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News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing

Yahoo Exec Scott Dietzen Quits, Joins rPath Board

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Scott Dietzen, until recently SVP Applications at Yahoo where the man oversaw key products such as Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, Flickr, Answers, Groups, and Zimbra, has left the company.

He is not moving on to other ventures yet, wanting to spend some quality time with his family first, but tomorrow rPath will be announcing that he is joining their Board of Directors.

rPath, of course, is a company that specializes in simplifying the distribution and consumption of applications via virtual appliances and cloud computing and enables sustainable appliance lifecycle management.

Scott Dietzen joined Yahoo with the acquisition of open source email startup Zimbra, where he was President and CTO. Dietzen went on to replace Brad Garlinghouse, Yahoo’s former SVP of Communications & Communities, when he left the company in June 2008. Before Zimbra, the man was CTO of BEA Systems (now an Oracle company) where he was the principal architect of the technology strategy for the WebLogic product family.

(Via TechCrunch)

IBM Introduces New Data Center Management Software

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IBM today introduced new software for managing data centers.

The introduction of IBM’s new VMControl product for enterprises, combined with IBM Tivoli software, gives businesses for the first time a single point of control across multiple types of IT systems and virtualization technologies. It spans UNIX/Linux, mainframe, x86 and storage systems and networks.

VMControl helps companies that have turned to virtualization – the creation of multiple virtual servers or storage on a single physical system – to reduce infrastructure costs, but have encountered new struggles as they try to manage enterprises made up of disparate platforms, each with their own virtualization technology.

VMControl allows combinations of physical and virtual IBM servers to be managed as a single entity. This approach – known as system pooling – expands the benefits of virtualization by helping corporate data centers simplify complex management functions and better share and prioritize use of critical resources such as processing power, memory and storage.

Centralizing control of virtualized environments brings new intelligence to data center operations. Companies can manage their vast pools of information and processing resources and parcel them out to applications when and where they’re needed. This breakthrough capability not only increases the overall capacity utilization of the IT infrastructure to lower capital, operational and energy costs, and improves application availability, but gives IT managers the flexibility to adapt to new demands being prompted by the surge of data from internet-connected devices.

VMControl will also accelerate the deployment of new IT delivery models, like cloud computing, which allows information and processing resources to be tapped from afar.

The new product, together with IBM Tivoli software, helps companies address and improve service and reduce cost and risk. IBM today announced a new version of Tivoli Provisioning Manager that provides enhanced automation of the manual tasks of provisioning and configuring servers, operating systems, middleware, software applications, storage and network devices.

The new product — IBM Systems Director VMControl Enterprise Edition — supports IBM’s PowerVM and z/VM as well as x86 virtualization technologies such as VMWare, Hyper-V and open x86 virtualization solutions. VMControl Enterprise Edition will be available on IBM Power Systems running AIX in December, 2009.

Additional support for other platforms is planned for next year as part of a dynamic infrastructure.

Release: VMware vCenter CapacityIQ

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VMware today announced the availability of VMware vCenter CapacityIQ, a new product in the VMware vCenter Product Family that provides complete capacity management for VMware virtualized environments.

VMware CapacityIQ empowers IT administrators with the necessary intelligence to be able to right-size capacity in a dynamic virtual environment. It provides unprecedented visibility into past, present and future infrastructure capacity in order to analyze what is available and what is being used; forecast what is needed; and plan when capacity will run out. As a result, VMware CapacityIQ helps eliminate infrastructure waste, reduce operational overhead and minimize business risk of outages, failures and disasters.

VMware vCenter CapacityIQ enables customers to proactively monitor capacity at multiple levels, analyze the impact of changes and forecast future needs based on consumption patterns. VMware CapacityIQ is critical for VMware customers who are interested in growing their virtual infrastructure cost-effectively –supporting server applications or virtual desktops – enabling them to:

  • Reduce cost by reclaiming unused capacity. CapacityIQ proactively analyzes resource usage patterns and automatically generates a list of virtual machines that have been over-provisioned. Armed with this information, virtual infrastructure administrators can reclaim unused resources instead of purchasing additional capacity.
  • Mitigate risk by modeling the effect of capacity changes. CapacityIQ helps customers avoid potential business and service disruptions by proactively modeling the impact of a planned change such as an acquisition or new application or an unplanned outage, failure or disaster.
  • Deliver the right capacity at the right time. CapacityIQ keeps track of a dynamic VMware virtual environment by helping customers monitor capacity and forecast future capacity needs, helping to ensure capacity is always available to meet required service levels.

BMC Software Snaps Up Tideway

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BMC Software today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Tideway Systems Limited (Tideway), a leading provider of IT discovery solutions.

The acquisition will enhance BMC’s Business Service Management(BSM) platform and help organizations minimize the risks associated with business-critical initiatives such as data center consolidation, virtualization and compliance.

The new offering supports the complete set of discovery requirements for BSM and features deep integration with BMC’s Atrium Configuration Management Database (CMDB) based on Tideway’s long-time membership in BMC’s Technology Alliance Partner program. This presents customers an in-depth understanding of the relationships and dependencies of their physical assets and applications not currently available from any other vendor.

The addition of Tideway technology provides BMC customers with the industry’s largest open library of predefined IT configuration discovery patterns. These patterns provide out of the box descriptions of software and hardware resources that allow IT organizations to automatically identify and characterize their environment and map related application dependencies and services.

When combined with the BMC Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping (ADDM) solution, BMC will deliver unmatched visibility into the data center and rapidly reduce the time and resources required to model, manage and maintain applications and services. This is critical for IT organizations that are transitioning applications and services to cloud computing environments.

Release: Xenocode Virtual Application Studio 2010

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Xenocode, a developer of technologies enabling instant delivery of software across networks and platforms, today announced the immediate availability of the 2010 edition of Xenocode Virtual Application Studio.

Virtual Application Studio allows system administrators and software developers to easily virtualize existing Windows-based applications for instant, one-click deployment on the web, intranets, and USB drives.

Xenocode is an easy-to-use app virtualization and delivery technology that eliminates software installation and conflicts. Xenocode packages applications into self-contained, lightweight virtual machine executables that run instantly on any Windows desktop.

Virtual Application Studio 2010 includes dozens of feature enhancements and upgrades, including:

  • Windows 7 compatibility: Xenocode is the first virtualization engine in its class to include full support for all editions of the new Windows 7 operating system.
  • Publish to Web: Publish apps to the web with a single click. Once online, apps can be launched with a single click directly within a web browser over 10 times faster than traditional download.
  • Software Expiration: Automatically create evaluation or license-restricted versions of existing apps with run time or date-based “timebomb” expiration.
  • Multi-platform capabilities: Platform merge allows virtual application behavior to be customized on a per-operating system basis while distributing a single executable.
  • Dozens of new application templates: Application templates allow one-click virtualization of most popular software applications, including Office, OpenOffice, Firefox, and Internet Explorer.

Xenocode is a powerful virtualization technology that packages apps into standalone virtual machines that run instantly on any desktop. Unlike traditional hardware virtualization, Xenocode technology exploits the host operating system environment to eliminate the need to emulate hardware or package operating systems with applications. Virtual applications require no setup, configuration, or device drivers, are insulated from conflicts, and run seamlessly across Windows variants and on locked-down desktops.

Xenocode Virtual Application Studio 2010 is available immediately via the web and through authorized Xenocode partners.

Upgraded: Nimsoft Monitoring Solution (NMS)

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Nimsoft today announced that it has added a set of firsts to its Nimsoft Monitoring Solution (NMS).

These new capabilities enable Nimsoft customers to extend real-time monitoring and historical reporting beyond the virtualised datacentre to hosted, cloud- and SaaS-based resources and applications. By extending monitoring from the virtualised datacentre to the cloud, customers will gain complete visibility over their entire IT infrastructure, enabling them to measure and improve service delivery, allocate computing resources for maximum performance, and enforce service level agreements (SLAs).

NMS is based on a scalable and extensible architecture that enables complete visibility and monitoring from a single product, eliminating the need to invest in additional products every time IT infrastructures change or expand. By monitoring all computing resources, Nimsoft customers will be able to make better decisions as they transition to a combination of internal and external environments.

New feature set delivers additional capabilities for monitoring both internal and external environments including:

• Cloud and SaaS Probes: Enable users to gain complete visibility over the performance and availability of Google Apps for Business, Rackspace Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and EC2, Salesforce.com, and other services. By understanding status and response time, users can determine if outsourced platforms and applications are meeting their service delivery commitments.

• Nimsoft Unified Monitoring APIs: Allow for easy extensions to NMS. This complete set of documented APIs is available to both customers and third-party developers.

• The Nimsoft Unified Reporter: Delivers more than 100 reports out of the box, and allows users to create their own performance and capacity planning reports. Information from these reports can be used to make decisions on how and where to redistribute workloads, to identify problems in the infrastructure, to benchmark performance metrics, and to prove where SLAs are not being met.

• Virtualisation Probes: Provide users 100 percent visibility over virtualisation platforms including Citrix, Microsoft HyperV, IBM Power-V, VMware, and Sun Solaris Zones. Complete visibility enables users to monitor and optimise the performance of all applications and resources running on virtual servers, and enables the optimisation of compute resources across business services.

• RCA (root cause analysis) and Topology Manager: Presents deep discovery and both virtual and physical topology views of the network. When an outage occurs, knowing where the root cause of the problem is dramatically reduces mean time to repair (MTTR).

In addition to providing Unified Monitoring for the broadest range of IT systems and applications in use today, these new features deliver:

• A scalable and extensible architecture that keeps pace with rapid IT infrastructure growth, monitors all internal and external IT systems, and provides a path to extend Unified Monitoring to new metrics such as power consumption

• A customisable management dashboard that enables IT administrators to get a single view of the overall health, performance and availability of their IT infrastructure and business applications irrespective of where they reside

• The industry’s most rapid deployment and shortest time to value, with a total cost of ownership up to 80 percent less than legacy solutions