News

IDC: Australian Server Market Reaches $1 Billion, Mainly Thanks To Virtualization

April 28, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

The Australian server market reached $US1.001 billion during 2007 according to analyst firm IDC, reports iTWire. Although volume only grew by 2 %, that figure masks the huge increase in spending driven by strong growth in the high-end enterprise market.

That segment grew by an amazing 30.2 % due in part to the interest in virtualisation.

“Virtualisation helped boost server revenue numbers in 2007 with richer configurations of servers being deployed to drive space, utilisation and energy efficiency,” says Matthew Oostveen, research manager of Asia/Pacific enterprise servers and workstations research at IDC.

Spending growth in the midrange enterprise and volume segments also contributed to the overall 17 % growth.

“Virtualisation was also one of the key underpinnings for the 40 percent increase in x86 blade server shipments in 2007,” said Oostveen.

Differences in market segments resulted in IBM being the number one vendor in terms of revenue (followed by HP and Dell), but IDC’s analysis by volume puts HP at the top of the list followed by Dell. Sun came in at number three for revenue, but was the only leading vendor to achieve year-on-year revenue growth, according to IDC.

[Source: VMBlog]

Avocent Releases DSView 3 Power Manager, Lets You Track Power Consumption In Your Data Center

April 28, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Avocent has introduced new power management software that enables users to monitor and measure the power consumption and energy usage of IT equipment in data centers in real time. DSView 3 Power Manager is an add-on “plug-in” to Avocent’s DSView 3 management software that provides centralized management for physical and virtual IT assets. DSView 3 Power Manager adds the ability to gather and aggregate power information, whether that be a power distribution unit, rack, or row of racks, to “help data center managers improve operating efficiencies, reduce outages, and reduce overall energy consumption costs”.

The news release cites a recent IDC study, which found that the expense to power and cool the worldwide installed base of servers will grow to $44.5 billion, equivalent to 70 % of new server spending, by 2010.

Avocent’s claims its new DSView 3 Power Manager is able to provide energy consumption level data for a consolidated view of energy use within the data center. It aggregates electrical usage by kilowatt (kW) and converts it into kilowatt hours (kWh) – how companies are charged for electricity. Through the software’s cost calculator, users can enter their utility charges to calculate power costs making it possible for IT departments to monitor and chargeback power usage costs.

The Avocent DSView 3 Power Manager offers a number of reporting and alarm features to further help IT managers track power consumption, including:

Consumption Reports: track power and energy consumption for user-defined time periods for data centers, power source busses, racks
Trend Reports: tracks power consumption over time and aggregates data for customized usage reports
Thresholds: set warning and critical level thresholds with customizable actions for when thresholds are exceeded
Alarms: customizable alarms provide preemptive notification when thresholds are approached

The DSView 3 Power Manager is compatible with the latest revision of Avocent DSView 3 software and both will be available in July. The new revision of DSView 3 software, version 3.6, will feature improved functionality and ease of use with simpler deployment and maintenance, more thorough device support, and enhanced VMware support for combined access and control of both virtual and physical servers.

Tideway Announces Availability Of Tideway Foundation 7.1

April 28, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Tideway, a London-based provider of IT automation software, today announced the availability of Tideway Foundation 7.1. The latest version of Tideway’s application dependency mapping (ADM) solution allows users to identify what has changed in their IT environment and why, view authorized, approved and expected changes, and carve out slices of data for more individualized and powerful reporting.

From the press release:

“Developed in collaboration with Tideway’s customer advisory board, Foundation 7.1’s new change control capabilities enable users to define a baseline “approved” state for their environment and compare all observed changes to the approved and expected states of that environment. This sophisticated change intelligence goes beyond merely providing data and offers users suggestions about what action should be taken to reconcile and explain discrepancies between the approved environment and the “as is” state captured by Foundation. Users can delve deeper into Foundation data to troubleshoot and determine the authorization status of specific lifecycle changes.”

“Foundation 7.1 also offers enhanced capabilities for managing virtual environments and controlling virtual machine (VM) sprawl. The cross-platform and vendor-agnostic solution allows users to monitor the appearance, disappearance and migration of virtual hosts and reconcile those changes directly with their authorization status to help eliminate unnecessary outages and excessive license charges.”

[Source: Virtually Speaking]

Xen 3.2.1 Released

April 27, 2008 by Kris Buytaert Leave a Comment

Keir Fraser has announced the availability of Xen 3.2.1 and 3.1.4, both bugfix releases in the Xen 3.1 and 3.2 series.

The 3.2.1 release contains architectural improvements and new user-visible features including:

Xen Security Modules (XSM)
ACPI S3 suspend-to-RAM support for the host system
Preliminary PCI pass-through support (using appropriate Intel or AMD I/O-virtualization hardware)
Preliminary support for a wider range of bootloaders in fully virtualized (HVM)guests, using full emulation of x86 real mode
Faster emulation of standard (non-super) VGA modes for HVM guests
Configurable timer modes for HVM guests, depending on how the guest OS manages time-keeping
Many other changes and enhancements across all supported machine architectures

As usual downloads are available at Xen.org

Novell CTO Jeff Jaffe Outlines Strategic Roadmap (Including Virtualization)

April 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Novell CTO Jeff Jaffe published a blog post earlier today outlining the company’s roadmap in seven areas: policy, identity, virtualization, Linux, orchestration, compliance and collaboration. Of course, the virtualization one interested us the most:

In 2006, Novell shipped Xen as an integrated part of our SUSE Linux Enterprise platform. In 2007, we collaborated with Microsoft to deliver the first cross-platform solution for running Windows on Linux.

At BrainShare, for the first time anywhere in the world, we demonstrated live migration of Windows Server 2008. We had it running as a Xen virtual machine on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Our vision for virtualization is that the p-Distro becomes the core operating system for the physical machine and hosts the v-Distros. To get here, we have work to do: performance tuning, ISV certification, systems management, security improvements and device drivers.

Read the rest here.

Parallels Named Red Herring 100 Award Finalist

April 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Server virtualization firm Parallels has been named a finalist in the Red Herring 100 Awards‘ selection of the most innovative private technology companies based in North America.

In preparation for the formal announcement of its Top 100 Award, the Red Herring editorial board surveyed the entrepreneurial scene throughout the North American region and identified the top 200 out of more than 800 closely evaluated companies that are “leading the next wave of innovation”.

Evaluations were made on both quantitative and qualitative criteria such as financial performance, innovation, management, strategy, and ecosystem integration.

Joel Dreyfuss, Editor-in-Chief of Red Herring noted:

”We can see the exciting evolution of the technology sector reflected in the quality and variety of exceptional companies that we had to choose from in putting our list together. It was tough to choose just 200 finalists from such a large list of excellent contenders, and we are very happy with the quality of the companies we selected as finalists.”

According to Red Herring, Parallels is on the list due to its innovative and entrepreneurial achievements. The 100 winning companies will be announced at the Red Herring North America event, May 12-14, in San Jose.

[Source: The Hosting News]