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Toon Vanagt

Insight Venture Partners outbids Dell for Quest Software at $25.75 per share in cash

June 21, 2012 by Toon Vanagt Leave a Comment

Quest Software has accepted a sweetened $2.17-billion bid to be acquired by Insight Venture Partners (partnering with Vector Capital).

The buyout group offers stockholders $25.75 per share in cash. This increased purchase price represents a 33-percent premium to Quest’s closing stock price on the day prior to the initial announcement of the Insight Merger Agreement on March 8, 2012. Dell stopped its counter bid at $25.50 last week.

This transaction will be financed through a combination of a $187 million equity commitment from Insight, a $187 million equity commitment from Vector, a rollover of at least 84% of Quest CEO Vinny Smith’s existing shares and approximately $1.2 billion of debt financing commitments from J.P. Morgan Chase Bank N.A., RBC Capital Markets and Barclays Capital.

Quest has been on quite a Virtualization shopping spree itself over the last few years and unexpectedly bought their VKernel competitor in November 2011? Earlier acquisitions to enrich their management products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments incluced Invirtus (2007) and Vizioncore (2008).

Below is our latest video interview with Scott Herold, Director, Virtualization Strategy at Quest Software, taken at VMworld Europe 2011. Prior to Quest, Scott was Vice President for Product Engineering at Invirtus and Director of R&D at Vizioncore.

Filed Under: Featured, Interviews, News, Partnerships, People Tagged With: insight, Insight Venture Partners, quest software, Vector capital, VKernel, vOps

Red Hat Gains Gluster To Better Manage Explosion Of Big Data

October 4, 2011 by Toon Vanagt Leave a Comment

Red Hat, Inc. today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Gluster, Inc., a leading provider of scale-out, open source storage solutions for standardizing the management of unstructured data. With this $136 million cash acquisition, Red Hat tries to define a new baseline for how enterprise IT can better manages the explosion of big data, whether deployed on-premise or spanning into the public cloud. This helps Red Hat expanding into a critical part of enterprise infrastructure, enabling it to deliver open storage solutions that protect customer investments as they approach the new era of computing.

“The explosion of big data and the new paradigm of cloud computing are converging, forcing IT to re-think storage investments that are cost-effective, manageable and scale for the future,” said Brian Stevens, CTO and vice president, Worldwide Engineering at Red Hat. “Our customers are looking for software-based storage solutions that manage their file-based data on-premise, in the cloud and bridging between the two. With unstructured data growth (such as log files, virtual machines, email, audio, video and documents), the 90’s paradigm of forcing everything into expensive, single-system DBMS residing on an internal corporate SAN has become unwieldy and impractical.”. Feel free to dive into the full take from Brian Steven on Gluster.

Founded in 2005, Gluster’s goal was to simplify storage using open source software and commodity hardware. The heart of Gluster is GlusterFS, a software-only, scale-out storage system. It allows enterprises to combine large numbers of commodity storage and compute resources into a high-performance, centrally-managed and globally-accessible storage pool. By combining commodity economics with a scale-out approach, customers can deploy abundant storage without compromising on cost, performance and manageability. Gluster has emerged as an innovative open source leader, relied upon by companies such as Pandora, Box.net and Samsung to efficiently manage large volumes of data.

“We are extremely pleased to be joining Red Hat,” said AB Periasamy, co-founder and CTO of Gluster. “We believe this is a perfect combination of technologies, strategies and cultures and is a great development for our customers, employees, investors and community.  Gluster started off with a goal to be the Red Hat of storage. Now, we are the storage of Red Hat.”
“Enterprises and service providers have struggled to manage their rapidly expanding unstructured data stores with conventional storage systems,” said Henry Baltazar, senior analyst of The 451 Group. “The scale out storage technology and expertise Red Hat is gaining from the acquisition of Gluster will serve as a powerful foundation for future public, private and hybrid storage clouds.”

In September 2008, Red Hat already acquired Qumranet, Inc. including its Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) platform and SolidICE offering, a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), which together presented a comprehensive virtualization platform for enterprise customers. With the addition of Gluster to KVM Red Hat now seems to aim at offering a cloud platform too. Interesting times ahead in the crowded cloud market.

Red Hat has agreed to acquire Gluster, a privately-held company, for approximately $136 million in cash. As part of the transaction, Red Hat will also assume unvested Gluster equity outstanding on the closing date and issue certain equity retention incentives.  The transaction is expected to close in October, subject to customary closing conditions.

Filed Under: Acquisitions, Featured, News Tagged With: big data, cloud, Gluster, GlusterFS, kvm, red hat, storage

New VirtualBox Bible: Thou Shalt Be Named ‘Teleportation’ and Forget About vMotion

November 30, 2009 by Toon Vanagt Leave a Comment

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Sun Microsystems today announced a new version of  Sun VirtualBox, its cross-platform virtualization software.

Their open source hypervisor is being downloaded an impressive 40.000 times a day and remains free for personal use. As a happy VirtualBox user, I also applaud Sun for providing the free bandwidth on that VirtualBox install file, which is between 42 Mb and 76 Mb (depending on the OS).

However, Sun also takes the opportunity to introduce ‘Teleportation’ to the virtualization industry with this VirtualBox 3.1 release and boldly claims the first Cross-Platform Live Migration of Virtual Machines. Sun’s ‘Teleportation’ capability is inspired by a Star Trek classic and allows “running virtual machines to be moved, uninterrupted between disparate hosts – including those on different operating systems, different classes of computer (e.g. server to client) and even different CPUs (e.g. Intel to AMD)…”

Most virtualization professionals have known this sexy feature for years… ever since VMware labeled it vMotion. Live Migration has also been added to Xen quite some time ago. It seems rather depending on your definition of ‘Cross Platform’ whether this really is a first, or rather an enhanced feature of what has been available for other hypervisors on other platforms…

Feel free to use the comment section below to list Sun’s Teleportation features which are not supported by your Virtualization vendor today.

Sun’s press realease continues: “By adding Teleportation and significant performance increases to its already impressive SMP and large workload capabilities, VirtualBox 3.1 now exhibits a full complement of enterprise hypervisor features. Teleportation helps virtual machines achieve high availability. When physical hardware needs to be taken down, the virtual workload can simply be teleported to another physical host. VirtualBox 3.1 also improves execution speed, with optimized memory handling delivering performance increases of 30% over the previous VirtualBox release; network performance, delivering increased throughput, while reducing CPU cycles, through a new high-speed, paravirtualized network driver; and display performance via a new 2D Video Acceleration feature for Windows guests. In addition, VirtualBox 3.1 offers new more powerful snapshotting features that help administrators move a virtual machine back or forward in time to any arbitrary snapshot state.

VirtualBox is open source software and popular: surpassing 20 million downloads worldwide since October 2007, with in excess of 40,000 downloads a day. VirtualBox software is free of charge for personal use. For wider deployments within an organization, enterprise licenses or subscriptions are also available, starting at $30 (USD) per user per year”.

Filed Under: Featured, News

Virtualization Security Startup HyTrust Launches With $5.5 Million In Series A Funding

April 8, 2009 by Toon Vanagt Leave a Comment

HyTrust is entering the virtualization arena today with HyTrust Appliance, which serves as a central point of control, management and visibility for virtualized environments. The company also announced it’s launching with venture capital backing to the tune of $5.5 million, a Series A funding round which was led by Trident Capital and joined by Epic Ventures.

VirtSec nowadays is less about those familiar ‘pure’ security functions like FireWalls (FW) or Intrusion Detection (IDS), but much more about the configuration control and compliance of virtualized environments. HyTrust claims to provide such centralized control, compliance,directory integration and security – requirements that become mission critical as virtual infrastructures scale up and production applications get virtualized. Readers of this blog, probably already know that in addition to immediate cost savings, virtualization enables a more flexible and dynamic infrastructure that can quickly morph to meet changing needs of any organization.

The fresh HyTrust single point of control seems to be competing with Reflex Virtualization Management Center (VMC),  Third Brigade Deep Security and an established suite of products from Catbird V-Security such as VMShield, HypervisorShield and VMPolicyCompliance. However during our interview with Eric Chiu (CEO HyTrust), he was confident that HyTrust is different by “really focusing on the underlying virtual infrastructure itself. HyTrust authenticates traffic across 5 VMware application interfaces and centrally enforces policies through role based access control. HyTrust single point of control and hypervisor security really ensures what is allowed to happen and what not.” Questioned on the introduction of a yet another single point of failure or potential security flaw, Chiu was confident that HyTrust “is even more secure than VMware vCenter, since our appliance runs on a hardened Linux OS, without command line interface and its use is strictly limited to the provided User Interface.” It goes without saying that known malicious penetration attempts, scans and probes were tested too. Apart form the current exclusive support for VMware ESX, Chiu confirmed to Simon Crosby they would come up with support for Citrix XenServer and also Microsoft Hyper-V later this year. “Our go-to-market strategy started with the VMWare enterprise datacenter customers, but we are already in talk with 3 leading Vmware cloud providers.” When it comes to cloud computing,  Chiu sees 2 main scenario’s. First the ‘internal cloud’-approach (aka located in-house, owned & internally managed by an organization), where HyTrust can provide a purpose built lasso around such corporate cloud environment. The second approach involves external cloud providers (located off-premise & managed by a third party provider) and could still make customers achieve compliance in an easy way by implementing Hytrust as a virtual appliance into that cloud offering.

Due to significantly higher rate of change in virtual infrastructure, automated controls are necessary to ensure that security and operational readiness is on par with that of physical environments. In addition, given the spread of virtualization, companies are now being faced with meeting regulatory compliance of their virtual infrastructure. HyTrust allows enterprises to meet these needs and answer the demands of auditors and their solution was created to proactively address the new challenges presented.

Rather than retroactively building necessary safeguards while sensitive data is put at risk, HyTrust, which has three patents pending, allows organizations to build a manageable virtual infrastructure foundation from the ground up. Additionally, to comply with regulations or security standards such as HIPAA, SOX and PCI/DSS, HyTrust gives enterprises the ability to demonstrate that adequate processes and enforcement controls are in place, configuration changes are consistent, and confidential information is secure. The HyTrust Appliance is the only product that addresses virtualization infrastructure control, including all four requirements outlined.

Backed by positive reactions from 12 trial customers, Eric Chiu is confident that he has gotten ‘at the right place, at the right time with the right solution’.

Pricing for the HyTrust Appliance (Enterprise Edition) is based on the number of protected VMware ESX hosts (on a per CPU/socket basis) and HyTrust Appliance license. Protection license for a 2 CPU VMware ESX host is $1,000; the HyTrust virtual appliance is $3,000; and the physical appliance is $7,500. Maintenance and support is charged on 25% of the annual license basis. HyTrust will soon make available the new HyTrust Appliance: Community Edition —a free virtual appliance available for download via the Web. Due out at the end of April, Community will allow protection for up to 3 hosts and offers an excellent way for smaller companies to bring automated virtualization best practices into their environments. HyTrust launched with a direct customer approach, but was already contacted by integrators and resellers eager to distribute licenses. Hytrust is expected to develop such hybrid distribution model in the third quarter of 2009.

Next to its venture capital investors, HyTrust is launching with an impressive list of technology partners, including VMware, Symantec, Cisco Systems and Citrix Systems.

Filed Under: Featured, Funding Tagged With: Epic Ventures, hytrust, hytrust appliance, HyTrust Appliance Enterprise Edition, Trident Capital, virtual appliance, virtualisation, virtualization

Video: vFace, H2A conversions or how to virtualize yourself with EyeBcom

March 19, 2009 by Toon Vanagt 1 Comment

This post is slightly off our usual virtualization track, as it dwells into the emerging H2A conversion industry (Human-To-Avatar). Last week I attended the excellent Plugg event on innovation and entrepreneurship in Brussels  (which happens to be organized by our editor-in-chief Robin Wauters). Now that his annual event is over, you can enjoy more frequent posts over here again. Robin pointed me to a mysterious booth on his exhibition floor. Dirk Callaerts, the president of Eyetronics gave me a short explanation of their amazing virtualization technology. I even got myself virtualized in a similar way as Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Angelina Jolie and Nicole Kidman. Major movie stars use these scans to get their face applied to stand-ins and stunt men. But also because the insurance companies require them to get virtualized, so that expensive movies can be finished, in the unfortunate event something happens to the leading actors.

For those who do not live on a film set, there are many application for this technology too. Think about the gaming industry or online communities. This seems a fun booth to add to the next VMworld exhibitor floor, so scanned virtualization gurus can boost the likeliness of their avatar in the ‘virtual pavilion’ or on their blog. Another market for these scans is to produce miniature physical copies of your virtual self. V2P anybody?. The cosmetics industry already knows vanity is a great revenue driver…

Now that I got my face virtualized, I am able to send stand-ins for those dangerous tech interviews in the heated hypervisor battle fields around the world 🙂

Filed Under: Interviews, News, Videos Tagged With: avatar, Dirk Callaerts, EyeBcom, Eyetronics, face virtualization, h2a, human-to-avatar, Plugg, v2p, vFace, virtualisation, virtualization

Video: Interview Mike Neil, General Manager for Virtualization – Microsoft (VMworld 2008)

February 24, 2009 by Toon Vanagt Leave a Comment

During this interview at the Microsoft booth at VMworld2008 in Las Vegas, Virtualization veteran Mike Neil recalls his past at Connectix, and his involvement with Virtual PC & Virtual Server and more recently his role in the Hyper-V launch. He discussed planned features such as Hyper-V live migration, VM standards and their planned support of the OVF-format.

Mike also explains why the VM formats are so similar between the Xen & Hyper-V-environment. These architectures were both designed with a thin hypervisor in mind, while using the drivers of the parent partition ecosystem (resp. Xen/Linux; HyperV/Windows). A similar hypervisor architecture is used by Sun with Solaris now. VMware on the contrary has always chosen to build the drivers into the larger ESX hypervisor.

Mike looks forward to VDI through RDP & the Microsoft partnership with Citrix, but also mentions the Calista acquisition and the new protocols this add to their VDI stack.

He firmly declines the rumors on an intensified Citrix – Microsoft relationship and gives his point of view on the industry challenge for virtualization licensing metrics (usage based, physical server based).

He also comments on the Vworld keynotes by VMware executives.
If you are in for a little fun,  you might want to watch this video to the very end to meet Virtual Mike after the credits.

Filed Under: News

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