News

PHD Virtual Extends esXpress Support To VMware vSphere 4

July 23, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

PHD Virtual Technologies, provider of the esXpress data protection and recovery solution for virtual machines, today announced that esXpress has been extended to support VMware vSphere 4.

This new release of esXpress version 3.6 also includes significant enhancements for all versions of VMware’s ESX platform version 3.0.2 and above. An optimized deduplication engine dramatically increases backup speeds and fuels performance for file-level restores, as well as VMDK restores and data archival via a Windows Share.

esXpress, with new support for vSphere 4, performs backup and recovery using the virtual environment itself. By creating virtual backup appliances (VBAs) – small virtual machines – the solution can be deployed in minutes on VMware servers, and provides the most scalable environment for backing up virtual machines. New performance enhancements include:

Improved file level restore speeds are now up to four times faster
Data Restoration and Archival via Windows’ Shares are now up to four times faster
Improved PHDD deduplication image-level restore speeds up to twice as fast
Accelerated deduplication engine provides initial backups that are seeded at double the previous rates

esXpress continues to support up to 16 concurrent backup/restore streams per host and all backups can be self-restored without using esXpress or other proprietary virtual machine infrastructure. esXpress’ block level backups are de-duplicated source side, ensuring data is compressed and deduped before it every leaves the host. This ensures that network traffic is kept to a minimum even while backing up over a WAN link.

Release: Veeam nworks Management Pack for MSCOM 5.0

July 23, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Veeam Software, provider of systems management tools for VMware virtual datacenter environments, today released version 5.0 of its nworks Management Pack for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager and Smart Plug-in for HP Operations Manager.

The products allow customers to leverage their investments in Microsoft Operations Manager and HP Operations Manager to monitor and manage VMware vSphere virtual environments from within the enterprise management console already in place.

With version 5.0, Veeam has improved the operational aspects of the products for enhanced scalability and a lower total cost of ownership, all while remaining agentless on the ESX server. A new component called the nworks Management Center dramatically improves scalability, high availability and load balancing by managing multiple instances of the nworks Collector in large enterprise deployments. Expanded support for VMware vSphere and enterprise-class centralized administration ensure that these VMware Ready Optimized nworks solutions from Veeam are “future proofed” and optimized for the world’s largest enterprise deployments.

New features in version 5.0 include:

Full, native support for vSphere 4 – Preconfigured monitoring of new features in vSphere 4, including Distributed Power Management, Host Profiles and Virtual Applications (vApp).
New nworks Management Center – a new web-based administrative interface dramatically improves scalability, high availability and load balancing, and simplifies the deployment configuration and usability of multiple instances of the nworks MP and SPI throughout the enterprise.
High availability – the centralized license and configuration features of the new Management Center make it possible to create “hot standby” nworks Collectors. Any nworks Collector “heartbeat” failure automatically triggers redistribution of the failed Collector’s jobs to a standby Collector, assuring no lapse in monitoring availability.
Load balancing – in enterprises using multiple instances of the nworks Collectors, monitoring jobs are automatically assigned using the Balance feature, optimizing workload distribution and eliminating the need to configure individual Collectors.
License server – now a pool of licenses is shared across all enterprise instances of the nworks Collector, greatly simplifying deployment in large, dynamic environments.

The nworks MP and SPI from Veeam have both been qualified through the VMware Ready testing process and are certified as VMware Ready Optimized products. The nworks MP and SPI are VMware endorsed solutions for VMware management per the VMware Ready Management program, providing customer assurance that these Veeam products not only offer lower integration costs today, but also will support VMware infrastructure future directions.

The Veeam nworks MP and SPI 5.0 are both available immediately, with North American pricing remaining at $450 USD per socket for the MP and $690 USD per socket for the SPI.

Tek-Tools Q2 Revenues Up 45% From Last Year

July 23, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Tek-Tools Software has announced that it closed the second quarter 2009 with an increase in revenue of 45 percent over the same quarter of the previous year.

Unrelenting demand on IT organizations to cost effectively manage virtualization sprawl, servers, storage, back up, applications and more fuels Tek-Tools continued growth. Existing customers driven by the need for end-to-end visibility into both virtualized and physical IT resources expanded their installations of Tek-Tools Profiler Suite accounting for 57 percent of revenue in the second quarter 2009. Simultaneously, the company added 57 percent more customers and increased new business revenue by 36 percent over the second quarter 2008. Revenue from direct sales and the channel continues to grow, 33 percent and 70 percent over Q2 2008, respectively.

VMware Global Partners Support Distributed Power Management (DPM), Part of vSphere 4

July 21, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VMware today announced VMware global partners, including Dell, Fujitsu, HP, IBM and NEC have announced their support of using VMware Distributed Power Management (DPM). VMware DPM, part of the VMware vSphere 4 platform, lowers power consumption in the datacenter by aggregating unused capacity and powering off unused servers without disrupting service levels, helping customers slash energy consumption by as much as 20 percent.

VMware virtualization has received acclaim for enabling customers to reduce energy costs and consumption in certain cases by as much as 80 percent through server consolidation and dynamic migration of virtual machines across physical servers. VMware DPM provides up to 20 percent additional reduction in energy usage on top of what is possible with consolidation by automatically placing all virtual machines on the fewest number of physical servers and powering down the physical servers that are not necessary to guarantee service levels to applications. A typical use case would be powering down physical servers at night or on weekends when the application loads decrease; as application loads increase at the beginning of the working day, VMware DPM would power on servers and again redistribute the applications.

3PAR Announces Cloud-Agile Partner Program

July 21, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

3PAR announced today the 3PAR Cloud-Agile program, a new partnership initiative to promote the adoption of cloud computing and cloud-based services offered by leading providers with infrastructures powered by 3PAR Utility Storage. The 3PAR Cloud-Agile program gives partners the opportunity to promote differentiated virtual private array (VPA) and disaster recovery (DR) offerings under the respective names 3PAR Cloud-Agile: SECURED and 3PAR Cloud-Agile: ASSURED.

3PAR created the Cloud-Agile program in response to an increase in demand for enterprise IT delivered as a utility service and a corresponding uptake in 3PAR Utility Storage adoption among leading IT hosting providers. Seven of the world’s top 10 revenue-generating managed service providers as identified by the “Winter 2009 Managed Hosting Report” issued by Tier1 Research use 3PAR Utility Storage as the storage foundation for their cloud-based service offerings.

The Cloud-Agile program is designed to raise awareness for the cost and agility benefits of cloud computing services and encourage the development of a mutually beneficial, robust cloud computing ecosystem. Program participation is limited to leading hosting providers using 3PAR Utility Storage as a strategic element of their cloud-based service offerings.

3PAR Cloud-Agile program participants such as Attenda, DataPipe, Terremark, and Verizon Business say their utility storage infrastructures — built on 3PAR InServ® Storage Servers — have enabled them to distinguish themselves with an agility that is lacking from others in their market. These companies share a significant investment in 3PAR Utility Storage, which has provided a strategic advantage by enabling them to handle unpredictable growth, control costs, accelerate book-to-bill cycles, assure service levels, and efficiently deliver value-added services. For these companies, service request response times have been reduced to minutes versus days, weeks, or even months with 3PAR.

For 3PAR Cloud-Agile partners, 3PAR Utility Storage has also contributed to savings on facilities and infrastructure costs while significantly reducing storage administration time. This has meant improved time-to-revenue, lower storage total cost of ownership (TCO), and tighter alignment between costs and revenues. For example, in a survey of 3PAR’s cloud computing service provider customers, 69% of IT organizations estimated that, by using 3PAR Utility Storage to power their cloud computing services, they have saved 40% or more in total capacity as compared to traditional storage alternatives.

Under the terms of the program, participants receive expert technical training to enhance the quality of the cloud-based services that these providers are able to offer to end users. The program also offers a combination of lead sharing, sales training, and joint marketing to increase selling opportunities and grow awareness of the benefits of cloud computing. In addition, under the program, participating providers have the opportunity to offer enhanced services built on 3PAR Utility Storage under the names 3PAR Cloud-Agile: SECURED and 3PAR Cloud-Agile: ASSURED.

PrimaCloud Deploys Xsigo Virtual I/O To Deliver Enterprise-Class Cloud Computing

July 21, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Xsigo Systems announced today that PrimaCloud, a leading managed cloud computing services provider, has deployed the Xsigo I/O Director as the foundation of its new service offering.

The virtual I/O architecture allows customers to provision a complete virtual private data center in just five minutes, a task that would otherwise require days or weeks. With Xsigo, PrimaCloud maintains 99.99% uptime at 50% less cost and in 85% less physical data center space than would otherwise be possible. Capital and operational cost savings enabled by Xsigo virtual I/O are expected to exceed $1 million in the company’s first year of operation.

Xsigo virtual I/O allowed PrimaCloud to deploy a fault-tolerant architecture based on highly-dense, quad server systems that package 48 processing cores within a compact 2U high chassis, reducing data center space requirements by 85% compared with conventional 4U high servers. By providing 40 Gb of bandwidth to each server while consuming only two PCI slots, Xsigo virtual I/O allowed PrimaCloud to deliver superior performance from more than 200 virtual machines per 2U system, a compute density that is believed to be the industry’s highest.

Xsigo virtual I/O was deployed in conjunction with VMware ESX software and Enigmatec’s EMS cross-platform policy-based automation solution. The combination allows configuration changes to be completed entirely in software — either manually or automatically — eliminating the need to visit the data center. When adding physical server resources, installation only requires connecting two I/O cables, reducing configuration time by 90%.