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

FastScale Introduces Stack Manager Workgroup Edition

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FastScale today announced the introduction of FastScale Stack Manager Workgroup Edition, a new product that enables enterprise IT and engineering teams to easily create, optimize and manage logical servers for deployment in physical, virtual or cloud environments. Logical servers enable a ‘build once, deploy anywhere’ methodology to support complex, dynamic and hybrid server infrastructure and allow a consistent approach to creating and managing physical and virtual machines throughout server lifecycles. FastScale Stack Manager provides a central platform with a one-button solution for administrators who need dynamic yet optimized server builds.

FastScale Stack Manager incorporates patent-pending Application Blueprinting technology to automatically generate logical servers with ‘just enough operating system’ (JeOS) and deliver lightweight server builds that are up to 95% smaller, inherently more secure, with dramatically reduced memory, processor and disk usage. In addition, new visualization and stack optimization tools enable users to quickly and easily analyze servers with a full operating system profile and then optimize by package group, file type or directory hierarchy with dynamic size calculations that support the assessment.

The result can be compared to the FastScale Application Blueprint as an insurance policy against creating a server build with missing file dependencies – omitted files are easily added with a mouse click. Rich web based settings management allows policy-based standardization as well as fine-grained customization of logical server configurations.

In addition to the most automated, iterative and robust set of capabilities available to build and optimize logical servers for Windows, as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based application environments, an enterprise-class software repository enables lifecycle management of logical server specifications, software assets, roles, permissions, history, and metadata for complete tracking, traceability and reproducibility. When a server deployment is needed, FastScale Stack Manager will create the appropriate output format on-demand from components stored in the repository, according to the logical server specification.

FastScale Stack Manager Workgroup Edition is available now, and pricing starts at $25,000 for five users.

Industry Moves: IT Veteran Don Bules Appointed CEO At Unidesk

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Virtual desktop management software maker Unidesk today announced that Don Bulens has joined the company as President and CEO.

Bulens is known for building and scaling IT infrastructure companies, as demonstrated most recently at EqualLogic, where he led the company to success in the networked data storage market and its $1.4 billion acquisition by Dell, and, earlier, at Lotus, where his channel development leadership was instrumental in the success of Lotus Notes. Bulens’ expertise in guiding companies and bringing transformational products to the global market is ideally suited for Unidesk as it begins to build its leadership position in the desktop virtualization and PC life cycle management software categories.

Bulens fortifies an executive team that has an impressive track record of delivering innovative IT infrastructure management solutions. His appointment enables Unidesk Founder Chris Midgley, who had been the company’s acting CEO, to focus full-time on his CTO role leading the company’s technical strategy and product vision. Bulens has also joined Midgley on Unidesk’s Board of Directors.

Bulens was most recently President and CEO of EqualLogic, provider of networked data storage systems that simplify how IT organizations store and protect information. Under his leadership, EqualLogic achieved stellar growth, doubling revenue each year and achieving the second largest market share in the fastest growing segment of the storage industry. In November 2007, while in the final stages of filing for an IPO, EqualLogic was acquired by Dell.

Bulens arrived at EqualLogic with extensive experience in early-stage and industry-leading companies. He was CEO of Trellix, a leading provider of web site publishing tools, through its sale to Interland, the largest provider of web hosting for small businesses. Earlier, at Lotus, Bulens led the creation of the channel and developer community that contributed to the extraordinary market growth of Lotus Notes.

Netuitive Brings Predictive Analytics to HP Business Service Management Console

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Netuitive, a provider of self-learning performance management software, today announced it has integrated its predictive analytics capabilities with HP Business Service Management (BSM) technology for an automated and adaptive BSM solution. Netuitive is now a Gold Enterprise Management Application Partner of HP’s and has been invited to join the HP Software Marketplace Referral Program.

Netuitive helps customers increase the value of their existing BSM tools. Business users benefit from increased service availability and avoidance of revenue loss and end-user productivity loss, while IT is better equipped to identify and act upon problems before affecting the end user. Both business and IT users benefit with a unified BSM toolset that enables successful BSM implementations and provides a better understanding of how IT operations and infrastructure performance affect business services.

At a more granular level, the combination of Netuitive’s automated performance management technology and HP’s leading BSM technology addresses common IT operational issues. These include too many fragmented domain tools; the inability to prioritize issues based on business impact; and, slow, inefficient problem identification and resolution processes.

Lanamark Debuts Storage Design Module for Lanamark Suite

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Lanamark today announced availability of the Storage Design Module for Lanamark Suite, which enables solution providers to design the underlying storage infrastructure for both virtualized desktops and servers.

The Storage Design Module offers advanced capabilities for assessing disk space and disk IO requirements, automates virtual disk sizing and provides a rich selection of HBAs, SAN switches and storage arrays from major vendors. It enables solution providers to design and compare what-if scenarios across multiple server and storage configurations. This ensures that enterprises are always presented with cost-effective, highly optimized storage options that maximize return-on-investment from virtual infrastructure.

Once the data collection phase is completed and virtualization candidates are identified, solution providers can approximate central storage requirements by analyzing a rich set of disk space and disk IO metrics. These metrics are also used for automatically sizing virtual disks and balancing workloads across target servers to minimize disk IO resource contention. The module supports HBAs, SAN switches and storage arrays from Brocade, Cisco Systems, Dell, EMC, Emulex, Hitachi, HP, IBM, NetApp, Pillar Data Systems, QLogic, Sun Microsystems and Xiotech. It also allows EMC partners to export data for analysis into the EMC ET Tool.

Inphi Corporation Announces New Tech That Could Quadruple Server Memory Capacity

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Inphi Corporation today announced a new technology that can quadruple memory capacity in servers and workstations at DDR3-2133 rates and beyond. Inphi’s technology will enable the world’s highest capacity memory-per-channel at the highest data transfer frequency. The enabling component of the technology is Inphi’s isolation memory buffer (iMB™), which will reside electrically on a server DIMM between the memory controller and the DRAM, allowing it to buffer the data lines, as well as command, address and control lines.

With the advent of virtualization, multicore and multiprocessor systems, servers can attain improved utilization levels. However, there is a gap in the amount of memory capacity available to feed this improved utilization and Inphi’s new iMB technology will significantly narrow this gap. Until this technology is commercially available, the only option for designers is to expand memory capacity by using more expensive higher density DRAM components.

Inphi’s iMB technology delivers an optimal balance of capacity, power, cost, latency and is used in conjunction with DDR3 DRAMs, while extendable to DDR4.

The benefits of the iMB technology are:

  • Increased capacity by enabling up to 384 GB of mainstream DRAMs integrated into standard-sized DIMMs without the need for hardware changes. The iMB chip will transparently make multiple ranks of DRAMs look like a single rank of DRAM to the memory controller.
  • Compared to a BoB approach, iMB is a cost effective single chip solution that fits on both low profile DIMMs and very low profile DIMMs.
  • Improved receiver sensitivity, equalized transmitter buffers and reduced load on the data bus ensure this technology is extensible to data transfer rates of 2133 Mega Transfers per Second (MT/s) compared to today’s top rate of 1333 MT/s.

Inphi is currently manufacturing prototypes of the iMB and expects to deliver engineering samples to OEMs beginning in the summer of 2009. These activities will pave the way for productizing the iMB in the second half of 2009 as well as a plan to support standardization of the iMB technology in the JEDEC standards organization.

Sun Updates OpenSolaris

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Sun announced the latest release of the OpenSolaris 2009.06 operating system, delivering features in networking, storage and virtualization, along with significant performance enhancements and developer productivity updates.

Central to the new release is the inclusion of Project Crossbow, the most significant networking technology development to Solaris in this decade. Extending the features that made the Solaris Operating System the world’s leading technology platform, OpenSolaris 2009.06 is a major step forward for enterprises looking to deploy the next generation of Solaris that includes the latest innovations from Sun and the OpenSolaris community.

As a follow on to Sun’s ZFS technology, which reinvented the fundamental concept of file systems, Project Crossbow’s complete re-architecture of the network stack becomes the new standard for how networking at the operating system level is done. This project delivers, for the first time, the networking capability designed for virtualization in combination with highly scaled, multiple-core, multi-threaded processors connected with extremely fast network interfaces. More information on Project Crossbow is available at: http://opensolaris.com/learn.

Project Crossbow’s virtual network interfaces provide full resource management to simplify administration of complex deployments of multi-tiered applications on a single machine or an entire datacenter. Combined with the ability to scale the workload of single or multiple network interfaces across multiple core and processor systems, up to the largest systems available in the world today, customers can increase network efficiency and performance. Available today, both of these networking enhancements are major milestones for an enterprise operating system and are likely to set a new standard for next generation operating system platforms.

OpenSolaris 2009.06 provides dozens of enhancements to the breakthrough technology of ZFS and encompasses it with a complete architecture of connectivity and protocol support. New, fully integrated flash storage support in ZFS helps to optimize large scale pools of very high performance storage by designating flash devices as write accelerators and read accelerators. These pools are automatically managed by ZFS to achieve extreme levels of performance across many workloads, making the need for small caches on RAID controllers obsolete.

Native support for Microsoft CIFS has been added as a full peer to NFS, as a high performance kernel with integrated features and support for Microsoft Windows semantics for security, naming and access rights, allowing transparent use and sharing of files across Windows, Linux and Solaris environments. To round out the complete storage capability, Sun has designed new, very high performance support for iSCSI and Fiberchannel block protocols into the Solaris kernel, allowing systems running OpenSolaris to participate as a client and a target for virtually any storage topology.

All of these storage features are integrated into the Solaris platform and take full advantage of its core functionality including: fault management, networking, multi-threaded scaling, performance, security and resource management capabilities.

With this announcement, Sun continues to deliver on a holistic, built-in virtualization design for networking, storage and application abstraction, raising performance and scale to new highs for the industry. Building on the advances in networking storage virtualization, the OpenSolaris platform delivers key server virtualization technologies in the form of Solaris Containers, Logical Domains (LDoms) for Sun CMT systems and the Xen-based hypervisor to give users a complete virtualization platform built directly into the OpenSolaris OS. One of the most widely deployed virtualization technologies in the world, Solaris Containers provide lightweight, agile, software-defined boundaries that can be used to create virtual servers for consolidating hundreds of existing enterprise-class workloads onto a single system. More information on the built-in virtualization capabilities of OpenSolaris is available here.