News

Linus Torvalds has merged open source data replication solution DRBD into Linux as a fully supported component.

After exactly 10 years of ongoing development work – software developer Phil Reisner wrote the first line of code on December 8, 1999 – Torvalds’ acknowledgment means DRBD has become a fixture on the storage market.

DRBD’s history is quite remarkable. Reisner originally published the Distributed Replicated Block Device as part of his Master’s thesis at the Vienna University of Technology. Originally intended as a means of storing email messages in a redundant fashion, Reisner quickly realized the full potential of the newly developed solution. In November 2001, he co-founded LINBIT, a Vienna, Austria based enterprise focused on advancing the development of DRBD and Linux High-Availability.

In May 2005, Lars Ellenberg joined LINBIT to lead its R&D team with Phil Reisner. His dedication has been a priceless addition to the LINBIT development team. January 2007, DRBD 8 was released which broke previous performance barriers and at the same time introduced active-active clustering capability, allowing simultaneous write access from two cluster nodes. In 2008, LINBIT USA, LLC was founded to offer development, consultancy, 24/7 support, and OEM/ISV integration services in North, Central and South America. Recently, LINBIT attracted considerable attention by open-sourcing DRBD+, a formerly commercially licensed add-on that offered three and four node clustering support.

The 2.6.33 Linux kernel release, of which DRBD will be an integral part, is currently expected for February 2010.

DRBD® is a registered trademark of LINBIT in the United States, the European Union, and many other countries.

CloudShare, formerly IT Structures, has announced it has received $10M in series B financing from Sequoia Capital, Gemini Capital, and Charles River Ventures (CRV). The company plans to use the investment to fund product development and expand its go-to-market capabilities.

CloudShare, a Menlo Park-based startup, has developed what could be revolutionary for solution providers and ISV’s selling software or appliances: A way for organizations to instantly deploy multiple, independent copies of their existing demo or training environments in the cloud. The company says its ability to raise a significant round of funding at a higher valuation than its previous round in a down economy reflects the stability of the company and the value it provides.

User benefits to CloudShare include faster sales cycles, rapid delivery of training, and increased channel visibility.

CloudShare customers, which include VMware, Cisco, SAP and more, have already delivered over one million VM demo, PoC (proof of concept) and training hours to date, representing over six quarters of consecutive double-digit usage growth for CloudShare. This early success demonstrates the practical, revenue-oriented, immediately useful nature of the CloudShare platform.

Notable functionality of CloudShare includes extensive workflow, hierarchical access and analytic monitoring capabilities, which provide sales and training owners with unprecedented visibility into customer use, direct sales, and channel activities. Additionally, CloudShare’s patented high-speed environment creation process lets users create new replicas in minutes, while its built-in collaborative whiteboarding, screensharing, and self-service capabilities enable corporate users to create and share their own prototypes and environments.

Founded in 2007, CloudShare is headquartered in Menlo Park, CA. The team is headed by Zvi Guterman, who previously cofounded Safend, an endpoint security company.

NetApp and Microsoft last week announced a new three-year agreement that deepens product collaboration and technical integration, and extends joint sales and marketing activities to customers worldwide.

Under the new agreement, the two companies will collaborate and deliver technology solutions that span virtualization, private cloud computing, and storage and data management, enabling customers to increase datacenter management efficiencies, reduce costs and improve business agility.

As part of the new strategic alliance agreement, NetApp and Microsoft will expand product collaboration and technical integration activities. In addition, NetApp and Microsoft will enable customers to experience firsthand the value of joint solutions at the Microsoft Technology Centers around the world and at industry events. Both companies will participate in engagements with channel partners and industry-leading systems integrators, offering technology solutions that are comprehensive and easy to use.

As further proof to the collaboration between both companies, NetApp, the 2009 Microsoft Storage Solutions Partner of the year, utilizes a variety of Windows Server platform technologies to improve storage system management and streamline backup, recovery and remote replication in Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V environments.

In addition, integration with the Microsoft System Center family of products and additional application-integrated NetApp products help maximize uptime for a wide variety of application environments, including Microsoft Exchange Server, SQL Server and SharePoint Server.

Integrated Environmental Solutions (IES), a provider of integrated performance analysis software for sustainable building design, recently announced that VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop are the preferred virtualization software for Mac installations.

IES now offers full technical support for <Virtual Environment> installations within Apple Mac environments which use VMware Fusion, Parallels Desktop or the Boot Camp utility included within the latest Mac OS X.

The IES <Virtual Environment> suite of Windows-only products – VE-Ware, VE-Toolkits, VE-Gaia and VE-Pro – can now be installed and run on Apple Macs, and be eligible for full IES technical support. VMware Fusion and Parallels create a ‘Virtual Machine’ (VM) on which a secondary Windows operating systems can be run. It allows you to run the most demanding Mac and Windows applications side-by-side at maximum speeds without rebooting. Alternatively, Boot Camp allows users to boot up their Mac using a Windows operating system, but does not allow simultaneous access to Mac applications.

The IES <Virtual Environment> integrated suite of building performance software supports energy analysis, energy load calculation, CO₂ emission calculation, solar shading analysis, natural ventilation analysis, and much more – providing a very useful and effective approach to green building design and development. IES’ services and products aid significantly in the provision of healthier and more energy efficient built environments.

When Red Hat acquired Qumranet about 15 months ago lots of people realized that RedHat’s good practice of Open Sourcing everything they do might be a difficult task for the Qumranet software. And indeed, RedHat has been critised a lot for having a Windows only management framework for their Qumranet based technologies and for not opening up Spice yet.

But it came trough on their promise, as of now you can go to the fresh Spice Space page, part of the RedHat emerging Technology Projects at et.redhat.com

“The Spice project aims to provide a complete open source solution for interaction with virtualized desktop devices.The Spice project deals with both the virtualized devices and the front-end. Interaction between front-end and back-end is done using VD-Interfaces. The VD-Interfaces (VDI) enable both ends of the solution to be easily utilized by a third-party component. ”
The 3 goals of spice are :

a). To deliver a high-quality user experience, similar to local machine, in LAN environments
b). To maintain low CPU consumption in order to have high VM density on the host
c). To provide high-quality video streaming and 3D

A bit later than the main page also the Wiki and the GiT repository became public

The 0.4.0 Spice version is the first Public release is currently available in source or as packages for Fedora 12

Currently, the project main focus is to provide high-quality remote access to QEMU virtual machines. Seeking to help break down the barriers to virtualization adoption by overcoming traditional desktop virtualization challenges, emphasizing user experience. For this purpose, Red Hat introduced the SPICE remote computing protocol that is used for Spice client-server communication. Other components developed include QXL display device and driver, etc.

If you want to know more, there is a 12 page document titled Spice For Newbies that should teach you a lot !

The folks over at Gluster dropped in the news that they are releasing their Gluster Storage platform:

“By integrating the GlusterFS file system with an operating system layer and improved management user interface, Gluster provides a complete storage software platform that simplifies the task of deploying petabyte-scale storage to two installation steps and a few mouse clicks. The new platform addresses the complexity of managing ‘big data,’ the demanding scalability requirements of modern applications”

Now what has this got to do with Virtualization you might ask,
the accelerating growth of Virtual Machine deployments requires people to rething their storage strategy, the demand for a unified storage space that contains high available copies of the running virtual machines is growing.

The Gluster Storage platform comes as a Clustered Storage on s stick version, the complete platform image fits on a USB memory stick that can configure a bare server to a clustered storage node in 15 minutes or less

As mentionned it provides the user with a Unified global namespace, according to them you can add hundreds of petabytes in a single volume across multiple commodity storage nodes.

It has Web-based installation and management providing you with rapid installation of first storage node with disk formatting performed post-install; integrated management of volumes, data resources and servers plus centralized logging and reporting.

And off course it is High availability – data can be replicated (mirrored) for high availability; real time self-healing performs error detection and correction within files while they are running and during recovery from hardware failures

“Gluster Storage Platform is the natural evolution of GlusterFS, combining the power and scalability of clustered storage with unparalleled simplicity,” said Anand Babu (AB) Periasamy, co-founder and CTO of Gluster. “Gluster is the only commercial scale-out storage platform that eliminates metadata server issues and allows non-experts to deploy petabyte-scale storage with the ease of an install wizard.”
With regard to virtualization ,
Gluster Storage Platform ensures continuous operation of virtual machines (VMs). Replicated virtual machines can continuously operate in the event of hardware failure and recovery is performed in the background without requiring a restart or blocking I/O to the live VM. Gluster Storage Platform uses checksum based healing which detects and corrects errors within the VM rather than for the entire VM image.

Gluster argues that as the Gluster Storage Platform aggregates disk and memory resources into a single pool of capacity under a global namespace it provides a true virtual storage environment to complement server virtualization. VM images and application data can be stored in the same system in a single volume, eliminating silos of data and centralizing management. Multiple storage building blocks are clustered together in parallel, eliminating I/O bottlenecks and hotspots that often negatively impact VM performance. With Gluster, storage administrators no longer need to manually manage multiple volumes and individual storage connections.

According to them it is now common for mission critical applications to be deployed on VMs. The VM images not only need to be stored, they also need to continue operating in the event of hardware failures and not allow faults to interrupt applications and services. Gluster Storage Platform employs file replication to ensure multiple copies of a VM are available in the event of hardware failure and provides both high availability and sophisticated real time self-healing to ensure continuous VM operation.

We quickly looked into the GlusterFS platform and set it up on different nodes,
the setup speed and ease of confiugration was a welcome suprise as opposed to different other clustering setups.