News

Teneros Joins VMware Technology Alliance Partner Program

June 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Teneros recently announced that the company has joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner Program (TAP) as a Select Partner. VMware’s authorized resellers are able to provide simple, effective email continuity via the Teneros Application Continuity Appliances.

“Teneros Application Continuity Appliances effectively leverage VMware virtualization to solve email downtime, enabling customer’s high availability and disaster recovery of Microsoft Exchange®,” said Bernie Mills, senior director, alliances programs at VMware. “We are pleased that Teneros is helping to deliver added value to customers with innovative technology combined with the significant business benefits of VMware virtualization, including lower capital and operating expenses, business continuity, strengthened security and reduced energy consumption.”

According to the news release, Teneros appliances are designed to meet the email continuity demands of today’s businesses. The plug-&-go appliances protect essential communications by assuring 24X7, ongoing email operation and access to valuable email data, calendar information, and email attachments that power business operations worldwide. This process is transparent to end-users. Client software (Outlook, Outlook Web Access, etc.) and access devices (laptop computers, desktop computers, mobile devices) continue to operate normally with complete email access and functionality maintained.

Teneros appliances incorporate VMware’s virtualization technology to facilitate their remote support, upgrade, and monitoring performed by Teneros’ Network Operations Center. As a result of including VMware technologies, Teneros can deliver the requisite levels of email reliability demanded by successful corporations today.

With more than 700 members worldwide, the VMware TAP program works with 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.

[Source: Sourcewire]

VMware Site Recovery Manager 1.0 Released

June 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VMware has announced its new tool for disaster recovery management and automation of a virtual infrastructure, VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 1.0 (build 97878).

VMware SRM 1.0 is part of VMware’s suite of management and automation products for the datacenter, leverages virtualization to simplify business continuity planning and testing, and reduces the risk and complexity associated with executing disaster recovery.

“Effective disaster recovery has been a significant challenge for many organizations,” said Raghu Raghuram, vice president of products and solutions at VMware. “With the delivery of VMware Site Recovery Manager, VMware removes hurdles associated with disaster recovery planning and implementation. Through our innovative disaster recovery testing, management, and automation capabilities, we bring predictability back into the hands of IT and help eliminate risks associated with human error.”

Site Recovery Manager works seamlessly with VMware Infrastructure, VMware VirtualCenter, and replication software from storage partners to provide integrated disaster recovery management and automation. It provides:

Integrated management of disaster recovery plans. Create, update and document recovery plans directly from VMware VirtualCenter.
Non-disruptive testing of disaster recovery plans. Execute automated tests of recovery plans in an isolated testing environment using the recovery plan that would be used in an actual failover. Hardware configuration dependencies are eliminated and testing can occur without impacting production systems.
Automated failover and recovery. Automate execution of the recovery process, eliminating many of the slow and unreliable manual processes common in traditional disaster recovery.

VMware’s parent company, EMC, is one of the first vendors to officially announce support for Site Recovery Manager. Other vendors showing support for the product include 3Par, Dell, FalconStor Software, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, LeftHand Networks, and NetApp.

Pricing for Site Recovery Manager is based on the number of processors in the servers. SRM can be purchased as a standalone product or purchased as part of VMware’s Management and Automation Bundle which includes two-processor versions of VMware Site Recovery Manager, VMware Lifecycle Manager, and VMware Lab Manager or VMware Stage Manager. There’s also a trial version available for download.

Release: VmwAROS 0.8 Beta

June 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VmwAROS is a pre-configured AROS Research Operating System environment for VMware.

A new version of this AROS distribution has been released. VmwAROS is available in two flavours: a virtual environment for VMware, and a live-cd that runs on top of real hardware, which can be installed on the hard drive as any other operating system. The new beta version includes lots of new games and applications for AROS, includes a complete C, C++ environment and E interpreter, and fixes an annoying compatibility problem that plagues current nightly builds on some hardware, by using a second “emergency” kernel.

[Source: OSNews]

Fortinet Patents Four New Network Virtualization And Multi-Threat Security Related Inventions

June 20, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Fortinet, a provider of unified threat management (UTM) solutions, has announced that the US Patent and Trademark Office has awarded the company four additional patents for network virtualization and security related inventions. These new patents strengthen Fortinet’s intellectual property portfolio, bringing Fortinet’s total awarded patents to 17.

Charles Cote, Fortinet Regional Director for Australia and New Zealand commented on ARN:

“Security consolidation and virtualisation are key business trends for enterprise networks. Fortinet is the clear technology pioneer in the unified threat management space, with a long track record of innovation. Our security consolidation solutions based on these new virtualisation patents will help our customers build more efficient and easier to manage security systems.”

The four new patents reflect Fortinet’s focus, on innovative methods for processing network data while applying various security-related filtration processes within a consolidated and accelerated platform. Three of the newly awarded patents are directed to the routing and processing of data in virtualized environments.

“These patents support Fortinet’s innovation and vision for an integrated, multi-threat and virtualised approach to network security – groundswell areas for the networking and security industries,” said Michael Xie, CTO and co-founder of Fortinet. “As we continue our strong research and development efforts, our growing patent portfolio provides momentum for accelerating the course of innovation we are undertaking.”

[Source: ARN]

DSA Research Group Launches OpenNEbula Technology Preview

June 19, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

The dsa-research group has announced that a new Technology Preview (TP2) of the OpenNEbula (ONE) Virtual Infrastructure Engine is available for download under the terms of the Apache License, Version 2.0.

ONE enables the dynamic deployment and re-allocation of virtual machines on a pool of physical resources, so extending the benefits of existing virtualization platforms from a single physical resource to a pool of resources, decoupling the server not only from the physical infrastructure but also from the physical location.

ONE Technology Preview 2 extends the functionality for management of both physical resources and virtual machines, and provides resources for developers, making public the Trac web interface.

More details are available here.

HP And VMware Tighten Partnership With Deeper Software Integration

June 19, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

HP today announced it is expanding its strategic collaboration with VMware to introduce new integrated software offerings that help customers seamlessly automate the management of heterogeneous environments.

New integrations of HP business technology optimization (BTO) software for the VMware virtualization platform aims to allow customers to seamlessly manage across both physical and virtual environments.

The offerings include:

HP Business Service Management – monitoring of physical and virtual environments. Products include HP Business Availability Center, HP Operations Center and HP Network Management Center.
HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping and HP Universal CMDB – discovery of virtualized environments and accurate tracking and reporting of changes.
HP Business Service Automation – automation of change processes across virtual and physical environments. Products include HP Server Automation Center, HP Client Automation and HP Operations Orchestration.

In addition, HP has worked with VMware to make software bundles available that combine the VMware Infrastructure 3 software suite and additional automation products with HP Insight Control Environment. These bundles offer customers comprehensive and seamless physical and virtual platform management.

HP also announced that its VMware Authorized Training Center (VATC) is the first to train more than 10,000 students on VMware certifying courses required for the VMware Certified Professional exam. All VATCs offer education programs using VMware-certified instructors and course materials. With the combination of HP’s global presence, remote training delivery infrastructure and expertise with the VMware platform, HP Education Services offers effective education programs for the broad range of VMware products.

“VMware and HP are working together to make virtual environments easier to manage and to get more professionals trained to implement our joint solutions,” said Brian Byun, vice president, Global Partners and Solutions, VMware. “We’re embracing and extending management and automation products from both companies to provide comprehensive solutions for managing the reality of customer environments with a mix of both virtual and physical systems. By collaborating with HP, we hope to bring to market additional management solutions that simplify these environments for our customers.”