News

Surgient To Use IBM Jazz Platform To Enable More Efficient Application Development

August 26, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Surgient today announced it will offer integrated solutions with products built using IBM Jazz collaborative technologies. As a result, IBM quality assurance users can use Surgient’s Virtual Automation Platform to allocate IT resources and set up and tear down virtual labs on-demand for software testing and quality assurance, introducing new efficiencies to the application development lifecycle.

IBM Jazz provides an open and extensible platform on top of which IBM, business partners and clients are building new development tools that integrate collaboration, team awareness and project health into every aspect of the software development lifecycle. Later this year, Surgient’s Virtual Automation Platform will include an integration with IBM Rational Quality Manager, comprehensive test planning and process software that provides a single view into all aspects of a quality plan. Surgient’s product currently integrates with IBM’s Rational BuildForge.

By implementing the Surgient Virtual Automation Platform, development and QA organizations will benefit from Surgient’s self-service IT solution for virtual lab management. IBM Rational customers using IBM Rational Quality Manager can request and build a live application testing environment with specific configurations without manual administration from a company’s IT department, freeing up IT personnel to address additional business critical initiatives. Surgient was a visionary behind virtual lab management beginning in 2003 and now serves many of the world’s largest companies.

Surgient, meanwhile, is still being rumored to be either planning an IPO or serving as high-profile acquisition target.

Surgient

Terremark Completes Infinistructure Deployment

August 26, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Terremark Worldwide today announced the completed deployment of the Infinistructure utility-computing platform at its facilities in Madrid and Amsterdam. The platform will benefit Terremark’s European and American customers and has been met with high demand from current customers and prospects.

Infinistructure’s server and storage infrastructure combines Terremark’s proprietary service-management platform with virtualization technology from partners including VMWare, Cisco, and IBM, providing a highly scalable and flexible high-performance computing platform.

Infinistructure’s on-demand network, storage and computing architecture allows customers to precisely match their infrastructure to their business needs, while leveraging a fully managed solution with plug-and-play access to network connectivity from multiple carriers. The Infinistructure platform is connected to the ESpanix exchange point in Spain and the AMS-IX exchange point in The Netherlands, the largest internet connection point in Europe with over 400 Gb/s in peak traffic.

terremark

CohesiveFT Adds Elastic Server Support for Amazon EC2

August 25, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Tomorrow, CohesiveFT, makers of the Elastic Server platform, will announce support for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) large, extra-large and high-CPU instances.

This is an expansion beyond the company’s existing support for standard instances on Amazon EC2’s 32-bit platform. Developers interested in defining software components for real-time deployment to Amazon EC2 can use the Elastic Server platform to build, test and deploy their Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) to a variety of virtualization and cloud-ready formats.

The Elastic Server platform lets users choose their components from a library of popular software stacks. The platform also allows any individual, team or company to import their software offerings, a crowd-sourced practice that ensures the library continually reflects evolving market preferences. Once assembled, these custom application stacks can be configured to a variety of virtualization and cloud-ready formats, downloaded and deployed in real-time. Support for the full spectrum of Amazon EC2 formats follows the company’s recent support for the Flexiscale cloud environment, the Skytap Virtual Lab, as well as its ongoing support for the VMware, Parallels, and Xen formats.

The Elastic Server platform features a dashboard that highlights the most popular user-selected components as well as an overall view of community activity. Users can also distribute their finished servers through the Elastic Server platform. There are currently more than a thousand community users contributing nearly three thousand Elastic Servers to the market.

Cohesive Flexible Technologies

Citrix Releases XenApp 5, Will It Prove To Become The Application Virtualization Standard?

August 25, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Remember when Brian Madden pointed out that Citrix XenApp 5.0 would be delayed for several months? Well, he was right, technically. Anyhow, Citrix today announced the release of Citrix XenApp 5, and claims it “breaks through performance and operating-cost barriers, making application start times up to 10 times faster, dramatically improving end-user experience and lowering application management costs by more than 25 percent over previous versions”.

“XenApp 5 broadens the horizon of the end-user experience and accessibility by delivering an end-to-end virtualization solution that addresses the needs of both local and hosted applications,” said Mark Bowker, analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “In addition, XenApp 5 is giving new and existing customers a welcome boost in performance at an attractive price-point, two highly sought-after requirements for companies investing in strategic technologies in today’s economy.”

XenApp, in combination with Citrix XenDesktop and Citrix XenServer, creates an end-to-end virtualization solution that spans servers, applications and desktops. The new XenApp 5 release is being featured on September 9, 2008 as part of a global, online launch event, called Citrix Delivery Center Live!

With the release of XenApp 5, Citrix claims it is raising the bar with significant new improvements to performance, user experience and cost savings. In total, XenApp 5 includes more than 50 new major enhancements, according to the official press release.

XenApp 5, which runs on the Microsoft Windows Server platform, leverages all the enhancements in Windows Server 2008 and fully supports Windows Server 2003. This enables existing Windows Server 2003 customers to immediately deploy Windows Server 2008 into their existing XenApp environments in any mix.

XenApp 5 will be available September 10, 2008. For North America, suggested retail pricing is per concurrent user (CCU) and includes one year of Subscription Advantage:

Advanced Edition – US $350
Enterprise Edition – US $450
Platinum Edition – US $600

Standalone pricing for client-side application streaming and virtualization begins as low as $60 per CCU.

Citrix Systems

StoneFly IP SAN Configurations Now Fit For Citrix XenServer

August 25, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

StoneFly, a supplier of integrated IP storage area network (SAN) systems and a wholly owned subsidiary of Dynamic Network Factory, today announced that all of its IP SAN configurations have completed Citrix Ready compatibility verification testing for use with server virtualization solutions from Citrix Systems.

StoneFly’s High-Availability Storage Concentrator (HSC), Integrated Storage Concentrator (ISC) and OptiSAN Storage Concentrator product lines have been optimized for Citrix XenServer server solutions, which are designed for virtualizing application workloads across any number of servers in the datacenter.

The compatibility bolsters StoneFly’s existing support for fast integration of networked storage with virtual servers – available via StoneFusion, the company’s IP-based, block-level provisioning platform. StoneFly pioneered storage virtualization over five years ago with StoneFusion, which centralizes storage management, control and monitoring of logical storage volumes.

XenServer compatibility allows StoneFly to further simplify IP SAN deployment for its customers: StoneFly’s support for network boot technologies (both software and hardware initiator based) in diskless virtual server environments saves IT administration time, and streamlines operations. Customers can also reduce datacenter costs and consolidate resources by using IP SANs to facilitate the use of diskless servers and virtual servers.

StoneFly is planning further enhancements over the coming months to its integration with Xen environments to build upon the seamless storage/server experience that it is providing to customers.

Xen 3.3.0 Available For Download

August 25, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

A recent post on the Xen blog featured a proposed data sheet (PDF) for the (back then upcoming) Xen 3.3 release, which we said was in final testing stage in the beginning of this month. Now Xen 3.3.0 is here and ready for download, as reported by Heise Online.

The new version is also available as part of a package with a 2.6.18 kernel version of Linux as the host system, also known as Domain 0 (Dom0). According to Xen developers, the number of supported guest operating systems has grown and there are improvements in performance, the ACPI power management modes, and security functions such as using PVGrub instead of PYGrub. Xen 3.3.0 also has fewer limitations on moving running virtual machines from one physical system to another. This function, necessary for redundant fail over configurations and practical for server maintenance, has previously only been usable when the processors (and chipsets) running on the physical machines involved supported very similar hardware virtualization functions.