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3Tera Goes Global With Cloud Services Based on AppLogic Grid OS

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3Tera announces the availability of global cloud services, based on its AppLogic grid operating system. Driven by demand from multi-national customers and customers outside the United States, 3Tera has selected partners to offer cloud solutions on four continents and provide redundant online resources worldwide. 3Tera currently has partners and is running in datacenters in seven countries (United States, Japan, Singapore, Argentina, United Kingdom, Netherlands and Serbia) on four continents (North America, South American, Asia, and Europe), with additional resources in South America and Australia soon to be available as well.

The global offering allows customers to choose their location and expand or move to different regions as their business demands, without having to change a single line of code in their applications. Applications close to the customer’s base provides optimal performance by avoiding latency.  Also, the ability to duplicate and migrate applications globally eliminates many cross border regulatory issues and replaces lengthy, costly legal processes with simple drag-and-drop operations that can be completed in minutes.

RingCube Joins VMware Technology Alliance Partner

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RingCube Technologies, provider of managed virtual workspaces, today announced (PDF) it has joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program. The VMware TAP program helps technology vendors integrate their products with VMware virtualization software and deliver timely, joint solutions to mutual customers. As a member of the program, RingCube will utilize VMware resources and expertise to deliver desktop virtualization solutions that complement the VMware VDI architecture.

RingCube’s virtualization technology separates the user’s desktop environment, including applications, data, settings and system resources from the operating system and encapsulates it into a secure container. Users can run their virtual desktop at the office or on unmanaged PCs — at home, at a client site or in a hotel business center. When users start their RingCube workspace, it transforms any PC into their own familiar, personalized workspace that facilitates access to their files, applications, settings and entire desktop, as if they were on their own PC. RingCube virtual workspaces can be implemented via a variety of deployment options.

With more than 700 members worldwide, the VMware TAP program works with best-of-breed technology partners to provide them a comprehensive set of VMware technical and marketing services, support, tools and expertise to deliver enhanced value to joint customers.

Microsoft Releases Integrated Virtualization ROI Tool

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Microsoft Corporation India Pvt. Ltd. today announced the availability of a set of tools designed to facilitate the adoption of virtualization technology for its customers and partners. As a part of this initiative, the company launched the (free) Microsoft Integrated Virtualization ROI Tool that is designed to help customers quantify the cost advantage from deploying Microsoft’s virtualization offerings versus competitive solutions. It also announced the availability of a solution accelerator – the Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool to help customers automate the process of updating virtual machines, thereby allowing them to manage the updation of a large numbers of offline virtual machines according to individual needs.

The Microsoft Integrated Virtualization ROI Tool gives customers direct access to a software solution that produces a detailed representation of the total cost advantage that Microsoft’s virtualization solutions deliver in comparison with other options in the market. This tool was developed independently by ex-Gartner TCO/ROI experts at Alinean, Inc. The tool allows partners and customers to examine current production server, development/QA lab, desktop and application virtualization opportunities – thereby enumerating the potential savings, service level, agility benefits and overall Return on Investment (ROI) from implementing Microsoft’s integrated virtualization solutions. The Virtualization ROI Tool collects specific information about current infrastructure costs and opportunities for improvement, then uses research by Alinean to project potential costs and benefits for various optimization strategies using the Microsoft Integrated Virtualization solutions. All research was collected from the Alinean ValueBase™ of IT spending metrics, and Microsoft product and pricing experts to reflect typical costs and savings for similar company type and size.

The Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool is built on Windows Workflow Foundation and the Windows PowerShell interface to manage the workflow of updating large numbers of offline virtual machines according to their individual needs. To do this, the tool works with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 and with software update management systems (at present, either Microsoft Windows Server® Update Services 3.0 or Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007. The tool uses “servicing jobs” to manage the update operations based on lists of existing virtual machines stored in VMM. Using Windows Workflow Foundation technology, a servicing job runs snippets of PowerShell scripts to work with virtual machines.

RedHat Picks Up Qumranet

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According to Globes, RedHat has acquired Qumranet (confirmed via press release)

“Redhat announced its acquisition of Israeli virtualization start-up Qumranet Inc. for about $100 million, ending a long period of rumors. This is Red Hat’s first acquisition in Israel, and it will turn the Linux software company into a market leader in virtualization. Qumranet will become Red Hat’s R&D center in Israel.”

Best known Qumranet co-founders are Benny Schnaider, Moshe Bar, Both are well known, with track records ath Cisco ,PentaCom and P-Cube, and more interesting Qlusters and XenSource (now Citrix)

“Benny Schaider, and Moshe Bar are expected to head Red Hat’s Israeli R&D after the acquisition. Qumranet has 65 employees worldwide, mostly R&D staff in Israel. The company has raised $20 million in two financing rounds from its founders, Sequoia Capital, Northwest Venture Partners, and Cisco. The company still has cash from its latest financing round, which was held in January. ”

This shines a totally different light on the irrational discussion if RedHat should be Acquired by VMWare .

RedHat now owns one of the fastest growing Virtualization technologies around : KVM
RedHat had already chosen for stronger support of KVM, but with todays evolution one has to start thinking about the future of Xen in the leading Linux distribution. In one day RedHat stepped from being just an integrator of different virtualization technologies to one of the leading Virtualization Vendors.

VirtualBox 2.0 Hits The Wire

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Sun just announced the availability of Sun xVM Virtual Box 2.0.

The biggest change in xVM VirtualBox 2.0 is the new support for 64-bit versions of operating systems like Windows Vista and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in addition to all other major host operating systems. VirtualBox also offers a new user interface for the Mac platform, improved networking for the Mac OS X and Solaris OS, as well as improved performance, especially on AMD chips.

Customers who purchase an enterprise subscription will also receive a Right-to-Use License, allowing them to deploy the xVM VirtualBox platform using their own software deployment tools.

The following major new features were added:

* 64 bits guest support (64 bits host only)
* New native Leopard user interface on Mac OS X hosts
* The GUI was converted from Qt3 to Qt4 with many visual improvements
* New-version notifier
* Guest property information interface
* Host Interface Networking on Mac OS X hosts
* New Host Interface Networking on Solaris hosts
* Support for Nested Paging on modern AMD CPUs (major performance gain)
* Framework for collecting performance and resource usage data (metrics)
* Added SATA asynchronous IO (NCQ: Native Command Queuing) when accessing raw disks/partitions (major performance gain)
* Clipboard integration for OS/2 Guests
* Created separate SDK component featuring a new Python programming interface on Linux and Solaris hosts
* Support for VHD disk images

Apani Pushes EpiForce VM as Virtual Appliance (Free Trial)

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Apani, provider of cross-platform server isolation solutions for large enterprises, today announced that EpiForce VM is now available as a virtual appliance free trial. EpiForce VM is the industry’s first software-based solution that secures corporate networks, containing both physical and virtual machines, from a single platform.

EpiForce VM is part of Apani’s security software product family and provides enterprises the ability to adopt a single security solution that will protect mixed data centers. From legacy systems to contemporary platforms and now virtualized environments, Apani’s EpiForce product line is the silver bullet for enterprise IT departments looking to simplify security enforcement and move away from a silo approach to protecting the inside of the corporate network.

The EpiForce VM virtual appliance free trial is a fully functioning version of EpiForce VM designed to install and run as a VMware VI3 appliance. The trial version includes two virtual machines (VMs) with agents pre-installed and license keys for up to 10 agents that can be installed on any physical or virtual Windows or Red Hat Linux platform. A complete video tutorial and training guide is included to help security administrators to configure and test EpiForce VM in their own environment.

EpiForce VM is based on the EpiForce platform v2.5 and initially supports VMware ESX Server 3.0 and 3.5 and uses on-demand policy distribution to offer enterprises the ability to manage and deploy policy to thousands of virtual or physical servers and endpoints with no impact to the network, application or user. EpiForce VM offers a centralized management console that enables a consolidated view to manage all EpiForce VM-protected machines — whether they are virtual or physical, without regard to their physical location on the network. Persistent security policy management allows administrators to utilize VMotion or Virtual Center to migrate EpiForce VM-protected virtual machines from one physical host to another with no disruption of security policy, minimizing unplanned downtime and maximizing operational flexibility.