News

Citrix Systems has announced a new program called Project “Open Door” that offers advanced virtualization management along with free support, training and conversion tools to customers switching servers from VMware ESX or vSphere to Citrix XenServer or Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.

Project Open Door helps ensure customers looking to expand their datacenters with XenServer or Hyper-V have a smooth transition. Through March 2010, customers who switch existing VMware servers to XenServer or Hyper-V, and add Citrix Essentials for advanced virtualization management, will receive additional technical support, training, and conversion tools from Citrix at no cost.

Citrix Essentials enhances the XenServer and Hyper-V platforms by adding powerful storage integration through Citrix StorageLink technology, automated lab and stage management and dynamic workload balancing. This combination enables broad interoperability that makes it easier for customers to manage virtual machines across heterogeneous virtualization environments throughout the full application lifecycle, from lab and testing to production.

With one in five enterprise customers now using XenServer, production deployments are growing rapidly across all industry segments. According to the Burton Group, using Citrix XenServer with Citrix Essentials meets 100 percent of the required features for enterprise production deployment. By switching servers from more expensive solutions to XenServer, customers have found that they not only get powerful, enterprise-class virtualization at a far lower cost, they are better equipped to future-proof their virtualization infrastructures for the coming wave of cloud computing.

Program Details

The Project Open Door promotion will be effective worldwide from October 1 – March 31, 2010. Customers who decommission five or more VMware vSphere 4 or VI3 servers and replace them with XenServer or Hyper-V plus the Citrix Essentials solution, receive the following:

• A free five incident support pack (5 by 8 hours) for every five servers converted
• A voucher for six hours of online training for every five servers converted
• Free migration tools for seamlessly transferring virtual machines from VMware to XenServer or Hyper-V

Raxco Software, the pioneer in virtual disk defragmentation software, announced today that PerfectDisk 10 for ESX Server now supports VMware vSphere 4.

PerfectDisk 10thus now provides integrated defrag support for VMware vSphere 4, the industry’s first operating system for building the internal cloud, enabling the delivery of efficient, flexible and reliable IT as a service and bringing cloud computing to enterprises.

Open source cloud development platform WaveMaker today announced the cloud quickstart program, a collaboration between IBM, Amazon Web Services, RightScale and WaveMaker to provide a complete cloud computing solution. The cloud quickstart program is based on a reference architecture from IBM and best practices from other partners. The cloud quickstart architecture has been proven by IBM business partners like KANA and is backed by a 10,000-strong developer community.

The objective of the cloud quickstart program is to help developers migrate to cloud computing while protecting existing IT investments. Companies selected for the program by IBM’s Developer Relations team receive a no-charge architectural review and technical support for a cloud proof of concept.

Oracle VM 2.2, the latest release of Oracle’s server virtualization software, is now available, enabling customers to accelerate deployment of and simplify management of enterprise applications; and to run their data centers in the most environmentally-sustainable and efficient manner.

Oracle VM 2.2 features the latest Xen-based, industry-standard hypervisor, Xen 3.4, and provides substantial performance enhancements for customers running Intel Xeon processor 5500 series based on Intel microarchitecture, codenamed Nehalem, as well as Six-Core AMD Opteron processors. Oracle VM 2.2 features new CPU power management, memory management, and direct disk I/O capabilities.

Additionally, this release delivers on the initial integration of Oracle VM and Virtual Iron technology, including the ability for customers to easily migrate Virtual Iron virtual machines to Oracle VM images.

Oracle VM supports both Oracle and non-Oracle applications and offers customers scalable, low-cost server virtualization backed by Oracle’s world-class support.

By leveraging the latest Xen 3.4 hypervisor and a newer dom0 kernel based on Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.3, Oracle VM 2.2 helps provide broader hardware support, and better performance, scalability and security for both hardware virtualized and paravirtualized guests. Performance can be improved for hardware virtualized guest operating systems including Microsoft Windows. Oracle VM 2.2 provides updated support for the Oracle Cluster File System (OCFS2) 1.4 to leverage advanced features such as sparse file support to enable faster virtual machine provisioning and cloning, and to allow users more control over file data allocation, improving performance and storage efficiency.

Oracle VM 2.2 adds direct support for multipath storage devices that can be assigned to virtual machines and enhance performance of clustered applications. By leveraging the Xen 3.4 hypervisor, Oracle VM 2.2 also provides more efficient CPU power management, enabling greener computing and cost savings.

Resource management has been enhanced in Oracle VM 2.2 by allowing users to set the scheduling priority for virtual CPUs in virtual machines and cap the maximum percentage of CPU time each individual VM can access. With this enhancement, users can now control the Quality of Service (QoS) for CPU, network, and disk I/O through the intuitive Oracle VM Manager browser interface.

Other enhancements to Oracle VM 2.2 include a number of user interface enhancements, improved high availability with automatic failover of server pool master agents, and enhanced serviceability and audit features.

NaviSite, a provider of cloud-enabled enterprise hosting and application services, today announced its cloud-computing platform.

NaviSite Managed Cloud Services (NaviCloud), based on VMware vSphere 4 and VMware vCloud and the Cisco Unified Computing System, is an enterprise-class infrastructure platform that provides high-performance, scalable, on-demand, usage-billed IT infrastructure. Targeted at enterprise IT-hosting and application-service needs, NaviCloud is a flexible and customizable platform that adapts to changing customer requirements, enabling businesses to use resources more efficiently, while reducing capital and operating costs.

NaviSite’s virtualized infrastructure is deployed as multiple highly-secure infrastructure clouds, hosted in NaviSite’s SAS 70 Type II-certified data centers in the U.S. and the U.K. These cloud complexes allow customers to buy compute, memory and storage from the underlying resource pool and configure them for use in either self-managed or fully-managed modes.  In self-managed mode, customers can create virtual machines (VMs) and configure them with a choice of operating systems and other software.  In managed mode, customers can select a range of monitors to be applied to VMs, groups of VMs and environments that then feed into NaviSite’s system-wide monitoring and management systems.  Functional management of the resources and VMs is provided by the NaviCloud customer portal, which has been designed by NaviSite to facilitate the different use modes, and to provide full transparency for resources, trending and service levels.

NaviCloud has several key differentiators:

–       Enterprise-Class Performance – NaviCloud is based on VMware vSphere 4 and deployed on the Cisco Unified Computing System.  With Intel® Nehalem processor-based blades and integrated Fabric Interconnects with 10 GbE fabric, the NaviCloud architecture spans multiple data centers, providing customers with built-in disaster recovery and high availability – regardless of geography.

–       Fully Managed – NaviSite delivers cloud-enabled managed hosting and application solutions as a fully managed service to ensure 7×24 enterprise class service levels.  NaviSite also continues to support all our customers with our 7×24 operations center and account management teams.

–       Full Suite of Solutions – NaviCloud brings cloud characteristics to the entire suite of enterprise-hosting and application-management services, enabling a broad set of solutions to be provisioned as a utility.  Enterprises can customize and optimize infrastructure for their application stacks and scale automatically to accommodate increased demand.  Resources are provisioned in real-time to match changing needs, billing is based on resource consumption and SLAs are based on application performance and availability.

–       Spectrum of Services – NaviCloud supports self-managed, monitored and fully managed modes, providing flexibility and system assurance on an as-needed basis.  NaviCloud can be combined with dedicated infrastructure services to create hybrid IT environments – allowing enterprises to augment existing internal resources with cloud services.

–       Custom Solutions – NaviCloud can be custom engineered to ensure that customers’ unique requirements are addressed.

NaviCloud offers a competitive advantage to enterprises looking for IT flexibility and cost-savings, providing seamless connectivity and performance that would prove difficult and costly for businesses to achieve in-house or through a public cloud.  Leveraging NaviSite’s industry-recognized experience and expertise in hosting, virtualization, applications management and SaaS enablement, NaviCloud offers an innovative alternative for procuring, deploying and paying for IT infrastructure.

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, today announced the new portfolio of agile cloud technologies to accelerate and simplify the adoption of enterprise cloud computing environments.

Specifically, the portfolio delivers the industry’s most integrated set of computing resources to create a single pool of virtualized block, file and content storage to support the diverse uses that are evolving in cloud computing today, and enables organizations to adopt cloud services at their own pace. As part of the cloud offerings, Hitachi Data Systems also unveiled the new Hitachi Content Platform that provides essential security, reliability and multitenancy for cloud infrastructures.

With sophisticated storage virtualization, Hitachi Data Systems enables a secure, multitenant environment that ensures privacy among various constituents within a shared infrastructure that can be managed from a single command suite. Supporting a variety of protocols and third party technology, enterprises and service providers can further leverage existing investments in hardware and software and allow legacy devices to inherit cloud attributes, thereby preventing cloud from becoming just another silo and eliminating the need for a complete refresh or update of hardware and software or the need to rewrite applications. As a result, Hitachi Data Systems cloud solutions enable enterprise customers to choose the best possible technologies to address their challenges at their desired pace and budget resources. By offering an integrated set of cloud solutions, Hitachi Data Systems can deliver an agile cloud infrastructure that empowers customers to look at their existing IT infrastructure in new ways, enabling them to:

• Provide efficient IT management and increase productivity through automation
• Meet changing performance, availability and storage needs
• Ensure security in a shared environment
• Cost effectively improve data protection
• Make information easy to locate and use, anywhere, at any time

Hitachi Data Systems best-in-class Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V and award-winning Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage systems provide a single, virtual pool of storage with a host of key cloud attributes which can be provisioned against all types of IT services on demand. These services can be delivered via a number of fully integrated solutions including the recently announced Hitachi NAS Platform for file services, the Hitachi Data Discovery Suite for collaboration and search and the new Hitachi Content Platform for cloud storage, archiving, business continuity, creating content depots, consolidation and many other services. The Hitachi Content Platform also includes a number of advanced features that enable the solution to address a variety of challenges beyond the long term preservation of business critical information, such as:

• Enabling Customers to Evolve Cloud at Their Own Pace: The new Hitachi Content Platform will serve enterprise content storage needs as well as public and private cloud environments within a single optimized cluster. Customers can adopt the cloud technologies based on their business needs, and they do not need to purchase another storage island for their cloud solution.
• Segregating Data Securely: By providing a multitenant architecture, object versioning, retention and disposition services, encryption, immutability, high availability, search capabilities and much more, Hitachi Content Platform helps IT organizations securely segregate data within different namespaces to prevent unauthorized access and provide different service level agreements and features for different data sets.
• Intelligently Tiering Data: Customers will be able to manage data growth from higher tier storage to a storage platform with features and capabilities that go beyond the traditional ‘archive’ and enable intelligent content storage for a number of use cases.

Hitachi Data Systems will further extend its cloud offerings to incorporate Hitachi BladeSymphony technology as well as other leading server platforms to deliver complete integrated and secure public and private cloud infrastructure solutions.