News

Veeam Software this week unveiled a major update, version 4.0, of its Veeam Reporter for VMware.

Veeam Reporter 4.0, formerly known as Veeam Reporter Enterprise, provides a single location where both business and technical users can perform enterprise reporting, change management and capacity planning for their virtual environment.

Veeam Reporter is integrated with Veeam Business View to provide IT executives and managers with the analytics they need to manage the virtual environment from a business perspective. For example, IT managers can see how storage is allocated and utilized by business unit, department and type of application. Veeam Business View also identifies uncategorized virtual machines (VMs) with no owner assigned, helping to control VM sprawl.

Veeam Reporter 4.0 includes these additional enhancements:

• Enterprise Reporting: A new reporting engine, based on Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), enables users to access reports via a web-based interface. SSRS is very scalable and easily accommodates many simultaneous users.
• Change Management: Improved change management reports, including new audit information for changed objects, enable users to see the “who, what, where, when and how” of every change. If a VM suddenly disappears, slows down or stops working altogether, users can quickly identify not only what changed but also who made the change.
• Capacity Planning: Version 4 can look into the future. With host utilization approaching 80 percent or more, capacity planning is a key virtualization management challenge. The product’s new capacity planning report pack projects future resource requirements based on historical growth and past performance. Reporter has the detailed data and built-in expertise needed to ensure service levels, even as demand grows.
• Redesigned web-based user interface and new dashboard capabilities: Version 4 includes a customizable dashboard that allows users to observe the most important aspects of the virtual environment at a glance. Reports can also be integrated into third-party dashboards and intranet web portals, such as Microsoft SharePoint.

Veeam Reporter 4.0 is available immediately. North American MSRP remains unchanged at $375 per CPU socket.

BMC Software last Monday announced that it has passed the $100 million mark in highly strategic “cloud foundation” deals where virtualization and computing management capabilities were the key element in the customer’s final selection.

More and more customers are seeking to unify the management of their physical, virtual, cloud, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) initiatives. Customers typically define the “foundation” for successful cloud computing as the implementation of tightly integrated service management and datacenter automation solutions, the clear prerequisites for subsequent cloud services implementations. BMC has seen a steady strengthening pattern of significant wins in cloud management platform deals.

In the past year, BMC has won 25 large proof-of-concept and technical design shoot-outs for virtualization and cloud management at some of the largest enterprises in the world. BMC also has been selected by five of the top 20 telecom companies as their standard platform for virtualization and cloud management, a very positive trend. In the last two quarters, two of the top five systems integrators and one of the top three global software companies have standardized on BMC, resulting in full competitive replacements. All of these instances represent multi-million-dollar deals.

During the past two years, the demand for BMC’s hybrid datacenter management solutions has steadily escalated among enterprise companies eager to leverage the power of physical, virtual, SaaS and cloud infrastructure.

Silicom today announced that its dual-port gigabit fiber server adapter has achieved VMware Ready status.

This designation indicates that the Silicom server adapter has passed a detailed evaluation and testing process managed by VMware and is now listed on the VMware Hardware Compatibility List.

The VMware Ready program is a VMware co-branding program for qualified partner products and is a benefit of the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program.

With more than 1,300 members worldwide, the VMware TAP program works with best-of-breed 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.

AutoVirt, provider of file virtualization and data management solutions, today announced that A&W Food Services of Canada, one of Canada‘s largest and fastest growing restaurant chains, is implementing a virtualized file storage environment with AutoVirt.

The AutoVirt solution was chosen to replace existing StorageX technology, as AutoVirt offered a more advanced and easier to use solution for the management of backend corporate file systems, over the soon to be end-of-lifed StorageX technology.  A&W’s new virtualized environment, which will come online without any disruption to users, will enable A&W to completely reorganize its file environment for streamlined backup, retention and security policies, leading to tremendous improvements in operational efficiency and dramatic cost savings.

When Bruce Jamieson, the company’s Network Systems Manager, joined the Corporate IT Department about five years ago, he inherited a number of challenges, especially in regards to the company’s backend file storage environment.  The file system had very little structure, making it impossible for Jamieson to separate the relatively few files that required specialized policy-based treatment from the rest of the data.  As a result, Jamieson needed to apply the same expensive backup, retention and security policies to all the files in his environment.  Jamieson needed to find a solution that would enable him to clean up, and then more easily manage the company’s backend corporate file data.  After an extremely successful server virtualization initiative, he was sold on the value of virtualization and decided to apply a virtualization solution to his file infrastructure as well.

Jamieson also plans to leverage AutoVirt’s file virtualization capabilities to consolidate how his users view and access their files, making it easier for them to find what they are looking for.  Jamieson will be able to archive unused files to lower-cost SATA drives, shrink A&W’s backup window, and apply appropriate retention policies to data after users leave the company. These activities all result in hard and soft savings across disk, tape, hardware, software and operational processes.