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Sun Microsystems Nearly Doubles Sun Ray Shipments

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Sun Microsystems today announced the company nearly doubled shipments of its Sun Ray thin clients during the fourth quarter of Sun’s 2008 fiscal year, compared to the third quarter of its 2008 fiscal year.

Sun claims that the Sun Ray unit shipments are growing faster than the thin client industry at large, underscoring the increased appeal thin client and desktop virtualization solutions are experiencing among businesses and organizations. Contributing to this growth is strong market demand for Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Software 2.0, which now ships on approximately 25% of Sun Ray units since being introduced in March 2008, in addition to enabling customers to display Solaris, Windows or Linux desktops on the same device.

Sun Ray virtual display clients, Sun Ray Sofware and Sun VDI Software 2.0 are key components of Sun’s broad desktop virtualization offering, which are a set of core desktop technologies and solutions within Sun’s xVM virtualization portfolio.

Sun offers a complete desktop-to-datacenter virtualization product portfolio and comprehensive set of virtualization service offerings to help customers deploy new services faster, maximize the utilization of system resources, and more easily monitor and manage virtualized environments. Sun’s virtualization products help to provide unified software management tools and virtualization capabilities across operating systems, servers, storage, desktops and processors.

Sun Microsystems

Hyperic CloudStatus Now Monitors Google App Engine

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We’ve covered Hyperic before, most recently when they added monitoring for Citrix XenServer environments to their Hyperic HQ service. The company just announced that their CloudStatus service now also supports Google App Engine, after launching with advanced monitoring for Amazon EC2 services. Support for additional cloud providers is planned for the coming months.

Update: check out the excellent analysis on GigaOM as well.

The addition of App Engine monitoring is designed to provide customers with the ability to obtain up-to-the-second perspectives on performance and network connectivity from both inside and outside the App Engine platform. The initial release will allow for continuous monitoring of the health and performance of major App Engine infrastructure, including the DataStore, Memcache, and global network connectivity. CloudStatus uses App Engine-specific management plug-ins to collect measurements that provide administrators and developers with unprecedented insight into the health of the App Engine platform.

As part of this development, Hyperic is also announcing the availability of the first cloud-specific management plug-in for its flagship product, Hyperic HQ. The new plug-in extends the full monitoring and management capabilities of Hyperic HQ to App Engine users, enabling them to examine the performance of their own custom applications running in the cloud. This plug-in is free for download on HyperForge.

Hyperic

ELASTRA Adds Support for Eucalyptus Platform

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ELASTRA, which recently raised $12 million from Amazon and other investors, today announced Elastra Cloud Server support for the Eucalyptus platform.

ELASTRA’s products are designed for portability across compute clouds and currently provide support for the Amazon EC2 and S3 compute and storage environments. Because Eucalyptus exposes its virtual machines through an EC2-compatible API, ELASTRA’s portability to Eucalyptus was a straightforward addition to its platform offering.

Eucaplyptus (Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems) is an open-source software infrastructure for implementing “cloud computing” on clusters. The current interface to EUCALYPTUS is compatible with Amazon’s EC2 interface, but the infrastructure is designed to support multiple client-side interfaces. Eucalyptus is implemented using commonly available Linux tools and basic Web-service technologies.

Elastra

Phoenix Technologies Talks Up HyperSpace Hypervisor at IDF

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Phoenix Technologies today announced that the first open demonstrations of Phoenix FailSafe, its anti-theft and data protection firmware-based product, and its embedded virtualization platform, Phoenix HyperSpace, are being held at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) August 19-21, 2008 in San Francisco.

At IDF, Phoenix also unveiled Phoenix MicroCore, Phoenix’s newest BIOS designed for the new Intel Atom processor for netbooks and nettops.

Update: a LinuxWorld keynote given by Simon Crosby unveils that the engine behind HyperCore is actually Xen. The presentation also revealed that other major vendors are using Xen for their upcoming desktop hypervisors.

Phoenix HyperCore is an embedded hypervisor which allows an independent Linux-based operating system called HyperSpace to run specialized core services side-by-side with Windows Vista. The HyperSpace platform provides a unique computing environment called ManageSpace that PC designers and security innovators can use to host remote management and security applications that are available before, during and after Windows boot up and shut down. Operating like self-contained appliances, these embedded applications such as anti-virus and secure browsing provide stronger protection than is currently available on PCs.
We recently wrote that Phoenix is integrating HyperSpace into NEC notebooks as one of the first manufacterers.
Enhanced by Intel based-processors enabling virtualization technologies, Phoenix HyperSpace provides a secure foundation of ’embedded simplicity.’ PC OEMs can now offer highly-efficient, instantly available applications that promise to deliver new levels of security, up-time, system reliability, remote management, and ease-of-use to PC users.
Phoenix Technologies

VirtualLogix VLX Adds Support for Intel-Based Mobile Internet Devices

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VirtualLogix (previous coverage) today announced that its VLX virtualization solution will be supporting the latest Intel Atom processor Z5XX series-based Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs).

Device makers using VLX on these MIDs can simplify hardware designs, reduce costs and enhance the end-user experience through improved quality of voice, multimedia services and stronger security capabilities. VirtualLogix VLX also offers complete power management support for virtualized environments, which reduces MIDs’ overall energy consumption.

The VLX hypervisor integrates transparently into a Windows or a Linux-based MID with no re-installation of the native operating system (OS) and no intrusion into the existing user environment. As a result, customers can use VLX’s flexible software architecture to securely separate critical applications while boosting the quality of service offerings. Additionally, by servicing the virtual appliances while the main application OS and associated hardware resources are not in use, VLX improves power consumption management.

The demand for next-generation devices is expanding. In a recent report, “Mobile Internet Device (MID) & Chip Market Opportunities,” Forward Concepts forecasted MID shipment growth from 305,000 units in 2008 to 39.6 million units in 2012.

Workspace Service Morphs Into Nimbus 2.0

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Grid is dead, and reinventing itself as Cloud. All kidding aside, the idea of providing a virtual machine instance as a service in the Grid rather than just CPU time with the appropriate environment and libraries to be used by different users isn’t new; it actually makes a lot of sense to provide e.g. a working virtual machine instance for a complex scientific application, which is a lot easier than having to document the correct setup for fellow researchers to implement.

The Workspace Service project part of Globus.org has just announced it’s rebranding and releasing the 2.0 version of what will now be known as Nimbus.

One of the core services of the Virtual Workspace project was orchestrating the deployment of VMs on remote resources as well as the release versioning. Today, Nimbus is a set of tools that together provide a “infrastructure-as-a-service” (IaaS) cloud computing solution targeted specifically towards scientific applications. Many non-scientific use cases are supported as well.

Nimbus allows a client to lease remote resources by deploying virtual machines (VMs) on those resources and configuring them to represent an environment desired by the user.

It was formerly known as the “Virtual Workspace Service” (VWS) but the “workspace service” is technically just one the components in the software collection.

Just as Eucalyptus, it is capable of managing clients that are compatible with the Amazon EC2 service.

Open Source Virtualization management platforms like Nimbus , Eucalyptus, OpenNebula and openQRM are catching on. This probably isn’t the last one we’ll learn about. The question is which one will survive eventually.