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Have a look at Convirture

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The guys over at Convirture have a mission .. “Enterprise-grade management for OSS hypervisor & cloud platforms.”. They want to close the gap between the Command Line based Linux Admins and the CIO’s that want to have nice administration interface

Late june they released a Convirt 1.1 version which apart from some bug fixes and some new features such as support for Virtual Network Management, a preview of a commandline interface that can be used to automate a lot work , and the ability to add disks to a running VM (Xen) They also added a number of fresh Linux distros to their list of supported distributions namely the latest RHEL and Centos 5.3 and Ubuntu 9.04

Their first major release 1.0 targeted to have Virtual Center alike features for Open Source software such as Xen and KVM, with their software being availably in only as GPLv2 , so as of Version 2 they plan on having a Dual License model offering both a Community Edition fully Open Source and an Enterprise Edition. Their biggest eye cathcher was the drag and drop support for KVM Live Migration

I ran into Convirture already ages ago, back when it was still called XenMan and they have progressed a lot so I decided to have a chat with Arsalan Farooq, currently CEO at Conviture joining them in 2006 from Oracle where he served as Director of Development for over a decade.

When asking Arsalan about how he felth about competing tools such as openQRM he replied that “openQRM was different from their approach but very strong in provisioning” , “other tools focus on just on single platform that needs to be managed” and others are absolutely not Open Source …

Today they are talking directly to the Xen API and to KVM. The future might bring more API’s to that list probably some of them in the cloud.

Convirture obviously is one of the platforms you should look at when your manager wants a nice an easy GUI for your virtualization platform ! But it does much more for you , it manages your storage pools , does intelligent VM placement provides you template based provisioning and much more.

ParaScale Forecasts Cloud Storage Opportunities for Service Providers and Hosting Companies

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Cloud applications, computing, and storage are just emerging on the scene, yet there is a rapid heightening of interest in all things cloud. Google and Amazon popularized the concept, now businesses of all sizes and types are interested in its potential. With the availability of cloud storage-enabling solutions, many service providers and hosting companies are investigating new cloud storage service offerings.

Sajai Krishnan, CEO of ParaScale, a start-up company developing cloud storage software, believes the impact of cloud technologies will be transformational and cloud will be a major way by which IT is consumed in the future. For service providers, this presents tremendous opportunity, as well as challenges.

Krishnan asserts that the public cloud storage service provider market is beginning to segment. Segment one includes the mass-market cloud service providers like Amazon S3, Google, Rackspace, and a few others. Segment two consists of the sophisticated enterprise cloud service providers who are rapidly creating new services that are combining virtualization, multi-tenant storage cloud and compute cloud service and private hosted clouds. Segment three is comprised of the giant telcos such as AT&T, Verizon Business, and Deutsche Telecom.

“Most manage hosters and service providers will need to determine their strategy for winning business in the second segment of contenders,” said Krishnan. “While the cloud services market is going to provide upside for many years, service providers must have a well thought-out entry strategy to succeed. Surprisingly, a number of mid-sized new entrants are considering a “build and they will come” approach and launching into segment one. This is a recipe for a “build and you will get run-over” scenario, as the goliaths of segment one already have first mover advantage and tremendous economies of scale.”

Krishnan identifies several considerations for service providers and managed hosting companies as they develop their cloud storage services offering. These include:

  • Evaluate your customers and their data needs.
  • What amount of data do you intend to store for your customers?
  • What sustainable differentiator should you base your business on?
  • What cloud services are already available and how will you compete?
  • If you succeed, is the business and architecture going to scale?

Regardless of how the service provider answers the above business questions, the systematic approach to evaluate cloud storage technologies remains the same:

  • A cloud storage solution has three key parts. Research the options to ensure a full storage cloud solution.
  • Choose a cloud solution that can start small with a few TBs and scale up.
  • Avoid proprietary interfaces and APIs.
  • Determine if your preferred cloud storage solution can offer data access via familiar enterprise protocols.
  • Do you have an opportunity to offer differentiated cloud storage integrated application services? Can your cloud storage platform help you deliver this high value service?
  • Cloud is about scale. Ensure that your cloud data access protocol can scale as your business grows.
  • Always perform a proof of concept within your own environment.

Rackspace Private Cloud Leverages VMware For Enterprise Computing Offering

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Rackspace Hosting, has announced its new Private Cloud offering, which allows customers to run the centrally managed VMware virtualisation platform on private dedicated hardware environments.

Rackspace recognises the demand from enterprises for a more flexible and scalable hosting solution. Although multi-tenant cloud solutions are very flexible and cost-effective, they are not always right for every segment. The Rackspace Private Cloud’s single-tenant architecture offers increased control and security, while still maintaining the scalability, flexibility and resource optimisation that make shared cloud offerings so compelling.

Rackspace Private Cloud is an evolution of its popular dedicated virtual server (DVS) offering within the managed hosting business unit. In the last year, revenue from virtualisation solutions has grown substantially, driven mainly by the increased flexibility, improved asset utilisation and lower capital and operating costs that VMware’s virtualisation provides.

NewServers Strikes Reseller Partnership with Silver Peak Systems

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NewServers, provider of Hardware as a Service (HaaS) dedicated cloud servers, today announced a reseller partnership with Silver Peak Systems, the leader in scalable Wide Area Network (WAN) acceleration. The addition of Silver Peak WAN acceleration solutions expands NewServers’ core product line of automated high-performance devices.

Silver Peak’s unique network approach to WAN acceleration delivers unprecedented scalability, including the highest effective throughput of any WAN acceleration device. This makes Silver Peak ideal for NewServers’ large enterprise clients that utilize networks and applications with high sustained data volumes.

NewServers’ cloud of “bare metal devices” has a global customer base and its services are delivered across multiple vertical markets and industries, including Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), High Performance Computing (HPC), Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), Semantic Search Engines and Applications, Enterprise Application Vertical Markets; Healthcare, Educational, Bio-Medical, Financial, Government, Retail and Massive Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMOG).

NetEx Takes HyperIP Virtual with Broad Application Support for WAN Optimization on VMware Infrastructures

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NetEx today announced that its HyperIP for VMware offers the broadest range of third-party support for applications. These include all of the leading providers of disaster recovery, data migration and replication software, such as Data Domain, Dell/EqualLogic, EMC, FalconStor, Hewlett-Packard/LeftHand, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, Microsoft, Network Appliance and many others.

The move by NetEx to virtualize the HyperIP WAN optimization software is part of an industry trend with more companies opting to deploy applications as software-only implementations to take advantage of the cost, scalability and flexibility of the VMware infrastructure.  Virtualizing applications for VMware eliminates the need for specialized appliances while allowing IT organizations to quickly re-allocate computing and storage resources as needed to accommodate business priorities.

HyperIP for VMware is the industry’s only software-based WAN optimizer that operates on a VMware ESX server to boost the performance of third-party storage replication applications.  Virtual HyperIP mitigates TCP performance issues that are common when moving stored data over wide area network connections because of bandwidth restrictions, latency due to distance and/or router hop counts, packet loss and network errors.  HyperIP increases end-to-end performance of replication applications by 3 to 10 times, reducing VMotion and Storage VMotion transfer windows with enhanced efficiency by utilizing 80 to 90 percent of available bandwidth between data centers or branch offices up to OC12 rates.

NetEx was one of the early adopters in recognizing the impact of the virtual infrastructure, how it could benefit IT operations, and speed up data migration and replication operations when combining HyperIP for VMware with data movement applications from top tier IT storage vendors.  VMware has enhanced the ESX infrastructure by redesigning the Hypervisor to support multiple cores, opening the way for all applications to be offered as virtualized pure software plays and eliminating the need for expensive appliances and expensive IP network upgrades.

The applications supported by HyperIP for VMware include: DataCore AIM,  Data Domain Replicator Software; Avamar, SRDF Adaptive Copy, SRDF/DM, SRDF/A (DMX), Centera Replicator, and Celerra Replicator,  RecoverPoint CRR and DL3D from EMC; Dell/EqualLogic PS Series Replication; FalconStor Software’s IPStor, Disksafe and FileSafe; HP/Lefthand Networks SANiQ; TrueCopy for iFCP from HDS;  IBM Tivoli Storage Manager and Global Mirror (FCIP),  Microsoft NetBios and Data Protection Manager;  SnapMirror and SnapVault from  NetApp; NSI DoubleTake; DataGuard, DB Rsync and Streams from Oracle; SANRAD Global Data Replication; Softek Replicator; NetBackup, ReplicationExec and Volume Replicator by Symantec; Veeam Replication; and VMware VMotion.  In addition, HyperIP fully supports WAN optimization for the industry standard FTP and iSCSI protocols.

Pricing for HyperIP for VMware starts at $2,000.

NEC Express5800/A1160 Server Breaks Virtualization Performance Record (VMmark)

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NEC Corporation today announced that their newest enterprise server, the NEC Express5800/A1160, has established a world record in overall VMmark performance benchmark results.

VMmark is an industry benchmark developed by VMware, to measure the performance and scalability of multiple enterprise applications running in virtualized servers so that customers can compare different virtualization platforms. The metrics are defined in “score @ tiles.” “Score” is referred as a throughput performance metric and “tiles” are the consolidation capacity of the system.

The record-breaking score, 34.05@24tiles, was achieved using the NEC Express5800/A1160 server, which was configured with 8 sockets populated with the Intel Xeon X7460 processors, powered by VMware ESX 4.0.

The NEC Express5800/A1160 features state-of-the-art NEC server technology with an up-to-4 nodes scalable building block architecture using the HSI technology to connect the blocks along with enhanced reliability, availability and serviceability, all of which are based on long-standing rich heritage of NEC mainframe, supercomputer and Intel Itanium server products.

Taking advantage of the server’s robust scalable architecture, high consolidation capacity, and high performance, NEC is promoting the NEC Express5800/A1160 server as a reliable virtualization platform.