News

Former Vizioncore CEO David Bieneman Is Back With A New Startup

May 20, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Founder and former CEO of Vizioncore, David Bieneman, is back after selling the company he started to Quest Software in January 2008. According to his LinkedIn profile, he’s now the CEO of a startup called Liquidware Labs.

Alessandro guesses the company will be doing something in the desktop virtualization sphere:

The company tagline, The Art & Science of the Desktop, and the Roher profile on LinkedIn unveil that Liquidware Labs will be active in the VDI space, will address the PSO organizations, and that will leverage the technology of vmSight, recently acquired while in stealth mode for an undisclosed sum.

vmSight is a startup that offers a solution to track how the users work on the virtual desktops, through the analysis of their network activity. Think about it as a network sniffer that re-assembles the snooped packets to understand the history and the performance of a VDI session and make it easier to troubleshoot.

What Liquidware Labs will do with this technology which is covered by 13 patents?

Time will tell.

3Tera To Debut AppStore, A Marketplace For Cloud Components

May 19, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

3Tera has announced the introduction of the 3Tera AppStore, a marketplace for cloud components where enterprise users, software vendors and datacenter experts can exchange production-ready, scalable and highly available cloud components on a pay-per-use basis.

3Tera’s AppStore is a globally available portal offering enterprise-class, supported software stacks, packaged for use in public, private and hybrid AppLogic cloud deployments. The AppStore catalog spans all types of datacenter infrastructure elements and complete applications, from networking components (such as load balancers, firewalls, routers, traffic managers, content switches), server components (such as Web servers, directory servers, databases, application servers) and storage solutions, as well as application software stacks, management and monitoring tools.

Users of the 3Tera AppStore can find pre-configured, ready-to-use appliances to add to their 3Tera AppLogic catalogs provided by trusted software vendors. Many are free or offered on a trial basis, while others are offered on a pay-per-use basis. For ISVs, the AppStore provides a way to publish and distribute enterprise-class, production ready, cloud components and generate revenue every time users run them in public or private clouds powered by AppLogic. Datacenter architects and consultants can package and publish complete application infrastructures to the AppStore that are ready to run, complete with value-added capabilities such as clustered solutions, high-availability, disaster recovery, on-demand scalability or automated backups and security.

Initial AppStore partners include CohesiveFT, GlobalLogic, Layer 7 Technologies, SOASTA, Tap In Systems, and Zeus Technology.

3Tera is working with established infrastructure and software vendors to populate the AppStore catalog of available appliances. The Beta version of the 3Tera AppStore will go live in Q3 2009.

Xen 3.4 Released

May 19, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Xen.org is pleased to announce the latest release of the Xen hypervisor (3.4), which is is referring to as “the open source industry standard for virtualization”.

From the blog post:

“As part of the Xen community’s commitment to continuous improvement, the new hypervisor offers significant enhancements in the following areas:

• Xen Client Initiative (XCI) Enhancements –Xen.org continues develop industry virtualization standards for desktop and client devices. Xen 3.4 contains the initial XCI code release providing a base client hypervisor for the community to extend and improve. This new version of the Xen hypervisor expands the hardware options for the leading open source virtualization platform.

• Reliability – Availability – Serviceability (RAS) – In addition, Xen now delivers a collection of features designed to avoid and detect system failures, provide maximum uptime by isolating system faults, and provide system failure notices to administrators to properly service the hardware/software. The combination of these services provide for a robust Xen hypervisor with fault-tolerant and back-up capabilities built-in.

• Power Management – Xen 3.4 improves the power saving features with a host of new algorithms to better manage the processor including schedulers and timers optimized for peak power savings.”

On average, Xen.org receives more than 750 new code submissions to the source tree each month from developers across the world working on an array of solutions within the hypervisor.

Release: LiveTime’s 64 bit ITIL Service Management Virtual Appliance

May 15, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

LiveTime Software, a leading provider of ITIL based Web 2.0 Service Management and Help Desk Software, today released version 5.5 of its highly integrated virtual appliance. The latest version of LiveTime’s JeOS (Just Enough Operating System) provides 64 bit native performance, Java 6, Apache Tomcat 6, Apache Web Server 2.2 and LiveTime 5.5. LiveTime’s virtual machine is available for all major virtualized environments such as VMWare, Sun Virtual Box and Citrix XenServer 5.0 and is also available in the Open Virtualization Format.

LiveTime’s JeOS is now production grade and recommended for all environments wishing to virtualize their service management solution. With 64 bit native performance and the ability to address more than 2GB of RAM, LiveTime can scale to any size organization. This version has been specifically optimized for SaaS provider networks and outsourced service providers using LiveTime in a muti-tenant environment. The appliance also includes support for symmetric multiprocessing for optimal performance across virtualized CPU’s.

LiveTime’s virtual appliance includes built-in debugging, configuration and management utilities. Simple guided menus provide easy access to networking, monitoring and general system utilities. The menu driven environment also supports automatic upgrades and SSL out of the box.

Organizations can now leverage LiveTime’s highly scalable ITIL Service Management software with the ease of installation of traditional software. The virtual appliance provides the necessary scalability and security that is difficult to achieve when deployed on existing hardware and operating systems. Since the system has been hardened at the operating system layer, LiveTime provides Just Enough Operating System for its needs. This makes the system easy to update and maintain and provides a very small footprint and a 170MB download.

Likewise Open Finds It Way Into Citrix XenServer

May 13, 2009 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

The integration of Likewise Open with Citrix XenServer now enables IT administrators to protect information and data from unauthorized access — and ensures that virtual servers have the same levels of security as physical servers.

Likewise, the leader in open source audit and authentication for mixed networks — provides identity management solutions that improve security and operational efficiencies by integrating Linux, Unix and Mac systems with Microsoft Active Directory.

Citrix XenServer provides customers with a robust, scalable, feature-rich virtualization platform that is exceptionally powerful, yet incredibly easy to learn and use — creating a flexible, aggregated pool of computing resources by virtualizing application workloads across any number of servers in the datacenter.

XenServer software with Likewise Open is scheduled to be available in June 2009.

Release: Unitrends 4.1 (Data Recovery Software)

May 13, 2009 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Further expanding its OS, virtualization and application support, Unitrends today announced the latest version of its data recovery software with new support for the Windows Server 2008 family and the Novell OES family of products, including Microsoft Hyper-V and Xen virtualization platforms. Unitrends Release 4.1 also includes expanded multi-appliance management and monitoring capabilities as well as enhanced support for Network Attached Storage (NAS) systems.

The new Unitrends Release 4.1 backup and recovery software offers support for more than 40 operating systems and applications. This support now includes:

· Windows Server 2008 (including Hyper-V)

· Exchange 2007 support on Windows Server 2008

· SQL 2008

· Novell OES1 and OES2 (including Xen and Groupwise 8.0)

· MacOS X 10.5

· Linux 64-bit

· pSeries 6.1

The latest Unitrends release also delivers extensive context-sensitive help, increased appliance management and monitoring functionality, and new reporting flexibility. In addition, Unitrends Release 4.1 adds new appliance scalability features and supports NAS protection via CIFS and NFS protocols without a high-priced NDMP agent.

The new Unitrends Release 4.1, with enhanced operating system support, is available now for all Unitrends rapid-recovery appliances including the recently announced, 1U Recovery-610. There is no charge for the new version for existing Unitrends customers.