls over which desktops are offered to each user.
    • Authentication: Policies can be assigned to users based on advanced LDAP filter expressions, providing policy assignment based on the user’s membership in multiple authentication server groups.
  • More Powerful Monitoring Capabilities: New logging events allow SNMP servers and syslog to be used for tracking pool thresholds and Leostream Connection Broker metrics. System administrators are instantly alerted when pool levels reach lower thresholds.

MokaFive Raises $21 Million From Khosla Ventures, Others

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MokaFive this morning announced that it has raised a $21 million Series C round led by NGEN Partners, with existing investors Khosla Ventures and Highland Capital Partners participating.

The company’s flagship product, MokaFive Suite, enables corporations to lower the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of managing distributed computing endpoints. The MokaFive Suite achieves this by providing the IT organization complete management control in delivering a secure virtual computing environment to any hardware platform — Mac or PC — offering users flexibility and choice of platform. CIOs can now leverage the growing demand by employees seeking to utilize their own computers for both personal and professional use.

Unlike server hosted virtual desktop solutions, such as VDI, MokaFive executes locally on computing end points, hence providing better performance and offline access while reducing the need for large server infrastructures.

(Via TechCrunch)

BLADE Network Technologies Names Former EMC Exec Eric Shefler Senior VP of Worldwide Sales

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BLADE Network Technologies announced the appointment of former EMC executive Eric Shefler as the company’s senior vice president of Worldwide Sales.

Shefler has extensive sales leadership experience in both North America and Europe. Shefler is a native of Canada and will lead BLADE’s global sales organization from Canada.

Shefler joins BLADE after a very distinguished 10-year career at EMC where he was most recently EMEA vice president Enterprise and Global accounts. His responsibilities also included EMC’s EMEA Marketing, Alliances and Networked Storage Sales organizations.

Prior to becoming vice president EMEA for EMC Computer Systems, Eric held a number of increasingly responsible positions at the company, including country manager for Canada and regional vice president for Western and Northern Europe. Prior to that, Eric was regional vice president for Cabletron Systems, responsible for Northeast Regional Sales and Operations.

Virtustream Buys Two Data Centers From NaviSite

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Virtustream, a privately held infrastructure services firm, today announced it has acquired two data centers from NaviSite as part of Virtustream’s data center growth strategy and support for itsxStream hybrid enterprise cloud platform.

Virtustream will continue to service existing customers with expanded data center services, and it will offer capacity within the San Francisco, Calif. and Vienna, Va. facilities to new customers, including those that deploy the xStream cloud platform.  Details about the transaction can be found in a related announcement from NaviSite.

Unveiled earlier in March, xStream is the first enterprise cloud platform that delivers cost and resource savings through flexible internal (private) and external (off-premise) cloud environments-commonly referred to as hybrid cloud environments-through one centralized subscription-based deployment, with guaranteed resources, capacity on demand and industry leading SLAs. xStream provides virtual, elastic and externally managed resources for running applications, and it is based on Virtustream’s long track record of successful enterprise virtual IT deployments.

Virtustream not only incorporates higher levels of security than most clients’ own internal systems, but also addresses end user concerns about availability by building redundancy into xStream deployments-data is replicated in real-time in a second data center located in a separate geography. In the event of an issue, services switch to the second data center with minimal interruption.

Release: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5

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Red Hat today announced the availability of the fifth update to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 platform, adding features designed to operate across physical, virtual and cloud deployments, the update offers enhanced virtualization and interoperability capabilities combined with support for important new hardware platforms.

As with all Red Hat updates, application compatibility and certification with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 platform is fully maintained, meaning the broad portfolio of certified applications for Red Hat Enterprise Linux applies to the new update. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 is available to subscribing customers via Red Hat Network today.

In addition to overall platform enhancements and bug fixes, this update provides support for new platforms being delivered by several Red Hat partners, including AMD, Dell, HP, IBM and Intel. Newly supported platforms include Intel Nehalem EX, AMD Opteron (TM) 6000 Series (formerly codenamed “Magny Cours”) and IBM Power 7. This allows Red Hat customers to take advantage of some of the industry’s most powerful new servers.

In the fourth update to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 platform, delivered in September 2009, Red Hat introduced the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor alongside the Xen hypervisor. Today’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 update provides a number of virtualization enhancements. Support for the large memory systems of new servers allows a larger number of virtual machines to be deployed on each physical server. With greater guest density customers have an opportunity to achieve higher levels of consolidation and reduce costs.

Huge page support is now automatic and extended to virtual guests, improving the performance of memory-intensive applications. Support for Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) offers virtual guests an improved ability to share PCI hardware resources and more efficient access I/O devices. As a result, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is one of the first operating systems designed to be capable of hosting a virtual guest that can saturate a 10 Gigabit Ethernet. Further I/O optimizations, which enable easier device reassignment, can help improve flexibility when migrating virtual guests across physical systems. In combination, these enhancements aim to allow large-scale, I/O bound, enterprise applications to be readily virtualized.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 also offers Microsoft Windows 7 interoperability enhancements and extends Active Directory integration, allowing improved user and group mapping, while simplifying filesystem management across platforms.

Verizon and IBM Team Up, Launch Private Cloud-Based Managed Data Protection Solution

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Verizon and IBM have expanded their relationship to deliver Managed  Data Vault – a new private cloud service that provides secure, quick and reliable daily backups, and fast recovery of enterprise information.

Available from both companies, the new solution is designed to automatically transfer data from a client location to a specially designed off-site data center via Verizon’s secure high-speed private network.  With Managed Data Vault, businesses can realize off-site data protection at on-site speeds while taking advantage of usage-based utility to meet data growth without limits.

Many companies today still transport their backup tapes by truck to an off-site location – a process that has proven to be a slow and unreliable approach to archiving – adding security concerns, time, complexity and cost to the data protection process.

According to industry experts, the global backup and restore market will grow by about 4 percent annually and is currently sized at nearly $3 billion.

Verizon and IBM will leverage each other’s complementary capabilities to deliver the new solution.  Verizon will provide its suite of leading global private data network solutions along with data center expertise, IT consulting services and application-aware capabilities, which give visibility into utilization and latency. IBM will supply backup infrastructure and management capabilities, supported by its extensive information protection expertise and more than 40 years experience in business continuity and resiliency.

Ideal for global enterprises with stringent security and performance requirements, Managed Data Vault is an excellent match for the financial, retail and health care services markets. The service is well-suited to a diverse mixture of applications, databases and operating system (OS) support services and comes complete with IT consulting services support to help organizations manage through this process.

This solution will initially be available to Verizon and IBM clients in the New York City metropolitan area.