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

Sun To Virtualize … Good Old Tape Drives?

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Sun Microsystems has reportedly revealed plans to add one of the newest storage technologies into one of the oldest storage methods in use: tape drives. The news comes from VNUnet.com:

The company said on Tuesday that it will update its line of StorageTek tape drive systems with a new virtualisation manager.

Sun said that the latest version of the StorageTek drives would support tape capacities of up to 1TB, and overall system capacity of some 90TB.

StorageTek Virtual Systems Manager will allow companies to manage and operate data stored on tape backup for use in tasks such as archiving and disaster recovery.

The vendor hopes that the systems will appeal to companies looking to handle growing capacity while navigating the economic crisis. Sun’s tape storage units have maintained strong growth rates in recent months.

EMC VP Chad Sakac: “We Want To Leave VMware Independent”

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At the EMC annual user conference (EMC World 2009), Chad Sakac, VP of the VMware Technology Alliance at EMC, told IT PRO magazine that the company reaffirms the promise it made to keep VMware as an independent company.

“We are determined to leave them independent. Both EMC customers and non-EMC customers have thanked us. We want everyone to have access to the technology but come to EMC on merit.”

But also:

“No-one knows what is around the corner but it would be short sighted of us to do it as this point. There are no plans [to remove its independence] in the works now and no plans to do so in the future.”

Doesn’t sound all too convincing, agrees VMBlog, who alerted us to the IT Pro article.

Former Vizioncore CEO David Bieneman Is Back With A New Startup

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Founder and former CEO of Vizioncore, David Bieneman, is back after selling the company he started to Quest Software in January 2008. According to his LinkedIn profile, he’s now the CEO of a startup called Liquidware Labs.

Alessandro guesses the company will be doing something in the desktop virtualization sphere:

The company tagline, The Art & Science of the Desktop, and the Roher profile on LinkedIn unveil that Liquidware Labs will be active in the VDI space, will address the PSO organizations, and that will leverage the technology of vmSight, recently acquired while in stealth mode for an undisclosed sum.

vmSight is a startup that offers a solution to track how the users work on the virtual desktops, through the analysis of their network activity. Think about it as a network sniffer that re-assembles the snooped packets to understand the history and the performance of a VDI session and make it easier to troubleshoot.

What Liquidware Labs will do with this technology which is covered by 13 patents?

Time will tell.

3Tera To Debut AppStore, A Marketplace For Cloud Components

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3Tera has announced the introduction of the 3Tera AppStore, a marketplace for cloud components where enterprise users, software vendors and datacenter experts can exchange production-ready, scalable and highly available cloud components on a pay-per-use basis.

3Tera’s AppStore is a globally available portal offering enterprise-class, supported software stacks, packaged for use in public, private and hybrid AppLogic cloud deployments. The AppStore catalog spans all types of datacenter infrastructure elements and complete applications, from networking components (such as load balancers, firewalls, routers, traffic managers, content switches), server components (such as Web servers, directory servers, databases, application servers) and storage solutions, as well as application software stacks, management and monitoring tools.

Users of the 3Tera AppStore can find pre-configured, ready-to-use appliances to add to their 3Tera AppLogic catalogs provided by trusted software vendors. Many are free or offered on a trial basis, while others are offered on a pay-per-use basis. For ISVs, the AppStore provides a way to publish and distribute enterprise-class, production ready, cloud components and generate revenue every time users run them in public or private clouds powered by AppLogic. Datacenter architects and consultants can package and publish complete application infrastructures to the AppStore that are ready to run, complete with value-added capabilities such as clustered solutions, high-availability, disaster recovery, on-demand scalability or automated backups and security.

Initial AppStore partners include CohesiveFT, GlobalLogic, Layer 7 Technologies, SOASTA, Tap In Systems, and Zeus Technology.

3Tera is working with established infrastructure and software vendors to populate the AppStore catalog of available appliances. The Beta version of the 3Tera AppStore will go live in Q3 2009.

Xen 3.4 Released

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Xen.org is pleased to announce the latest release of the Xen hypervisor (3.4), which is is referring to as “the open source industry standard for virtualization”.

From the blog post:

“As part of the Xen community’s commitment to continuous improvement, the new hypervisor offers significant enhancements in the following areas:

•    Xen Client Initiative (XCI) Enhancements –Xen.org continues develop industry virtualization standards for desktop and client devices. Xen 3.4 contains the initial XCI code release providing a base client hypervisor for the community to extend and improve. This new version of the Xen hypervisor expands the hardware options for the leading open source virtualization platform.

•    Reliability – Availability – Serviceability (RAS) – In addition, Xen now delivers a collection of features designed to avoid and detect system failures, provide maximum uptime by isolating system faults, and provide system failure notices to administrators to properly service the hardware/software. The combination of these services provide for a robust Xen hypervisor with fault-tolerant and back-up capabilities built-in.

•    Power Management – Xen 3.4 improves the power saving features with a host of new algorithms to better manage the processor including schedulers and timers optimized for peak power savings.”

On average, Xen.org receives more than 750 new code submissions to the source tree each month from developers across the world working on an array of solutions within the hypervisor.

Exec Exodus At VMware: CIO Tayloe Stansbury And EMEA Marketing Director Reza Malekzadeh Split

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More and more high-profile VMware executives are leaving the company to start their own businesses or join other technology ventures. Virtualizatio.info brings us the news that both Tayloe Stansbury (former CIO) and Reza Malekzadeh (former Sr. Director, Products & Marketing, EMEA) have left the virtualization leader.

Stansbury is joining business service provider Intuit as CTO, while we don’t yet know which job Malekzadeh has accepted (or if he has already accepted another job for that matter) – his LinkedIn profile still shows his old role at VMware.

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