News

DataCore Software, a provider of storage virtualization software, today announced that Waterstons, a Gold Accredited Partner, has selected its storage virtualization software to provide the infrastructure to power their cloud-based computing service.

Waterstons provides cloud hosting services from a purpose-built Tier 3 data center in the North of England, monitored and managed around-the-clock from their regional operations center in Durham.

Through this service Waterstons are offering a comprehensive range of options: customers can take a single, virtual machine from Waterstons for only a month, or an entire network of servers – interconnected with one or more private, virtual networks – residing on a highly available infrastructure.

Waterstons offers flexible and resilient Internet connectivity options for hosted infrastructure and offers hosting and co-location of physical hardware. Flexibility is paramount – many customers use a combination of offerings, and Waterstons specializes in providing a tailored service to meet customer needs.

Underpinning the service is a pair of DataCore SANsymphony servers on Dell hardware, operating in a synchronously mirrored configuration and thereby avoiding a single point of failure scenario. Waterstons has made a considerable investment in eliminating single points of failure in the infrastructure, which is seen as critical to providing a high-quality service suitable for running hosted line of business applications. Waterstons is currently commissioning a second identical infrastructure in a geographically remote data center in order to provide replicated disaster recovery (DR).

StorageCraft UK, a provider of disaster recovery, system migration, data protection and security solutions for servers, desktops and laptops, has announced the launch of VirtualBoot to enable temporary restoration of servers and keep organisations in business whilst repairs to physical machines are made.

VirtualBoot, which is part of the latest version of its flagship ShadowProtect suite, improves on the original virtualisation features, such as Hardware Independent Restore (HIR), to give administrators the ability to boot any ShadowProtect backup image into a virtual machine using Sun/Oracle VirtualBox.

To do this IT administrators simply need to right-click on the ShadowProtect backup image file and boot it as a virtual machine, which takes approximately two minutes, regardless of the size of the server or backup image; even terabytes can be booted in a few minutes.

In addition to the functionality offered by VirtualBoot, ShadowProtect also allows easy migration from physical environments to virtual ones, and from virtual to physical — or any combination of the two (P2P, P2V, V2V or V2P). In conjunction with the Hardware Independent Restore technology in ShadowProtect, which enables organisations to change environment no matter what kind of hardware they are switching to or from, this offers significant savings in terms of recovery times and costs.

Alongside VirtualBoot, ShadowProtect now offers functionality that enables all backup images to be converted into a virtual machine either in .VHD or .VMDK format without the need to use any third-party technology, providing greater flexibility and control over your systems.

Flexiant, the cloud software and services company, announced today it is to offer CohesiveFT’s cloud overlay, VPN-Cubed, on Extility, enabling secure virtual private clouds.

CohesiveFT’s product suite, developed from decades of enterprise management experience within a cloud-oriented engineering organization, directly addresses the needs of the cloud user. VPN-Cubed will provide Flexiant customers with enhanced networking tools including static addressing, end-to-end communication encapsulation and encryption; as well as the use of normally cloud-prohibited protocols, complete topology security and control in third party infrastructure.

One of only three independent public cloud providers in Europe and five world wide, Flexiant launched Europe’s first cloud platform, Flexiscale, in 2007. Extility, Flexiant’s licensed virtualised cloud platform, launched earlier this year effectively enabling hosting providers to compete on an even playing field with global market leaders of proprietary rapid provisioning infrastructures.

Extility offers a viable alternative to the cost of developing a cloud computing platform in-house. Licensees generate substantial savings and reduced energy consumption slashes operating costs and shrinks carbon footprints.

All the benefits of real-time server estate management are delivered to end users through Extility’s unique user interface and API. Users can shape server requirements to meet fluctuations in demand, allowing provisioning and reconfiguration of servers in seconds or minutes rather than hours or days.

Extility’s licensees see substantial capital expenditure savings, streamlining of technical resource and progressive efficiencies in server utilisation, allowing them to achieve business acquisition and profitability targets. This in turn enables them to offer Extility’s unified platform at a realistic cost.

Importantly, in times of challenging margins and market fluidity, sales gestation periods are dramatically shortened through accelerated delivery timescales, so reducing time to invoice and to attaining positive, profitable cash flow.

CohesiveFT has been providing enterprise-grade virtualisation and cloud products since 2006 (Elastic Server® and VPN-Cubed). Its early participation in the market provides it with the expertise to help enterprises understand the real benefits of cloud computing from assessment through to deployment. Elastic Server, a multicloud virtual server, will also be available soon on Extility.

Hyper9, the enterprise-class virtualization management company, today announced its IT Director/Manager Lens, the second in a series of management-specific filters developed to help organizations optimize the business value of their virtualization initiatives.

Hyper9’s IT Director/Manager Lens provides a single, consolidated management view into multiple points of potential “VM stall”, enabling organizations to overcome issues on the path from low-risk/low reward server virtualization to high-risk/high-reward application and service virtualization. Hyper9 attacks the key causes of VM stall with the following features:

Availability & Performance Assurance – trend uptime, availability and performance of the virtual infrastructure by business units or applications delivered; receive proactive alerts on critical points of resource contention.

• Performance Analyzer – pinpoint memory, CPU and storage I/O contention
• Uptime Check – understand the uptime of your VMs and hosts by cluster or other business mappings
• Hot/Cold Map – show when and where you’re running out of resources and when you need to add more
• Assurance Alerts – provides 40+ alerts covering availability, performance and configuration best practices

Capacity Planning & Budgeting – understand resource consumption trends across your datacenter; forecast shortages; understand if your current infrastructure can support new applications/services.

• What-If Analysis – add/remove host resources, VMs and applications; understand the impact of how well you are maximizing efficiency for best practices and industry comparisons
• Application Usage Profile & Modeling – profile application usage and determine if a given application will be supported or if additional capacity is required
• Resource Containers – model the CPU, memory and shared storage resources available in your environment; understand when you will run out of resources across your datacenter, clusters, production or development environment

Resource Optimization – maximize your existing resources by balancing workloads to accommodate demand variability and identify wasted resources.

• Datacenter Explorer – search, report and visualize information across tens of thousands of elements and relationships across your virtual environment and inside your guests
• Instant Sprawl ID & Alerts – control storage, CPU and memory for recovery of expensive resources; identify over-/under-allocated VMs; track idle/stale VMs, zombie VMs, orphaned files and more

Cost Allocation & Business Transparency – build trust in the virtual environment by sharing Hyper9 insights; show the right information to the right people through the Hyper9 dashboard; understand virtual environment resource usage by business entity such as department, project, line of business, etc.

• Business Labels – automatically tag VMs with business-relevant data such as organizations/business owners, applications and criticality
• Dashboards – leverage out-of-the box management-views for reporting, performance management, utilization, costs by infrastructure and applications, and key performance indicators to share with application owners

Application Awareness – visualize dependencies between your key applications and the virtual infrastructure; understand real-time VI issues affecting your applications; understand assurance, capacity and cost allocation by application.

• Application Dependency Mapping – visually map the relationships between VI components and the applications they support
• Application Service Overlays – relate the virtual infrastructure to the critical application services that it delivers; visualize dependencies between key applications and the virtual infrastructure
• Application Assurance Alerts – create dashboards, alerts and reports to track the health of each of your key applications in a virtualized environment
• vApp Support and Hyper9 Application Service Modeling – automatically collect vApp information and their relationships to VI; model an arbitrary application service and its associated VMs; understand the relationships of application services to the virtual infrastructure

Hyper9’s enterprise-class management platform provides extreme scalability to tens of thousands of virtual elements, resulting in quick installation and immediate ROI to minimize the impact of dynamic datacenters on VM stall.

Quest Software has launched a beta program for Toad for Cloud Databases, a data access and management tool for non-relational data stored in cloud databases, also known as NoSQL databases.

Toad for Cloud Databases helps users unlock data stored in the cloud by using the familiar SQL language or Toad’s popular visual query and data access capabilities. Users can query and report on non-relational data, migrate data in both cloud and relational databases from one to the other, and create queries that combine the two.

Emerging non-relational platforms are compelling options for organizations looking to overcome the cost and scalability limitations of relational database systems. Currently, complex programming is required to access data stored in the cloud, and this creates significant barriers for users who want to build applications or use the data for business intelligence. Toad for Cloud Databases breaks through this roadblock, providing query building and reporting capabilities familiar to Toad users, plus migration and management for developers who want to experiment with the cloud – all wrapped into a SQL-based interface.

The current beta supports Amazon SimpleDB, Microsoft Azure Table services, Apache HBase, and any Open Database Connectivity (ODBC)-enabled relational database. The second beta release will add full support for Apache Cassandra, as well as Apache Hadoop through Hive. In addition, Quest has an Eclipse-based version of Toad for Cloud Databases on its roadmap for a future release.

DreamFace Interactive, an enterprise application development software company, announced today at GigaOM Structure 2010 that it has entered into a strategic partnership with OpSource to provide an integrated one stop solution for development of custom applications in the cloud.

DreamFace 3.0 Cloud Application Development Platform will provide a comprehensive toolset to build, use, and distribute web sites, dashboards, mashups, and enterprise applications in the cloud.  The DreamFace Platform-as-a-Service Solution on the OpSource Cloud provides the first multi-tenant solution for all layers of the cloud.

DreamFace provides multitenancy at the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) levels, serving many users while protecting individual preferences, personalization and data/interactions through shared base widgets and templates. OpSource provides virtualization of the multi-tenant platform infrastructure.  The DreamFace Platform also provides tools to manage data on distributed environments in the cloud.

The DreamFace 3.0 Integrated Cloud Development Platform Starter Package is priced at $9 per day.

This price includes a server with 1 CPU, 2MB of RAM, 10GB of storage, 5MB of outgoing bandwidth and unlimited incoming bandwidth and a fully configured and ready to use DreamFace Cloud Application Development Platform with full application deployment rights.  DreamFace Interactive also offers web-based training, consulting and support as well as on-site services.

DreamFace 3.0 can also be used in a private or hybrid cloud environment or downloaded under a dual-license open source model that is based on GPL 3.0.

DreamFace 3.0 will be available for download July 1st.  DreamFace 3.0 Cloud Application Development Platform will be available in early summer 2010.