News

Uptime Software Upgrades VMware Monitoring and Reporting Tool

June 25, 2009 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

uptime software has announced the latest version of its systems management software, up.time 5. Through close collaboration with VMware and its vSphere and vCenter Orchestrator offerings, up.time’s new capabilities aspire to change the way enterprises manage, measure, and monitor their VMware infrastructure.

up.time represents a leap forward for companies that need to drive both performance and cost-savings from their VMware infrastructure, while ensuring a consistent quality of service. It does this by providing IT managers with an unobstructed view of the datacenter to efficiently manage distributed applications and global services levels, while maximizing enterprise-wide IT resources. The solution’s ability to span both physical and virtual realms has helped hundreds of customers achieve new levels of performance and render immediate cost savings. QuickPlay Media, a customer dedicated to providing solutions that manage the business of mobile video for the world’s leading communications providers, is one example.

The new capabilities announced today– advanced visibility, deep VMware metrics and reporting, automated problem resolution and incidence avoidance –raise the bar for managing VMware performance with:

Increased VMware efficiency though dramatic increases in VM density and optimized VM workloads.
Automated incidence avoidance that reduces manual find/fix by automatically heading off reoccurring problems before they happen. Deep and seamless integration with VMware vCenter Orchestrator® makes building out automated problem avoidance workflows easy, providing advanced capabilities for SMB and Enterprise companies. This dramatically reduces Mean-Time-To-Repair and required resources, while increasing performance and productivity.
Fast problem isolation and resolution through intelligent alerting, easy pinpointing of root cause, and automated actions that can eliminate recurring outages in the future.
Rapid VMware infrastructure growth requiring fewer resources by delivering an easy-to-use consolidation, monitoring, optimization, and automation solution, all while helping reduce VM sprawl.
Improved visibility and manageability of the entire infrastructure from a single console, including virtual and physical infrastructures and applications, and across multiple datacenters.

An enterprise version of up.time is available for a risk-free 30 day evaluation download here – (a Virtual Appliance is also available for download here. uptime software’s world-class support services are free during this evaluation period to help customers drive value in their environments.

VMware Releases Fusion 2.0.5

June 25, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VMware Fusion 2.0.5 is a maintenance release of VMware Fusion 2.

It is a free upgrade for all VMware Fusion 1 and VMware Fusion 2 customers, and provides the following enhancements:

Supports Mac OS X Server guest operating systems on Macs with Intel Xeon 5500 and 3500 Series processors (based on Nehalem micro-architecture)
Provides experimental support for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Server as a guest operating system (32-bit only)
Provides experimental support for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard as a host operating system (32-bit only)
Supports Ubuntu 9.04 as a guest operating system, including features such as VMware Tools pre-built modules and Easy Install
Reduces CPU usage when a virtual machine is idle under VMware Fusion
Contains fixes for more than 80 bugs

You can download VMware Fusion 2.0.5 now.

OK Labs Launches Mobile Virtualization Integration Practice (VIP)

June 25, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Open Kernel Labs (OK Labs) today announced that the company has launched the industry’s first mobile Virtualization Integration Practice (VIP). The VIP offers a set of consulting and training services that help customers to define requirements, validate design approaches, and support mobile phone product development.

Leading the practice offerings is a collaborative Discovery Service that helps OK Labs OKL4 users integrate virtualization into mobile handset hardware and software architecture. Other VIP Services include Training, Porting, Quick Start, Installation, and Engineering consulting. OK VIP Services help handset OEMs, mobile network operators (MNOs), and semiconductor suppliers to realize significant value from deploying mobile phone virtualization, and to propagate that value across the mobile ecosystem.

OK VIP Discovery service takes into account not only the architecture of mobile hardware and software, but also customer-defined business goals and objectives, and ecosystem relationships. The service delivery is informed by the OK Labs tech team’s understanding of silicon suppliers’ current capabilities and product roadmaps; the evolution of mobile operating systems and other mobile device software; the requirements and service rollout plans of MNOs; and the channels used to deliver handsets, applications, and content.

The VIP Discovery Service starts with detailed requirements gathering, accomplished through an on-site engagement with handset OEM, MNO, or semiconductor supplier technology and business teams. Together with the customer, OK Labs evaluates mobile project design, development, testing, and deployment processes, from both technical and commercial perspectives. Ultimately, OK Labs VIP Discovery Service includes delivery of actionable recommendations for implementation of mobile phone virtualization architecture, integration, training and support.

The VIP Discovery service confers a range of benefits to OEMs and their ecosystem:

• Aligning mobile phone virtualization with business goals and objectives
• Building and refining mobile design strategies to maximize ROI from mobile phone virtualization
• Aligning mobile device features with capabilities and requirements of ecosystem partners and the mobile marketplace

In a study conducted by OK Labs regarding mobile access to enterprise applications, something made possible by mobile phone virtualization, it was found that mobile phone users and corporate IT managers expect that mobile access to enterprise applications growth will outpace the growth of mobile email over the next two years. For OEMs, MNOs and semiconductor suppliers that leverage this opportunity, VIP services enable a quick and efficient path to meet this demand.

OK VIP services are available immediately from OK Labs

RNA Networks Debuts RNAcache For Its Memory Virtualization Platform

June 24, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

RNA networks today announced it has extended its Memory Virtualization Platform (MVP) product family with the release of RNAcache. MVP transforms server memory into a shared network resource. RNAcache allows servers to leverage RNA’s unlimited pool of memory by loading entire working datasets into a single shared, virtual memory pool for simultaneous access and processing. RNAcache significantly lowers the cost of supporting business critical, memory-intensive applications without making further investments in costly data center equipment, enabling companies to wring as much revenue potential out of existing servers as possible.

Broadly applicable to a variety of industries, RNAcache provides line speed processing of the most memory intensive and I/O bound applications including predictive analytics and modeling, high volume Internet applications and clustered environments without requiring changes to applications, OS or storage.

An investment management firm using RNAcache said, “With RNAcache, our analytic models that previously took 1.5 hours ran in a matter of minutes – showing a 2,000 percentage performance improvement.” In this case, RNA’s unlimited memory pool held a working dataset of 3 Terabytes across hundreds of compute nodes.

RNAcache works in all network environments including GbE, 10GbE, and InfiniBand. RNAcache removes data center bottlenecks caused by contention for application memory, the most scarce and limited resource in the data center. During customer testing, RNAcache significantly enhanced performance in the following use cases:

Predictive Analytics and Modeling: improved predictive modeling capabilities by 20X, delivering results to analysts in a fraction of the time.
High Volume, Fast Internet Applications: improved query speed 100X, increased simultaneous user capacity 5X and expanded customer revenue opportunities each business day.
Clustered Environments: A high performance cloud provider accelerated processing rates by 30X, without having to scale out their hardware, power or space footprint.

The rate of proliferation and amount of data that must be quickly analyzed, shared and interpreted is growing exponentially. RNAcache makes the benefits of memory virtualization widely available to customers in industries who rely on access, performance and scale to remain competitive – be it video streaming or algorithmic model processing.

Release: Entuity Eye of the Storm Network Professional Edition

June 24, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Entuity today announced Eye of the Storm Network Professional Edition (EYE NPE), a network management solution that defines a new category along the management price/performance continuum – enterprise functionality at a price point previously reserved for workgroup class tools struggling to scale and support SME network needs.

The newest member of Entuity’s software family delivers technology for the mid-market on three fronts: automation, accuracy, and deep functionality for management to cost-effectively keep dynamic and contemporary networks optimally performing.

EYE NPE delivers optimal network performance by going beyond the “red light/green light” signaling that qualifies the typical low-priced network management tools. EYE NPE provides an intelligent view of object connectivity, root cause analysis, and a broad range of configurable thresholds allowing users to pinpoint where problems occur and quickly take action.

Unlike the device-centric approach of other commercially available solutions, EYE NPE includes user configurable views which represent any logical collection of devices or segmentation of the network. Views represent a higher abstraction of the network – a business unit, a building, a particular floor, a department, or the devices assigned to particular operations personnel – then EYE NPE collects and reports operational metrics matching specified business processes. Built in reports with a versatile scheduler in a range of business-ready formats are also available to automate reporting and distribution.

Built from Entuity’s enterprise class event engine and database that support 85,000 managed objects per server, EYE NPE supports up to 7,500 managed objects on a single server and combines proven features of the best network management tools on the market. The product is priced at $22,500.

EYE NPE will be available June 26, and runs on Microsoft Windows Server operating systems, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and VMWare ESX Server.

Release: 5nine P2V Hyper-V Planner

June 22, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

5nine Software today announced the release of 5nine P2V Hyper-V Planner, and 5nine P2V Hyper-V Planner Free Edition – the first virtualization migration planning solutions specifically designed for enterprise P2V Hyper-V deployment projects.

5nine P2V Hyper-V Planner offers the following features:

Automated P2V Hyper-V Migration Planning – Performs sophisticated analysis of the current data center and provides multiple migration plans depending on particular enterprise requirements. Optimized placement of virtualized workloads is based on business requirements, technology (memory, storage and CPU utilization, security) and TCO/ROI.
Agentless Data Collection – Automatically discovers and collects hardware inventory, utilization data and application performance metrics in a non-intrusive manner without installing agents. It also allows importing this information from an Excel or XML file.
Simple-to-Use – The product was designed to be used for projects of all sizes – from small virtualization pilot or SMB projects to large enterprise projects with hundreds of servers, hosts and virtual machines (VMs).
Integrated TCO/ROI Reporting – P2V Planner creates a variety of technology assessment, workload and TCO/ROI reports for each migration plan, for easy comparison and decision making.
Ongoing Value – Whether your P2V Hyper-V migration project is complete or ongoing, the Planner continues to provide value by optimizing the workloads and resource utilization in a virtualized data center.

The current version of the product supports Microsoft Hyper-V, while subsequent releases will support multiple virtualization platforms, including VMware P2V planning, as well as actual P2V conversion in accordance with the P2V migration plans created.

5nine P2V Hyper-V Planner Free Edition is available immediately, and it’s free for any Microsoft Hyper-V environment. P2V Hyper-V Planner is also available immediately, with North American pricing starting at $59.00 USD per physical server.