News

MTI, an international provider of consulting services and comprehensive information infrastructure solutions for mid- to large-size organisations, has sold the first Vblock 1 solution in Europe.

The customer, Cobweb, is a managed services provider in the UK and Europe. Vblock infrastructure packages are integrated and tested IT solutions stemming from the Virtual Computing Environment coalition, that combine virtualisation, networking, storage, security, and management technologies by Cisco, EMC and VMware.

Vblock 1, which MTI also has installed in its own UK Solution Centre, is based on Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS), EMC’s CLARiiON storage system and VMware’s vSphere 4 platform. The package helps organisations accelerate their adoption of private cloud environments while eliminating the risks traditionally associated with the deployment of this IT model.

During the last six months the “Cobweb Cloud” model has seen great traction in the mid-size and enterprise space. In order to meet this market demand Cobweb required a scalable and efficient “pay-as-you-grow” virtualisation and compute platform. After many months of testing the Vblock with MTI it proved to satisfy the needs of the business.

Cobweb was attracted to the Vblock 1 package as it offers all the benefits associated with the cloud computing such as lower total cost of ownership and faster deployment. The solution can be used as a platform to host a range of existing and new services. MTI has been helping Cobweb build and maintain a best-in-class Microsoft Exchange hosting service for the past five years. The brief includes ensuring high availability in order to serve customers such as the Transport for London website 24/7, whilst having the ability to expand the range of services to include SharePoint and CRM among others.

MTI is certified to the highest Data Centre level with Cisco, EMC and VMware. The company holds the Advanced Data Centre Partner Specialisation (DCNI, DCSN & ATP) from Cisco UKI, having been an EMC Velocity Signature Solutions Centre Partner for many years. MTI recently announced its status as a VMware Premier partner. For organisations looking to learn more about the VCE coalition and Vblock solutions, MTI offers a number of workshops that enable IT administrators to better understand these packages to ultimately make informed decisions.

Centrix Software today announced the results of a survey of IT professionals that looked at the ability of organizations to measure and monitor application usage and consumption, and how IT spend drives business value.

According to the survey, knowing how frequently an application is being used from a company’s IT infrastructure is a challenge for most IT managers: 54 per cent of respondents could give this information but with some difficulty, while 22 per cent found this extremely difficult or impossible to achieve. Only 24 per cent of respondents found it easy to provide this information on application usage.

Similarly, the ability to measure the true cost of application delivery across an organization’s entire estate is an issue for IT professionals, particularly in larger companies, with more than three quarters of respondents stating it would be difficult for them to achieve this.

Of the respondents, 31 per cent said that they would find it extremely difficult or impossible to measure their costs; 45 per cent said it was somewhat difficult; only 24 per cent of those surveyed said it would be easy to provide this information.

Centrix Software’s IT intelligence solutions, Centrix WorkSpace Discovery and WorkSpace iQ, enable organizations to capture vital information around the technologies that are installed and being used across large enterprise environments.

Centrix Discovery is available as a free download and provides a view on all the applications and devices in use within a company’s network.  It can be used to assess where software licensing can be rationalized and to identify good candidates for new platforms such as virtualization.  Centrix iQ provides a deeper level of reporting on application consumption and device use and enables IT to define and apply costs against services and applications, to support chargeback modeling, business service development and financial reporting.

Looks like EMC plans to shut down its Atmos Online cloud storage service immediately, according to its website (see below).

EMC said its hosted storage service will be phased out immediately, and it is offering no guarantee that any current users storing data on it will be able to retrieve it in the future.

Dear Atmos Online Customers,

We are no longer planning to support production usage of Atmos Online.  Going forward, Atmos Online will remain available strictly as a development environment to foster adoption of Atmos technology and Atmos cloud services offered by our continuously expanding range of Service Provider partners who offer production services.  We will no longer be offering paid subscription or support for Atmos Online services.  Any existing production accounts will not be billed either for past or future usage.   We will also no longer provide any SLA or other availability commitment.  As a result, we strongly encourage that you migrate any critical data or production workloads currently served via Atmos Online to one of our partners offering Atmos based services.  An updated list of partners is available here.

Beginning this week, you will see changes to the service consistent with this approach.  In the short term, these changes will neither affect your existing accounts nor your existing data.  You are welcome to continue leveraging Atmos Online for development purposes as needed.  These changes also do not affect our commitment to your success.  If you have any concerns about these changes or appropriate migration strategies and support, please feel free to contact us at [email protected].

Thank you for your cooperation and ongoing interest in the Atmos family of products and services.

Sincerely,

The EMC Cloud Infrastructure Services Team

Cisco announced new technology that supports its Data Center 3.0 strategy to help customers increase the flexibility of their data centers as they become more virtualized and cloud-based.

The new technology advances Cisco’s underlying unified fabric capabilities that help customers enhance the efficiency of information delivery in physical and virtualized data center environments, and manage public and private cloud resources more effectively.

Announced today is Cisco FabricPath, networking technology that dramatically increases network scalability, resource agility, asset efficiency, and performance in the data center.  Cisco also announced new enhancements for Cisco Nexus and Catalyst data center switching platforms, Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) extensions, and new Cisco services.

Key Highlights

Data Center Scalability, Resource Allocation and Performance

• Cisco FabricPath: A feature of Cisco’s data center operating system, NX-OS, Cisco FabricPath addresses emerging data center and cloud computing challenges posed by sophisticated virtualization requirements, dynamic workload mobility needs, and clustered application environments found in high-performance computing.  Based on Cisco’s efforts in support of the emerging Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL) standard, FabricPath provides ground-breaking data center-wide scalability, resiliency and performance.
• Cisco Nexus 7000 F-series I/O module: A new module for the Cisco Nexus 7000 data center switch provides next-generation performance with 32 ports of 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity with low latency, reduced power, and improved return on investment.  Designed for access and aggregation layer applications, the I/O module delivers up to 320 gigabits per second of switching capacity and supports both Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity, providing an easy migration path while protecting existing technology investments.  It supports the Data Center Bridging and TRILL standards with Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) to be enabled in the near future through a software upgrade.
• Cisco FabricPath Switching System (FSS): The FabricPath Switching System is an integrated, validated, hardware and software system that delivers the FabricPath functionality to build massively scalable domains. It is based on the FabricPath feature of NX-OS and FabricPath-capable hardware, such as the Nexus 7000 with F-Series I/O modules.

Application Performance Optimization

Cisco WAAS accelerates application traffic over the wide area network, enabling enterprises to consolidate applications into data centers and utilize cloud computing, while ensuring performance and productivity for users in remote sites or on the go.

• WAAS as an on-demand service for the Cisco Integrated Services Router (ISR) G2: Cisco WAAS can now be deployed in the branch office as an on-demand service direct from select models of the Cisco Integrated Services Router (ISR) G2, providing increased business agility and greater operational simplicity.
• Web and software-as-a-service (SaaS): A new version of Cisco WAAS, version 4.2, offers performance optimization for Web applications deployed in the data center, or hosted in the cloud and delivered as a service (SaaS).
• Windows-server-on-WAAS (WoW): Cisco WAAS 4.2 provides better support for Windows-server-on-WAAS (WoW), with fast access to data center and cloud applications, and locally hosted Windows services, on a single platform.
• WAAS Mobile for the Cloud: WAAS Mobile 3.5 for the cloud can now be easily deployed in a public cloud infrastructure for faster application performance for mobile users.

Higher Performance Data Center Switching

• Cisco Catalyst 4948E Switch: Building upon the success of the Cisco Catalyst 4900 Series Switches with more than 10 million ports sold, Cisco introduces the 4948E Switch with increased capacity, superior performance, microburst protection for predictable latency, plus automation and visibility. The switch also supports wire-speed IPv6, in addition to auto-provisioning and smart call-home features.

New Cisco Services for Data Center Deployment

• New Cisco Cloud Enablement services: Backed by a broad ecosystem of industry-leading partners, Cisco today launched a set of services to help customers transform the data center. Cloud Enablement Services, including strategy, planning, design, and implementation, help customers successfully transition the data center to a cloud infrastructure to quickly realize the benefits of a cloud operational model.
• Cisco Intelligent Automation Solutions: Cisco is also introducing Cisco Intelligent Automation for IT Services, including new versions of the Tidal Enterprise Scheduler and Tidal Enterprise Orchestrator products that provide real-time IT process orchestration and batch automation to simplify data center management and increase operational efficiency and performance.
• Cisco Validated Design guides: Cisco validated design guides serve as blueprints for ready-to-deploy IT across a variety of domains, including Cisco Virtualized Multi-Tenant Data Center (VMDC) solutions for private cloud design.

Price and Availability

• The Cisco Nexus 7000 F-Series I/O module entry-level pricing is $35,000.  Cisco’s Enhanced Layer 2 License for FabricPath is priced at $25,000.  Both products are scheduled to be available in the third quarter of 2010.  Cisco WAAS Release 4.2 software for the ISR G2 starts at $2,500 and is available now.   The Cisco Catalyst 4948E is available now and is priced from $10,995.

VMware has announced new features of VMware Go, a web-based service that provides small and medium businesses (SMBs) with an easy on-ramp to virtualizing their applications by automating the installation and configuration of the industry-leading hypervisor, VMware ESXi.

With VMware Go, SMBs can not only easily virtualize servers and create new virtual machines (VM), but customers that have created VMs on VMware Server can now move to the more scalable ESXi platform without losing the investment they’ve made in creating and fine tuning VMs.
Another new feature of VMware Go is Collective Intelligence, which helps guide a customer’s virtualization experience by aggregating user data to show virtualization best practices. With Collective Intelligence, users can view what other users have done in each stage of the virtualization process so they can be more confident they are making the right virtualization decisions.

Additionally, users can view reports and dashboards with such information as the average number of VMs users are creating per ESXi server, the top five hardware types on which the community is running ESXi, or the top five virtual appliances that have been downloaded from VMware Go.

VMware Go Simplifies and Accelerates Virtualization in Three Simple Steps:

1. Initial ESXi server setup

— Unique web-browser interface, intuitive wizard set-up, and collective intelligence guides accelerate installation and setup process.
— Built in hardware compatibility check automates the process of selecting physical server environments.
— Migrate VMware Server virtual machines to ESXi in an automated fashion.

2. Virtual machine creation

— Leverage existing physical server configuration, install a prebuilt virtual appliance, or start with a new, clean virtual machine.

3. Manage ESXi servers and virtual machines

— Basic management interface simplifies changes to a virtual environment.
— Monitor virtual machines for basic performance and resource utilization.
— Patch scan and remediation for ESXi.
— Scan and update virtual machines from a central console.

VMware Go was developed in partnership with Shavlik Technologies, a member of VMware’s Technology Alliance Partner Program.

Ulteo, the Open Source Enterprise Virtual Desktop and Application Delivery Solution company co-founded by veteran open source entrepreneurs Gaël Duval (founder of Mandrake Linux, a popular Linux distribution) and Thierry Koehrlen (co-founder of Intalio, the leading Open Source BPMS and Cloud solution), aims to build and deliver an open source virtual desktop solution for small and large organizations to deliver their end users applications in a more efficient, cost effective and centralized fashion.

“After our OVD v2.0 release that provides a nice web portal access to applications delivered with Ulteo we have received extremely good feedback from all sizes of organizations. But we did not anticipate that the large organizations would consider rolling out Ulteo OVD to 10,000 and even 30,000 users fairly so quickly”, says Thierry Koehrlen, CEO and co-Founder.

“This makes sense because we provide a nice, modular and cost effective solution, so it’s completely normal that large organizations, telecom and cloud computing companies or outsourcing firms are planning to roll out a virtual desktop solution to many more users than in the past. And since we are a customer-driven vendor, we adapted our roadmap and have built this OVD v2.5 scalability version. It will be useful for smaller organizations as well”.

“In this v2.5 version, we really unlocked the OVD to accommodate much larger projects”, comments Gaël Duval CTO and co-Founder. “First of all, on the directory side, we can now work with fairly large directories up to 55,000 users without any trouble. But we also wanted to make sure that on server side the OVD could scale up easily to run more active users. On the Windows side, we leverage the scalability delivered by a typical Windows TS server. And on the Linux side, we are getting close to the full potential of the server capabilities when it is correctly setup with a good CPU/RAM ratio. By intensively sharing resources between all active users, we can fully optimize the CPU and RAM usage, again making the OVD more cost-effective.”

Ultimately, this allows IT department to design their Ulteo infrastructure with more flexibility and choices. Ulteo OVD v2.5 also offers some new features like more usage reporting capabilities and auto detection of web browser language for example. It is also available in more languages thanks to the coordinated effort of the Ulteo community of users and partners.