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Kace Integrates Virtual Systems Management Tool Kbox Into VMWare Infrastructure

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Kace announced today what it calls the first virtual systems management appliances to run natively within the VMware infrastructure. Kace’s Virtual Kbox appliances offer users a software product that runs on the user’s existing hardware. Earlier versions of the Kbox appliance required the installation of separate hardware to deploy and manage IT resources.

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The Virtual Kbox appliances family is now shipping and fully supports physical and virtual machines across Windows, Mac, Linux and Solaris environments.

“Unlike a generation of virtual appliances preceding it, the Virtual Kbox family provides a systems management and deployment solution that is fully integrated from a highly optimized and hardened operating system through an easy-to-use, Web-based application,” Rob Meinhardt, cofounder and CEO of Kace, told TechNewsWorld.

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The virtual appliance aims at delivering the benefits of a hardware appliance, including fast deployment times with low costs and ease of use. It also provides the benefits of virtualization, such as improved resource utilization, reduced energy and cost savings, improved maintainability and support and the ability to quickly scale. While the product’s name implies that it is an actual hardware device, it is a software product that runs on the customer’s computer. The virtual appliance product will do all that a physical appliance will do, he said. It provides the full range of features found in physical appliance management devices.

Virtualization is exploding in popularity in many enterprise categories. Organizations are seeking new ways to leverage this technology, also according to Meinhardt. “We’ve seen an incredible ramping up for virtualization. This gave us an opportunity to deliver our Kbox products for virtual appliance management,” said Lubos Parobek, Senior Director of Product Management for Kace.

Kace, which started in 2003, is targeting companies with from 100 to 1 000 employees. It currently has 450 customers worldwide, mostly in the SMB category, according to CEO Rob Meinhardt.”That gives us up to 100 000 companies worldwide as potential users,” he said.

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Company Index: VMWare

[Source: TechNewsWorld]

Virtualization Comes In Many Flavors

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Interesting article from ‘The Virtual Man’ Daniel Kusnetzky, President and Principal Analyst of Kusnetzky Group LLC and blogger at ZDNet. At a conference, he was asked by a group of attendees what he did for a living, and after a short explanation about his company he went on to explain virtualization technology.

Kusnetzky discussed the typical goals organizations have when they acquire and then deploy various types of virtualization technology, like:

  • Being able to access applications and data from just about anywhere using just about any networkable device
  • Being able to run applications or, in fact, full workloads without being concered about potential incompatibilities steming from different versions of operating systems, development tools or application frameworks
  • Being able to safely and securely access complex organizational networks
  • Being able to access applications and data even if they were stored in a datacenter halfway around the world
  • Being able to process applications faster or support more people’s work than any single reasonably priced system could manage
  • Being able to continue operations even if some component failed

Kusnetzky asks: “If you where put on the spot and asked to explain all of the different layers of technology and all of the different uses of virtualization, what would you say?”

Why don’t you go tell him? 🙂

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Sun Aims To Virtualize Web 2.0 Startups. From LAMP to SAMP?

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Sun MicroSystems aims to equip the next generation of Internet companies (read: Web 2.0 startups) with its hardware and software and will offer virtualization products to help them keep their costs to a minimum, make their data centers more flexible, and give developers multiple target environments.

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“You can see a connection to developing under VirtualBox and moving the software to a server running xVM,” Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz said; “xVM is Sun’s Xen-based hypervisor, due in June. Sun views a virtualized development environment as a way to capture developer loyalty. The company already offers developers incentives to use Java, namely its NetBeans tools and the PHP, Ruby, and Perl scripting languages through the Sun Developer Network. It registered an additional 1 million developers on its network in 2007”, Schwartz said, “and building a relationship with those developers is key to getting more of its software into Web 2.0 companies”.

As Sun is set to acquire open source relational database MySQL, the company seems determined to turn “LAMP” (which stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PPHP / Perl) into “SAMP”, evidently substituting Linux for Solaris in the pet name for every open source developer’s favorite tool set.

Sun also has a special program with custom offerings for startups dubbed Startup Essentials, which it has recently expanded to Canada, France and Germany.

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[Via InformationWeek]

EMC & SAP Heading Into Cloud Computing Together?

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According to Reuters, EMC and SAP are about to team up to deliver computer programs over the web. The news company cites a senior executive from German software provider SAP AG, President of SAP Labs North America and member of the SAP Executive Board Doug Merritt, predicting an upcoming partnership whereby the companies will use virtualization technology centralizing computing and storage functions at data centres (‘cloud computing’).

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Merritt chose not to discuss specifics, such as the expected launch date for the new venture and the financial details involved. Moreover, EMC, while openly betting hosting software and services will be a key to growth over the coming years, declined to comment on Merritt’s statements. A blog post by Chuck Norris Hollis, an EMC VP, doesn’t shed more light on the potential alliance but hints at the possibility of a partnership.

If EMC eventually enters the web hosting game through its partnership with SAP, it will be entering a market filled with household name competitors like HP, Symantec, Microsoft, Amazon, Google and IBM.

So far EMC has only announced one key services product, namely MozyEnterprise, an upgraded version of automated backup service Mozy that it acquired last year. EMC reportedly said earlier this month it plans to sell Mozy’s services to large corporations, through a recently upgraded EMC infrastructure dubbed ‘Fortress’.

SAP has also been noisy about launching its own flavor of SaaS program BusinessByDesign to combat Salesforce.com. At an announcement in September, SAP said it would look to partner with companies to provide applications and hosting, which it now seems to have found in EMC.

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VMWare’s Mike DiPetrillo Openly Critical About Citrix – Xensource

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If you thought the leaked internal VMWare memo criticizing the partnership between Microsoft and Citrix was bad, get a load of this: Mike DiPetrillo, Specialist System Engineer of Industry Research and Competitive Analysis at VMWare (VMW) and one of VMWare’s bloggers, posted a rather critical blog post on his personal space yesterday attacking Citrix’ acquisition of Xensource.

Other than calling Xensource a ‘good little company’, DiPetrillo says he’s still trying to figure out why Citrix paid $ 500 million for it in the first place.

“In Q3 XenSource announced 1,000 customers. On the call they said they added another 400 customers. Good growth! That puts the total at 1,400 customers. Then came the partner count – 1,817 partners certified to sell XenSource. Hmmm. So now we have 1,817 partners trying to get business from the 1,400 customers that total $2 million in revenue (that’s $1,100 in revenue per partner). Good days to be a Citrix partner.”

He goes on to say:

“OK. So the strategy is go and spend $500 million on a company that’s losing money, switch all of your current successful products and branding over to the losing company, and then exit the market when your larger partner moves into the market. Is this the end of Citrix then? Terminal Services in Windows Server 2008 closes the gap pretty nicely. Virtual Desktops are also taking large chunks of market share. Time will tell where Citrix ends up.”

In the end, it’s fair critiscm and DiPetrillo does raise some good points, but coming from a VMWare employee (although published on his personal blog), the article is bound to make some people frown.

[Via Channel Marker]

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Company Index: VMWare

ViUX Automates Hosting With Parallels / SWSoft

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Server virtualization firm, Parallels/SWsoft, has partnered with software-as-a-service and technology solutions firm, ViUX Systems, to provide a complete hosting automation system for all of its clients, including resellers.

The new hosting system is based upon several modules – HSPComplete, Virtuozzo, Plesk and SiteBuilder – to fully automate all four levels of hosting that ViUX offers. Those four levels – Shared Hosting ervers , Virtual Private servers (VPS), Dynamic Dedicated servers (DDS) and Reseller Hosting servers (RHS) – use redundant, multi-homed, high-speed connections, within multiple geographically dispersed data centers.

Joe Murphy, Vice-President of ViUX said:

”Partnering with Parallels/SWSoft gives us a completely automated hosting infrastructure and allows us to offer virtualized hosting to bridge the gap for those customers that have outgrown the shared hosting environment but are not quite ready for a fully dedicated server. In addition, we can now offer automated deployment of hosted applications in a SaaS module, such as: SmarterMail, SmarterStats, DotNetNuke, Miva Merchant, osCommerce.”

To market their new hosting system, ViUX has also undertaken a complete revision of its website, providing an easier-to-use interface that complements the new capabilities and flexibility of its automated, virtualized hosting infrastructure. ViUX has also migrated most of its servers to a new data center in Iowa which allows the company to deploy new servers virtually on demand.

Mr. Murphy continued,

”Our partnership with Parallels/SWSoft also allows us to offer leased licenses for HSPcomplete, Virtuozzo, Plesk and other related products, in a license leasing module to other hosting providers and resellers. We have also formed a similar partnership with SmarterTools, which allows us to likewise offer leased licenses of: SmarterMail, SmarterStats, and SmarterTickets. This will allow smaller hosting providers or resellers to obtain these industry leading products from ViUX at low monthly fees and avoid the upfront cost of purchasing directly from the vendor.”