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VMware Buys Blue Lane (Updated)

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VMware went shopping and came back home with Cupertino-based Blue Lane Technologies. Despite the lack of press releases, this transaction was confirmed by Mary Ann Gallo, VMware’s head of Global Public Relations. Unfortunately she could not disclose the financial details.

Update: according to Brenon Daly from The 451 Group, the price was around $15 million, and Blue Lane was in search for a buyer since last Summer because of lack of sufficient capital. He also mentions Blue Lane raised “some $18.4m in two rounds of funding”, but our information keeps it at $13.4m.

The acquired company provides solutions that secure virtual and physical data centers. Its solution secures servers and VMs by controlled code execution in the network and taking appropriate countermeasures against traffic aimed at known software vulnerabilities (without signatures).

Blue Lane was quite silent after releasing VirtualShield 4.2 last April. We interviewed Greg Ness, former VP of Marketing with Blue Lane (and avid blogger) and Thierry Evangelista, Technical Director Europe for the company at VMworld Europe earlier this year.

This acquisition confirms VMware’s commitment to virtualization security or VirtSec in short.

Blue Lane was founded in 2002 and has raised $13.4 million to date in two financing rounds from Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures and Matrix Partners. According to Greg Ness, who left the company last July to join Infoblox, Blue Lane has around 40 employees.

Below, you can find 3 embedded videos encompassing a long interview we did with Ness last June when he was still with the company.


Interview BlueLane Greg Ness 1/3 from Toon Vanagt on Vimeo.


Interview BlueLane Greg Ness part 2/3 from Toon Vanagt on Vimeo.


Interview BlueLane Greg Ness 3/3 from Toon Vanagt on Vimeo.

Thanks to Virtualization.info for the news.

Blue Lane Technologies

IBM Adds More Virtualization Capabilities to Power Systems, Eyeing Sun and HP

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IBM, which combined its System i and System p server product lines earlier this year, is revamping its Power Systems to offer more systems for enterprise and midmarket customers. The enhancements include additional processors based on the IBM Power Architecture as well as more virtualization capabilities. These IBM Power Systems compete against both Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems in the Unix market.

IBM is looking to widen its offering for the Unix market with new Power Systems that support more processing cores based on IBM’s Power Architecture as well as new management and virtualization features.

IBM Power Systems were introduced in April as a new set of offerings that combined the older IBM Systems i and System p under one product portfolio. The combination of these two systems gave IBM a set of offerings for enterprises and midmarket companies that not only can run AIX—IBM’s version of Unix—but also Linux and the i OS—the renamed version of the i5/OS operating system.

While the overall Unix market pales in comparison to servers based on x86 processors, this market remains important for three major OEMs: IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems. According to Gartner, while shipments of Unix-based servers fell in the second quarter of 2008, worldwide revenue increased nearly 10 percent year over year to about $4.2 billion for the quarter. Not surprisingly, IBM, which has been pushing its Unix platforms beyond the enterprise into the midmarket and even the small and midsize business, saw its revenue increase 29 percent in the second quarter for a total of $1.5 billion.

By combining the two systems into one product portfolio, IBM is looking to further strengthen its position in the Unix market. It was also a way to absorb some losses for IBM, which had seen its System i revenue slip in 2007, while System p continued to grow.

HP has its Integrity Systems that use Intel’s Itanium processors, while Sun, which has been struggling selling its high-end servers, offers its SPARC-based products and Solaris operating system.

IBM listed the starting price of the Power 560 Express with the AIX operating system at $47,216. There was no pricing information for the updated version of the Power 570.

In addition to the new hardware, IBM also rolled out several management and virtualization features of its Power Systems. These include an update for IBM’s PowerVM—the company’s virtualization software for Power Systems—called Active Memory Sharing. While only in beta now, Active Memory Sharing allows the system to access more memory in virtual environments by pooling compute resources between the partitions.

IBM is also offering a new management console called Systems Directory. This management tool works across all three operating systems—Linux, i, and AIX—and allows IT managers to control and check the resources both in the physical hardware and within virtual environments.

Finally, IBM is rolling out an Enterprise version of the AIX operating system, which includes the OS itself plus Tivoli and PowerVM software.

Symantec Unveils Veritas Cluster Server One (VCS One)

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Symantec today introduced Veritas Cluster Server One (VCS One), a new high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) platform for next-generation data centers. VCS One moves beyond traditional clustering, enabling IT managers to implement advanced services including active/active DR, multi-tier business application HA and scale-out control — increasing uptime and decreasing capital (CAPEX) and operational costs (OPEX) for the business.

Traditional clustering solutions can be complex to deploy and manage for individual databases and applications. Yet next-generation data centers, with their need for virtualized, scalable and distributed environments, strain these traditional solutions past the breaking point. Next-generation data centers are leveraging server virtualization to create thousands of servers, demanding a massive increase in scalability. In addition, traditional clustering solutions complicate or even prevent the use of valuable virtualization features like live migration. Finally, maintaining only the availability of traditional back-end services such as databases is not enough. Instead, organizations require the availability of end-to-end business applications built on highly distributed, multi-tier application architectures.

Veritas Cluster Server One delivers a new, unique HA/DR architecture that not only directly addresses these issues, but also dramatically simplifies the deployment and ongoing management of HA/DR services. The VCS One architecture is client-server based and highly scalable, initially supporting up to 256 nodes per cluster. It is non-intrusive and outside the operating system kernel — facilitating deployment and upgrades. VCS One also has a simpler networking model and built-in resiliency against configuration changes that impact availability. VCS One is policy-driven, with priorities, scheduling and dependency management to automate tasks and increase operator efficiency. Finally, Veritas Cluster Server One has server virtualization abstraction and control to deliver a common HA/DR operating model across the various virtual platforms in an enterprise data center.

Veritas Cluster Server One provides high availability and disaster recovery for the next-generation data center with: One platform for virtual and physical environments; One platform for multi-tier and monolithic applications; and One platform for scale-out and scale-up control.

Veritas Cluster Server One is now generally available with estimated pricing starting at $995 per CPU.

CA Wants A Piece Of The Virtualization Pie, Upgrades Data Center Automation Manager

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CA today announced a group of products aimed squarely at the new-world data center and its growing ranks of virtual machines. With today’s announcement, CA debuts Data Center Automation Manager 11.2, plus nine tools aimed at infrastructure, application performance and service management, as well as information governance.

CA’s Data Center Automation Manager tool seeks to minimize the amount of time IT spends caring for virtual machines, while improving agility and efficiency. It includes elements such as a rules-based policy engine and the ability to analyze performance measures and configuration details from apps and systems, while integrating with other CA tools including CA AutoSys Workload Automation, CA NSM, CA Service Desk, and CA Wily Introscope. The new products will all be available within a few weeks.

VMware, no stranger to the fact that customers want to use management tools from multiple vendors, introduced its plans for a Data Center OS at VMworld last month. The company envisions this OS as a layer into which other tools vendors can plug, using APIs.

HP takes a similar approach to CA’s, not making hypervisor technology itself like VMware or Microsoft, but offering hardware that makes sense for highly-virtualized data centers, as well as already-known management tools that can pull data from virtualized environments as well as physical ones. HP, with its acquisition of EDS also has a large services organization to help customers with virtualization projects.

Enomaly Unveils Elastic Computing Platform After Years of R&D

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Enomaly today announced Enomaly Elastic Computing Platform (ECP), after having released an Alpha version in March of this year. ECP is an open source, programmable, cloud computing infrastructure for businesses looking to design, deploy and manage virtual applications in the cloud. With its official product launch, Enomaly is shifting its business from a services organization to a software products and support company.

Enomaly’s ECP is designed to work alongside a company’s existing virtual data center providing time and money savings. An intuitive, browser-based dashboard makes it easy for IT personnel to efficiently plan deployments, automate VM scaling and load-balancing; and, analyze, configure and optimize cloud capacity.

The Enomaly ECP is available for immediate download. Proprietary enterprise licenses of the software are available. With the release of the Enomaly ECP, the company is offering paid Web-based and phone support packages. The three plans are: Silver — Web-based support for up to 25 incidents per year; Gold — Phone and Web-based support for up to 50 incidents per year; and Platinum — Phone and Web-based support for up to 100 incidents per year plus assistance and advice with cluster architecture and virtual machine and application design.

HP Buys LeftHand Networks For $360 Million In Cash

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HP today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire LeftHand Networks, a provider of storage virtualization and iSCSI storage area network (SAN) solutions who recently came out with some impressive numbers.

LeftHand Networks’ solutions enable midsize companies and remote offices or branches of large corporations to easily and cost-effectively protect critical business data. HP has agreed to purchase LeftHand Networks for $360 million in cash, subject to certain purchase price adjustments.
Founded in 1999, LeftHand Networks is privately held and headquartered in Boulder, Colo. It has 215 employees and more than 500 resellers and distributors worldwide. The company has more than 11,000 installations across 3,000 different customers.
With the addition of LeftHand Networks, HP will add midrange offerings to its suite of iSCSI solutions. Customer needs at the low end of the market will be met with the HP StorageWorks All-in-One Storage System (AiO) and HP StorageWorks Modular Smart Array (MSA) product lines. The high end will be addressed by the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) line. Customers will further benefit since LeftHand Networks’ solutions are already certified to work with a wide range of HP products.
The transaction is subject to certain closing conditions and is expected to be completed in HP’s first fiscal quarter of 2009. Following completion, the business will be integrated into the HP StorageWorks division within the Technology Solutions Group at HP.
LeftHand Networks