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

OpenNebula 1.4 Beta 1 Is Ready for Testing

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The OpenNebula team has announced the availability of OpenNebula 1.4 Beta1 Hourglass (1.3.80), the first preview of the next stable release of the OpenNebula Virtual Infrastructure Manager.

OpenNebula focuses on incorporating bleeding edge technologies and innovations in many areas of virtual infrastructure management and Cloud Computing.  OpenNebula 1.4 aims to be the swiss-army knife of Cloud Computing, letting you deploy any type of Cloud.  The OpenNebula team has been set now to bug fixing mode to provide a robust and stable OpenNebula 1.4.0 to your data centers.

Please note that OpenNebula 1.4 Beta 1 is not suitable for production settings. Its sole purpose is gathering feedback and testing new exciting features.

Highlights of OpenNebula 1.4 are:

  • EC2 Query API interface on top of OpenNebula, so you can transform your OpenNebula installation into a Public Cloud
  • A new OpenNebula Cloud API (OCA) to easily develop any Cloud interface or Cloud application (several Cloud interfaces, such a OGF OCCI-API, are planned)
  • Support for the VMware Hypervisor family
  • Multiple user support and access-right control for Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks
  • Advance contextualization support to integrate VM packs and implement multi-component services
  • Libvirt interface has been moved to the libvirt repository
  • New ElasticHosts drivers and support for multiple Amazon EC2 Clouds in Hybrid Cloud deployments
  • Easy integration within your data-center services and procedures with a new hook system
  • Many bug fixes, and scalability and performance improvements in several components of the OpenNebula system
  • A whole new set of documentation pages, guides and examples

REFERENCES:

Altor Networks Integrates Altor VF 3.0 With Juniper Networks STRM Series Security Threat Response Managers

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Altor Networks today announced the integration of Altor VF 3.0 with Juniper Networks STRM Series Security Threat Response Managers to extend its powerful solution for correlation and threat management into virtualized server environments.

Altor VF 3.0 provides logs, events, and inter-virtual-machine traffic statistics from inside the virtualized server to the STRM Series via Syslog and Netflow. With this combined solution, customers can continue to use the STRM product features, work flow, and user interface they are already trained for, with the added benefit of including the virtualized server environment.

Altor VF 3.0 uses purpose-built, patent-pending technology, and integration with VMware VMsafe APIs to deliver defense-in-depth and address the unique security challenges of the virtualized environment. By deploying the integrated solution, enterprises can bring the benefits of the leading log and event management solution to the virtualized environment with minimal overhead and cost.

Release: Univa UniCloud 2.0

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Univa UD, a provider of software solutions for enabling dynamic IT environments, today announced UniCloud 2.0, a new release which includes unique capabilities for enabling private, public and hybrid cloud environments.

UniCloud 2.0 enables the formation of an elastic compute infrastructure or cloud environment that unifies provisioning, configuration and virtualization management with application configuration into a single RESTful web-services-based framework. By integrating this flexible, powerful framework with management of resources and policies, UniCloud 2.0 greatly simplifies the deployment and operation of both physical and virtual (i.e. ‘dual-mode’) compute infrastructures. As a result, users can maximize software license optimization, throughput and resource utilization.

The new release is groundbreaking in several respects:

  • First to simultaneously manage ‘dual-mode infrastructures’ that consist of both physical and virtual resource nodes, the most common use case in a cloud scenario
  • First to integrate provisioning, infrastructure configuration, application configuration, and physical and virtual resource management into a single, unified product

UniCloud 2.0 is the ideal cloud solution for a variety of real-world usage scenarios, such as high-throughput engineering organizations that are trying to optimize expensive software licenses or fair-share compute resources that require check-pointing. UniCloud is also a valuable product for small business HPC and ISV appliance manufacturers who need a cloud enablement component for their customers.

UniCloud 2.0 is the first cloud enablement product to operate and support simultaneous dual-mode infrastructure, instead of requiring users to choose between deploying physical or virtual compute nodes in a cloud environment. The built-in descriptive policy management ensures applications automatically use the best available mode by switching the hardware profile or live-migrating workload as required to achieve the service level objective. This means all workloads and users get the fastest possible throughput performance and the greatest possible utilization.

UniCloud 2.0 provides a single construct to manage complex infrastructures and workloads using service level objectives. Workload of any type is automatically managed through integration with powerful Sun Grid Engine software. Workload requiring expensive application licenses, or meeting other prescribed priorities, can be run immediately without having to restart current jobs – check-pointing and live-migration are fully supported, so all workload finishes within a predictable amount of time. Integrated policy management enables automation by harmonizing workload, resources and hardware profiles. Changing system behavior is as simple as publishing a policy – new actions instantly become available.

UniCloud 2.0 allows any typical cluster administrative functions to be supported in a cloud environment and also supports many capabilities that are not typical or possible with incumbent solutions such as basic check-pointing. UniCloud can dynamically add virtual or physical compute resources to the cluster infrastructure, automatically delivering real-time resource optimization based on available memory, licenses, power consumption, CPUs and even data locality. With UniCloud 2.0, users can place multiple applications safely on the same compute resource without worrying about swapping or application interference and can reduce power consumption significantly by shifting workload to less expensive data centers. “If you can think it, you can do it,” quips Tyreman.

Coverage of Top Cloud Use Cases

UniCloud 2.0 addresses these top use cases:

  • Cloud Clustering: Provision an entire cluster in a public cloud
  • Cloud Bursting: Add virtual compute nodes to internal clusters by provisioning nodes in a public cloud
  • Private Cloud Computing: Create an internal virtual cluster that uses policies to place jobs on the most appropriate infrastructure, live-migrate or checkpoint jobs, and add virtual compute nodes by cloudbursting

UniCloud 2.0 is available as a standalone product or in an Enterprise package. Both packages include Sun Grid Engine software; the Enterprise package also includes Oracle VM, Oracle Enterprise Linux and a version of Reliance, Univa’s proprietary infrastructure and application service governor.

Virtutech Announces Simics: Checkpointing for SystemC Based Transaction-Level Modeling

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Virtutech, specialized in virtualized systems development (VSD), today announced that its Simics platform now provides full-system checkpointing for SystemC based transaction-level modeling (TLM). OEM and semiconductor developers now can save, restore and share the precise and full-system state to bypass lengthy system boot and restart steps, share the system among engineering team members, capture and duplicate bugs, parallelize testing and offer product training from virtual platforms.

Virtutech is the only vendor to enable full-system, mixed-architecture checkpointing that reaches far beyond a simple save and restore function for individual elements of a SystemC virtual platform. The Simics checkpoint captures a snapshot of the complete system and can be restored at any point or location, on any host and by anyone so that software development, integration or test efforts can continue as if they had never been interrupted. Simics checkpointing works with mixed modeling languages to enable unique capabilities such as language freedom, portability across model versions, differential saving of memory and disks, the ability to easily change the level of model abstraction and to archive multiple target setup configurations.

In the past decade, checkpointing has become one of the most utilized and valuable capabilities within Virtutech Simics. The addition of SystemC checkpointing complements existing support for models written in C, C++ and Python to provide developers with a seamless, robust simulation solution for software, hardware and systems development bringing benefits that are difficult or impossible to achieve using physical hardware.

NextIO Strikes Partnership with Avnet Technology Solutions

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NextIO today announced that it has entered into an agreement with Avnet Technology Solutions, the operating group of Avnet. Under the terms of the agreement, Avnet will act as NextIO’s primary integration partner and exclusive distributor of NextIO’s I/O virtualization solutions to its IBM reseller partners in the United States and Canada.

The NextIO Express Connect product provides an all-encompassing I/O solution for today’s dynamic data center. NextIO provides customers with the largest breadth of server I/O choice for any-to-any connectivity without the need to change existing infrastructure and lays the foundation for I/O virtualization in any server environment. Express Connect enables servers to access many more I/O devices than are available by default. Server I/O devices are contained in the NextIO Express Connect appliance and are accessed by multiple servers as a flexible and dynamic pool of I/O resources.

NextIO provides customers with cost savings, flexibility and manageability, while protecting their existing infrastructure investments. As the industry leader in next-generation I/O virtualization solutions, NextIO provides enterprise-class servers with faster installations, network transparent I/O upgrades, minimal service disruptions, and less operational management overhead.

Fujitsu Launches Enterprise-Grade Infrastructure as a Service in the UK

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Fujitsu has today announced the availability of a range of new on-demand Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings including a storage service and a development infrastructure service.  The new services will benefit organisations looking for the flexibility and cost effectiveness associated with cloud computing but who are nervous about the security and reliability of the public cloud.

As well as the new offerings themselves, Fujitsu will provide consultancy and integration services to help customers make the most efficient use of IaaS.

Fujitsu’s storage service provides tiered information management capabilities in four critical areas; storage capacity with block or file access, data protection and archive infrastructure, all available as a service using the right storage infrastructure to achieve optimum cost efficiency.

Fujitsu will be hosting the services using its own high-security UK-based data centres – a significant factor as organisations become increasingly concerned about the legal ramifications of allowing their data to be stored outside the UK. For top security and high performance systems Fujitsu also offers a private service on the customer’s premises using their own retained data centres.

In response to the tight timescales and unpredictable workload peaks of development projects, Fujitsu’s new development infrastructure service reduces the cost and risk of project delays by providing server and storage infrastructure on a weekly basis.  This will eliminate wasted resources and allow project teams to scale-up with fast provisioning of additional resources. Fujitsu is finalising a service designed for live production business systems, which will be available later this year.

Fujitsu’s storage and server services use advanced technology from leading brands, EMC, Cisco and Fujitsu, providing enterprise class performance and functionality that is trusted by major corporations around the world.

There will be a further announcement detailing the full Infrastructure as a Service suite in the Autumn.