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Partnerships

IBM Adds VMware Technology To Lotus Foundations

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Looking to steal the limelight from this week’s official launch of Microsoft Essential Business Server, IBM Monday said it is adding VMware’s virtualization technology to its IBM Lotus Foundations hardware/software appliances, allowing customers to run Windows on the Linux-based appliances.

Lotus Foundations competes head-to-head with Microsoft’s Windows Small Business Server and Windows Essential Business Server. This week Microsoft is slated to begin shipping the new Windows Essential Business Server 2008, a pre-configured software bundle targeting mid-size companies with up to 250 PCs. It’s also expected to begin shipping Windows Small Business Server 2008, a new release of the popular package for small businesses.

IBM is adding the VMware hypervisor to the Lotus Foundations server, allowing customers to run Windows and Windows applications on the system. VMware for the Lotus Foundations servers is currently in beta testing. The Lotus Foundations servers run on an optimized version of Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 with an operating system kernel that’s less than 100 Mbytes.

AMD / Red Hat Pull Off A Live Migration of VMs Across Vendor Platforms

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AMD, in collaboration with Red Hat, today demonstrated for the first time “live migration” of a virtual machine across vendor platforms. Live migration enables the movement of running virtual machines (VMs) from one physical server to another without disrupting service to the end user, something that, till now, has only been demonstrated across systems based on one vendor’s platforms. Today’s live migration demonstration moves a live VM from an dual socket Intel Xeon DP Quad Core E5420-based system to a system based on the forthcoming 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor, utilizing Red Hat’s high-performance open source virtualization software. See the demonstration on the AMD Unprocessed YouTube Channel or here.

Update: also, read the blog post from Margaret Lewis (Product Marketing Director at AMD) on the announcement.

Industry interest in live migration has grown as virtualization technology has become more widely adopted. Live Migration of VMs across physical servers is a vital component of data center management that enables IT managers to move VMs as necessary in order to perform tasks such as upgrading or conducting maintenance of a server, balancing the server load and proactively managing the server availability to avoid downtime or lost data. The demonstration illustrates AMD’s approach to an open and collaborative relationship with its partners to meet customer demands.

RightScale Supports The Smell Of Saunas

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Today RightScale Inc. announced they will team up with the Eucalyptus team have their platform available with Eucalyptus so they can deliver an Easy to Mange Open Source Cloud Computing platform.

They have announced that starting today, November 4, 2008 they will have the RightScale Cloud computing management platform ready for use with the Eucalyptus Puclic Cloud (EPC).


“We are honored to collaborate with the talented UCSB Eucalyptus Project Team to accelerate the advancement of cloud computing technology,” said Michael Crandell, CEO at RightScale. “Now anyone — from those just becoming familiar with cloud computing to organizations evaluating a massive application for deployment on Amazon’s EC2 — will be able to easily test their applications on the Eucalyptus EC2-compatible, open source cloud infrastructure using RightScale’s management platform.”

RightScale was already supporting Amazon’s EC2, FlexiScale and now GoGrid and sends a big message to the Cloud Community that Eucalyptus is a valuable platform to support.

Earlier this year Elastra also announced support for Eucalyptus. May we wonder why the Eucalyptus folks went with RightScale and not with Scalr ? Afterall integrating Scalr with Eucalyptus seems like a good way to achieve a fully featured opensource platform.

And on a final note .. if RightScale titles their Press Release “RightScale and the Eucalyptus Team Join Forces to Deliver Easy-to-Manage Open Source Cloud Computing” , when will they show us the code ?

NetQoS Expands Partnerships Globally

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NetQoS has expanded its global reseller and system integrator network with new partnerships in Africa, the Middle East, Asia Pacific, Europe, and Latin America. Combined with a dedicated NetQoS international sales team, the partnerships will help NetQoS build and support its growing global client base with products and services that enable large organizations to optimize their networks for application performance.

In Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, NetQoS is working with MICROmega Technologies (MMT), based in Johannesburg, South Africa. MMT will help NetQoS expand its regional presence through an established network of Cisco Gold Partners and the expertise to deploy and integrate the NetQoS Performance Center in customer environments.

NetQoS is also expanding its presence in Asia Pacific through a strategic partnership with NetFrontier. Working closely with NetFrontier, NetQoS will build on its success in the region by helping companies in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan improve network performance and application delivery.

In addition to new partnerships in emerging markets, NetQoS has expanded its European sales efforts recently with new partnerships in France, Sweden, and the UK. NetQoS complements its reseller network with direct sales staff in the UK, Germany, and Singapore. During the first half of 2008, NetQoS increased EMEA revenues 160 percent year-over-year.

eG Innovations And Leostream Team Up

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eG Innovations, a provider of performance monitoring and triage solutions for virtual and physical IT infrastructures, and Leostream, developer of virtual hosted desktop software, announced today that they have established a technology partnership to leverage their combined strengths and define a new standard of performance and flexibility in the area of virtualized desktop computing.

Under the agreement, eG Innovations’ virtualization monitoring software, the eG VM Monitor, has been enhanced with specialized monitoring capabilities for the Leostream Connection Broker software. With this integration, organizations deploying virtual desktop environments have a comprehensive solution to establish, monitor, and report performance baselines for end-user virtual desktop access to enterprise applications.

Part of the eG Enterprise Suite, the eG VM Monitor is a comprehensive solution for monitoring and managing all aspects of virtual hosts and guests, whether the infrastructure is used to support server or desktop applications. Coupled with the ability of the eG Enterprise Suite to monitor over 80 applications eG VM Monitor – with its patent-pending In-N-Out Monitoring technology — provides a comprehensive end-to-end solution for monitoring and managing the performance of virtual IT infrastructures. The eG VM Monitor won the Best of VMworld 2008 Gold award in the Application and Infrastructure Management category at the VMworld 2008 conference in September.

The Leostream Connection Broker is an independent, flexible, cost-effective solution for regulating access to end user computing resources hosted in the data center. Leostream provides a comprehensive approach to desktop virtualization. The product enables organizations to manage end-user access to computing resources such as desktops, Terminal Server sessions, and streaming applications. It provides a scalable, fault-tolerant management layer that centralizes and consolidates IT resources in the data center and then creates, assigns, and delivers desktops to end users.

DataCore Goes After Eastern European Market, Partners With Prosper Intelligence

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DataCore Software and Prosper Intelligence have announced a distribution agreement for Austria and Eastern Europe. Prosper will resell and support SANmelody and SANsymphony™as the SAN and virtual storage component of its virtualization portfolio. Prosper will integrate both SAN software solutions into its showcase “Virtualization Consolidation Academy” (VCA) lab in Vienna.

The Virtualization Consolidation Academy is an innovative knowledge transfer and competence center, which focuses on helping partners and customers evaluate and train and understand virtualization and consolidation technologies. With the agreement, Prosper can provide an end-to-end virtualization portfolio – Total Enterprise Virtualization – to its partner base with the addition of DataCore’s advanced storage virtualization, fault-tolerant SAN and disaster recovery solutions. In addition, DataCore obtains a key distribution partnership with the ability to support and resell into the emerging and growing Eastern European market.

Prosper currently supports a growing base of resellers in Austria and Eastern Europe, who are implementing virtualization and consolidation projects for business-critical applications, servers and data storage. With today’s agreement, DataCore’s storage virtualization technology complements the existing portfolio of desktop, server and application virtualization with a hardware-independent, flexible and cost effective storage solution. The Virtualization Consolidation Academy is seen as an independent review platform that can be used to evaluate, test, train and showcase virtualization solutions and technologies.

DataCore’s virtualization platforms improve the utilization and performance of disk storage, enable a new level of flexibility and hardware independence and reduce the overall cost of storage area networking. With SANmelody, DataCore provides a cost-effective, feature rich SAN solution that includes automated storage management, high availability, disaster recovery and thin provisioning. SANsymphony is the enterprise solution that enables Continuous Data Protection (CDP) and meets the advanced needs of larger organizations in terms of capacity, performance and scalability.