News

Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), the organization bringing the IT industry together to collaborate on systems management standards development, validation, promotion and adoption, today announced the availability of two new documents produced by its Open Cloud Standards Incubator.

The documents – “Use Cases and Interactions for Managing Clouds” and “Architecture for Managing Clouds” – will form the foundation for DMTF’s ongoing cloud standards work.

In addition, DMTF has also launched the Cloud Management Workgroup (CMWG), to develop cloud management standards based on the recommendations outlined in the Incubator documents.

The “Use Cases and Interactions for Managing Clouds” and the “Architecture for Managing Clouds” describe how standardized interfaces and data formats can be used to manage cloud environments. Together, they provide a comprehensive overview of DMTF’s recommended use cases, interactions, data formats and overall architecture for cloud management.

Moving forward, the CMWG will focus on using this information to develop a set of standards that deliver architectural semantics and implementation details to achieve interoperable management of clouds between service providers and their consumers and developers.

Additional areas of emphasis within the workgroup will include creating cloud service management models and developing mappings to prevalent infrastructure models, including DMTF’s Open Virtualization Format (OVF). The CMWG will also continue collaborating with DMTF alliance partners including Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), Open Grid Forum (OGF), TeleManagement Forum (TM Forum), and Cloud Security Alliance (CSA).

DMTF announced the formation of the Open Cloud Standards Incubator in April 2009, to address the need for open management standards for cloud computing. Led by many key stakeholders in the cloud computing space, the Incubator developed a set of informational specifications and processes to advance the standardization of cloud management.

In addition to the “Use Cases and Interactions for Managing Clouds” and “Architecture for Managing Clouds,” a whitepaper entitled “The Interoperable Cloud” is also available.

Documents developed by the Incubator can be downloaded here.

Flexera Software, provider of strategic solutions for Application Usage Management to application producers and their customers, has announced the availability of its updated FlexNet Producer Suite for Software Vendors and FlexNet Producer Suite for High-Tech Manufacturers.

Both suites include enhancements addressing the growing demand for application virtualization — enabling vendors to capitalize on the revenue opportunities associated with application virtualization, cloud computing and the creation of virtual appliances that increase manufacturing efficiencies and flexibility.

Key enhancements made to the FlexNet Producer Suites, which enable revenue growth and reduced operating costs through software licensing, electronic software delivery and entitlement management, include:

FlexNet Publisher — provides software licensing to secure and grow market share through flexible pricing, packaging, licensing, and protection of their software. FlexNet Publisher Virtualization Option contains patent pending technology enabling developers to establish varying enforcement strategies by customer segment and geography to protect and monetize their software in virtualized environments.

• Virtual Use Detection — detects if end-users are trying to deploy the application and license server on a virtual machine. It protects against revenue leakage by instructing the application or the license server to “operate” or “not operate” in virtual environments. It also delivers the foundation to enter new markets and/or monetize solutions in existing markets in new ways.

• Flexible Monetization Options — supports flexible revenue models ranging from preventing usage of software in a virtual environment to enabling software to run in virtualized environments while ensuring compliance. Flexibility can be restricted by ensuring licenses are bound to physical machines even while the software is running inside a virtual machine. It enables monetization of software and virtual appliances running in VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V-based public clouds.

• Tamper Proofing — adds WiBu dongle support to prevent tampering with the software licensing once the software is deployed. The inclusion of a physical dongle, which is coupled to the software via a software licensing system, greatly reduces the means to pirate software while still easily allowing the software to move from machine-to-machine.

FlexNet Embedded — gives high-tech manufacturers the power to unlock revenue with tailored software licensing, pricing, and packaging solution for their embedded software, including support for creating and running virtual appliances to replace hardware devices.

• License Pool Monitoring — provides functionality for serving and monitoring a counted pool of devices through the prebuilt FlexNet Embedded server application. This availability of an out-of-the-box server application greatly reduces development time and effort.

• Easier License Updates — adds support for a “push” model (in addition to a “pull” model where the device contacts the server when it needs a license update), where the server pushes updated licenses to devices. For devices requiring uninterrupted operation, the push architecture ensures a device’s primary functionality is not interrupted by server communications.

• Backup License Capability — ensures availability of FlexNet Embedded served pools of software licenses through server failover. The server and device APIs, communication protocols, and license rights have been enhanced to support a backup license server managing a license pool if the primary server becomes unavailable, further increasing reliability.

FlexNet Operations — enables easy and efficient support for new revenue models by quickly creating product configurations to meet market demands, cutting operational costs by automating the generation, fulfillment, and activation of entitlements, and improving customer satisfaction by providing a consistent experience and a 24/7 self-service web portal for your end users.

• New Revenue Models — enables new revenue models for virtualized and region-based software licensing. Supports FlexNet Publisher’s ability to detect; Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware virtualization and time zones. Delivers new revenue opportunities via new licensing models for cloud computing, the ability to prevent revenue leakage in virtualized environments, and the ability to grow revenues by pricing differently based on geography.

• Channel Partner Self-Service — new make-to-stock channel management allows tracking of software entitlements through a multi-tier channel. This enables channel partner self-service management of software entitlements while ensuring data privacy. The results are lower operational costs, the ability to track partner performance and enhanced partner relations.

• Superior Automation — allows internet and offline activation to run faster and more efficiently, reducing support calls and lowering network bandwidth costs. Devices are automatically tracked as they move within an enterprise, providing better visibility into the installed base. Efficient bulk operations notify upgraded, up-sold or renewed customers via email and fulfills their software licenses automatically, enabling revenue growth through subscription licensing and lower operational costs.

Novell and Tencent recently announced the establishment of a research laboratory in Shenzhen, China to jointly develop an Internet Data Center (IDC) cloud computing platform.

Tencent, China’s largest Internet service portal with more than 480 million active users, is adopting SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and PlateSpin Orchestrate as its auto-deployment system.

As part of the agreement, Tencent will also utilize intelligent workload management solutions from Novell, including PlateSpin Workload Management, to create a flexible and easy-to-expand IDC cloud platform that will allow users to build, purchase and run business applications in a faster and more convenient way.

Typically, IDC vendors lease resources from solution providers and make a profit by then leasing space, bandwidth and other resources to customers. With the rise of Web 2.0 and bandwidth-intensive multi-media sites, as well as increased business usage, demand for the IDC solutions has grown.

Because of this rapid development, the IDC industry and a number of Tencent’s operations have met with considerable challenges. To address these challenges, Tencent built its virtualization and data center engine using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with Xen Virtualization and Novell PlateSpin Orchestrate. To date, the engine has achieved significant results including more efficient utilization, operational flexibility, improved productivity, lower costs and greater compatibility and security.

Diskeeper Corporation has officially shipped V-locity 2.0, a new virtual platform disk optimizer designed to deliver invisible background optimization of all Windows Guest operating systems running on the VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V platforms.

New to V-locity 2.0, is the addition of the breakthrough IntelliWrite fragmentation prevention technology originally introduced with Diskeeper 2010. Utilizing IntelliWrite technology, V-locity writes files to the disk to prevent up to 85 percent of fragmentation from occurring before it even happens.

Already a VMware and Microsoft partner for its Diskeeper performance software, V-locity was made to create a virtual-specific product that not only performs defragmentation functions, but also synchronizes the complex and ongoing activity between host and multiple guest operating systems in a virtualized environment.

Diskeeper Corporation’s proprietary technology, IntelliWrite writes files in a non-fragmented condition. Copy on write solutions (e.g. as used by Snapshots) take action on changes to data at a block level. Moving data, as is done in a defragmentation job to consolidate file fragments in a logical file system, can trigger copy on write solutions to take extra actions such as using more storage capacity, unnecessarily. Writing a file contiguously eliminates the need to defragment it after it has been created.

InvisiTasking technology, another Diskeeper Corporation proprietary technology, is specifically engineered to allow “background” applications to operate with zero impact/overhead on a system. With V-locity 2, the InvisiTasking technology has been “enlightened” to operate across a virtual platform. Even as more VMs are added to a host platform or dynamically migrated to new hosts (e.g. vMotion, Live Migration), the enlightened InvisiTasking will continue to dynamically adjust to changing environments, providing V-locity 2.0 users with “Set It and Forget It”  optimization of their virtual disk platforms.

V-locity also frees up vital storage resources by eliminating virtual disk “bloat”.

This is the wasted disk space that takes place when virtual disks are set to dynamically grow but don’t then shrink when users or applications remove data. V-locity actually compacts the virtual disk, thereby preventing waste and allowing IT Managers to better allocate their virtual storage resources.

Estimated Street price begins at $199.95 per CPU-core.

Quest Software has announced the addition of several enhancements to Foglight, its application performance monitoring product.

Enriched features in the latest version of Foglight simplify application support and IT operations roles and drastically shorten time-to-value across mixed physical and virtual systems, multiple datacenters, third-party tools and complex deployments.

In this new edition of Foglight, the expanded User Experience Management capabilities provide businesses with the ability to manage online revenue and conversion rates in real time, analyze trends in customer buying patterns and understand how application usability, performance, functionality and content affect conversion rates.

New Foglight features include the following:

• Enhanced management visibility: Get the job done quickly with dashboards for every stakeholder – including executives, line-of-business, IT operations and support – coupled with role-based workflow support and drag-and-drop features.
• Service-based alert subscription: Streamline your day by only subscribing to critical services that impact your business and your responsibilities. Become instantly aware of any condition within the monitored enterprise that impacts that service.
• Simplified installation, deployment and maintenance: Shorten time-to-value with a wizard-based, common user interface that helps users and administrators configure and install Foglight within hours.
• Greater user productivity: Easily transition Foglight metrics into information that all business stakeholders can understand with wizard-driven scheduling and reporting.
• Integrate with your existing monitoring tools for faster time-to-value: Implement Foglight as an application-centric monitoring console to complement an existing framework or as a single enterprise console. Foglight can seamlessly integrate inbound alerts and host data from other monitors, or export them to other management consoles that organizations might be using.

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has launched a virtual appliance of IBM’s DB2 Express-C software running on the Ubuntu cloud computing platform in private and public cloud configurations.

Canonical also announced that IBM has completed validation of the full version of DB2 software on Ubuntu 10.04 Long Term Support Server Edition.

This announcement is the latest in the growing ecosystem for Ubuntu 10.04, which launched in April with declarations of support from more than 80 organisations.

Ubuntu is one of the most popular guest infrastructure layers on cloud services like Rackspace and Amazon EC2. Increasingly, it is also being deployed as the host cloud infrastructure layer (as Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud) by private organisations and ISPs. IBM DB2 Express-C software will be available however Ubuntu is deployed on a cloud.

IBM DB2 Express-C is a no-charge community edition of DB2 software. It is ideal for small businesses and multi-branch companies, as well as developers and business partners who serve these clients. DB2 Express-C can be setup quickly, is easy-to-use, and includes self-managing capabilities. It also embodies all of the core features of more scalable DB2 editions, including pureXML technology for powering Web 2.0 and SOA-based solutions.