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

FastScale Lands $5.5 million Series B Financing

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FastScale Technology today announced that it has secured $5.5 million in a Series B funding round led by ATA Ventures and joined by prior investors Leapfrog Ventures, Hunt Ventures as well as a new strategic corporate investor. The company’s last round of financing occurred in late 2006, shortly before the launch of their flagship product, FastScale Composer Suite.

FastScale’s technology enables data centers to respond to constantly changing business requirements, server workloads, and server hardware with a server software platform that dramatically increases agility while significantly reducing day-to-day operating complexity and cost – whether the data center is virtualized, not virtualized or a hybrid of the two. The ground-breaking technology is the only solution on the market to fully automate the process of building, managing and deploying heterogeneous server software environments with compact software environments built on-demand, automatic patch and configuration management, lightweight provisioning in only seconds, and an enterprise-class repository for lifecycle management.

FastScale software environments average 95% smaller than traditional images, dramatically decrease memory requirements, and increase virtual server density by 300% or more. With FastScale’s solution, the entire server infrastructure, both physical and virtual, is a dynamic pool of resources able to adapt to constantly changing demands.

“FastScale’s approach to the growing issue of software complexity is breakthrough technology for data centers,” said Hatch Graham, managing director at ATA Ventures. “The technology provides an elegant way for enterprises to manage the complexity while increasing server consolidation and decreasing cost. We’ve seen what FastScale has done for customers, and it’s impressive. We look forward to working with the FastScale team to help drive the next stage of company growth.”

Reflex Systems Bags $8.5 Million in Series A Funding

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Reflex Systems today announced that it has secured $8.5 million in Series A funding lead by RFA Management Company, an Atlanta based private investment firm.

The deal marks the final step in the reorganization of Reflex Security Inc. by creating a new Georgia limited liability company, Reflex Systems LLC. Reflex Systems is exclusively focused on virtual management and security software solutions. The company’s award winning Reflex VMC (Virtualization Management Center) product provides the industry’s most comprehensive management solution with dynamic policy enforcement across the entire virtual datacenter, whether the virtual resources are hosted locally, remotely, or in a cloud environment.

“This funding is testament to the innovation that our management and security solutions are delivering to the rapidly growing virtualization market,” said Pete Privateer, CEO of Reflex Systems. “Organizations are investing in virtual infrastructure to streamline costs and operations during these extraordinary economic times. Likewise, the demand for tools to automate the management and security of virtual datacenters is a rapidly emerging market creating significant growth opportunities for Reflex.”

Citrix Debuts Beta Of All New XenServer

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According to Virtualization.info, Citrix has just opened the beta program for the next version of XenServer, code-named Project George, which will be entirely free. Citrix says that the beta will be open until the end of this month.

The most interesting capabilities:

  • Active Directory integration. Specify the AD domain to use for authentication by the pool and use your AD credentials to connect to the pool via XenCenter and ssh. You control which AD users/groups are allowed access.
  • Workload balancing. Guest and host performance metrics are used to create star ratings for individual VM placement and balancing recommendations for resource pools to achieve optimal performance.
  • LVHD. Fast cloning and snapshots are now supported on all SR types through integration of our software VHD stack and LVM-based Storage Repositories (SRs).
  • StorageLink integration. CLI-only support for a new StorageLink Gateway SR that adds native standards-based support for HP MSA, HP EVA, EMC Clariion, and NetApp storage arrays over iSCSI and Fibre Channel with automated initiator/fabric/array management.
  • Expanded guest OS support. RHEL 5.3, Debian Lenny, and SLES 11 Linux guests.

StorMagic Launches Channel Program for StorMagic, VMware Partners

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StorMagic last week announced details of its enhanced channel partner program, which targets resellers and system integrators in the VMware community. Through this program, StorMagic channel partners get access to a unique promo key, which their customers can use to download a free copy of the StorMagic SvSAN with no expiration date and management of up to 2 TB of data. SvSAN is a storage virtual appliance that enables the deployment of a high-availability shared storage solution for VMware environments for less than US$2,000.

Benefits of becoming a StorMagic channel partner include:

  • Two levels of membership (Preferred and Premier) with generous discounts
  • Qualified sales lead generation and lead distribution to partners
  • Customized marketing campaigns for lead generation, follow-up and renewals
  • Joint marketing and selling with the StorMagic team
  • Sales training and access to dedicated StorMagic sales representatives
  • Opportunity protection through deal registration with incremental margin
  • Referral fees for non-reseller partners
  • 24X7 access to the StorMagic partner website with useful tools, information, as well as case entry and management
  • Ongoing web-based and onsite training.

StorMagic SvSAN works with VMware vCenter Server so that administrators are able to manage datastores, the StorMagic iSCSI SAN, and the internal RAID controller from one interface. With capacity that starts at 2 TB and scales to unlimited storage, the SvSAN enables administrators to create, manage and provision datastores through a single-operation, which allows them to rapidly deploy datastores without managing multiple applications. Add-on features include active-active mirroring for high-availability and capacity management upgrades.

HP Announces Enhancements to its Business Service Automation Software Suite

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HP today announced new enhancements to its Business Service Automation (BSA) software suite to help customers better manage and reduce operational costs associated with virtualized data centers.

Enhancements within the HP BSA software suite include updated versions of:

  • HP Storage Essentials, a standards-based storage resource management software, helps customers manage the increased storage requirements of virtualized data centers by optimizing capacity allocation and utilization.
  • HP Operations Orchestration, a run book automation software that automates incident resolution, change orchestration and routine maintenance tasks in the data center. This new release allows customers to reduce operational costs by better provisioning and repurposing servers and storage without service downtime.

HP also launched HP BSA Essentials, an online community and subscription services offering that helps customers maximize the value of their HP BSA software investments.

HP Storage Essentials software helps customers lower costs for managing, visualizing and reporting on heterogeneous storage infrastructure. It can automatically baseline, configure and provision storage resources to match changes in virtual infrastructure. Using HP Storage Essentials, customers have reduced the amount of time required to provision storage by up to 90 percent.

New enhancements to HP Storage Essentials software help customers:

  • Optimize storage capacity allocation and utilization by allowing IT organizations to discover and map VMware hosts to storage and storage area network (SAN) dependencies. This enables IT staff to remove storage from virtual machines that are not being fully utilized, making it available to areas that need it most.
  • Improve storage administration efficiency and reduce task errors by automatically provisioning storage to a VMware hypervisor or guest operating system.
  • Deliver better business service visibility and automated change execution across application, server and storage domains through new integrations with HP Operations Orchestration workflow software and across the HP BSA software suite.

HP Operations Orchestration software saves customers time and money associated with managing routine IT operations by standardizing processes. The software automates incident resolution, change orchestration and maintenance tasks in the data center.

New enhancements to HP Operations Orchestration software help customers:

  • Provision and repurpose additional servers and storage capacity without service downtime through an automated workflow.
  • Reduce virtual server deployment time from hours to minutes through enhanced integration with the HP BSA suite.
  • Manage heterogeneous virtualization technologies with a single solution through new integrations with VMware Virtual Infrastructure, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V.

HP BSA Essentials helps customers maximize the benefits of automation and virtualization. The online portal connects customers to BSA Essentials Subscription Services and the BSA Essentials Community.

  • BSA Essentials Subscription Services provide access to security alerts and updates to regulation policy templates used for compliance auditing. This helps customers reduce risk by assessing and correcting security or policy violations that affect the technology infrastructure.
  • The BSA Essentials Community allows customers to find updated product information, share best practices and get new content, such as virtualization management workflows for HP Operations Orchestration software.

HP BSA Essentials is available now here. Access is available to HP BSA software customers with a current maintenance contract. HP Software Professional Services provides consulting services for BSA software to help customers maximize the value of their BSA virtualization solution.

HP Operations Orchestration and HP Storage Essentials software are available now from HP and select channel partners.

Veeam Announces Enhancements To nworks Product Line

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Veeam Software today made available version 4.5 of its nworks Management Pack (MP) for VMware for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager and its nworks Smart Plug-in (SPI) for VMware for HP Operations Manager. Both products now use VMware vCenter custom attributes to offer the ability to segment VMware environments by line of business, SLA (service-level agreement) terms, or any categorization of the customer’s choosing. This allows customers to manage virtual machines in accordance with their criticality to business needs, and to group virtual machines for management by department or location.

Version 4.5 of both products also includes significant enhancements in scalability and performance. Veeam developers, working closely with VMware’s scalability lab, enhanced the nworks Collector version 4.5 to support larger VMware environments and reduce vCenter processing requirements. A single Collector now supports more than twice as many ESX hosts and virtual machines as before, with far less performance impact on the vCenter server. With this breakthrough in scalability and performance, enterprise customers gain operational efficiency while monitoring their ever-growing virtual environments.

The nworks MP and SPI from Veeam have both been qualified through the VMware Ready testing process and are certified as VMware Ready Optimized products. This key designation from VMware validates the Veeam products as being architected and tuned for VMware Infrastructure, as well as for the next-generation VMware vCloud. The nworks MP and SPI are VMware endorsed solutions for VMware management per the VMware Ready Management program, providing customers assurance that these Veeam products not only offer lower integration costs today but also will support VMware Infrastructure future directions.

The Veeam nworks MP and SPI 4.5 are both available immediately, with North American pricing remaining at $450 USD per socket for the MP and $690 USD per socket for the SPI.