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

Lifeboat Distribution Offers Fresh Virtualization Solution Bundle, Courtesy Of DataCore and Virtual Iron

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DataCore and Virtual Iron today announced that distributor Lifeboat Distribution has unveiled a new promotion for their resellers when they purchase DataCore and Virtual Iron licenses together. Lifeboat will provide their resellers with additional margin and marketing support for selling the new bundle. Lifeboat Distribution is an international specialty software distributor for virtualization and other technically sophisticated products.

Services and solutions provider TelosIT already delivers solutions that combine DataCore with Virtual Iron. “Lifeboat’s decision to offer additional margin for using DataCore in conjunction with Virtual Iron is something we will leverage,” said Kevin Carlson, CTO, TelosIT. “This represents a very cost-effective option for resellers and the resellers taking advantage of this opportunity will soon see just what high performance solutions are possible when combining these two robust offerings.”

TelosIT has already enabled Matrix Design Group, an interdisciplinary firm providing professional engineering consulting to expand capacity and achieve dual-site data redundancy, while saving tens of thousands on lease renewals on its previous generation SAN with DataCore and Virtual Iron.

“With DataCore and Virtual Iron in place both administration and management were simplified greatly and I was able to further reduce my IT spending,” said Eric W. Smith, vice president, Matrix Design Group.

Oracle Releases Enterprise Manager 10g Release 5

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Oracle announced today its new management capabilities for Oracle VM through the release of Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Release 5 (10gR5).  With the new Oracle VM Management Pack, Oracle Enterprise Manager 10gR5 provides a comprehensive management solution that spans the entire lifecycle of applications and their virtual infrastructure.  The Oracle VM Management Pack helps customers accelerate the adoption of virtualization, enabling them to optimize IT resources, improve hardware utilization, streamline IT processes, and reduce costs – without adding the complexity and cost associated with multiple management tools. Customers can now manage both physical and virtual environments with a comprehensive top-down approach that provides a unique business perspective, enabling the understanding of user experiences and the business impact of IT issues, in addition to offering the best tools to manage each component in the stack individually.

Highlights of the New Oracle VM Management Pack

  • Manage virtual environments with an application perspective – allows customers to quickly diagnose whether the root cause of a problem is in an application component, in a virtual resource, or in a physical resource; enabling efficient consolidation and optimization of data center resources through virtualization.
  • Built-in configuration management – enables administrators to easily track application relationships and analyze configuration changes.
  • Policy-based management – helps reduce the on-going costs of IT compliance with the ability to define company specific policies for virtualization, to enforce configuration best practices and help achieve regulatory compliance.
  • Automated deployment – automates software deployment through Oracle VM Templates for packaged applications, middleware, database, and Oracle Enterprise Linux.
    • ISVs can now streamline deployment of their products and services for virtual environments by providing predefined templates.
  • Lifecycle automation – spanning test, deployment, patching and maintenance capabilities, including automated patching of operating systems and Oracle software running inside the guest virtual machines and live migration of guest virtual machines to other servers during server maintenance windows. This helps maximize return on investment in a virtualized environment, through simplified management across the application lifecycle.
  • High availability for virtual infrastructure – provides enterprise-class capabilities such as server pooling, automatic load balancing and server failover, helping to ensure business continuity in the virtual environment, usually associated with traditional high-cost physical servers.

Hyperformix Snags $3.8 Million More to Spur Growth in Virtualization Capacity Planning

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Hyperformix, provider of solutions for IT capacity and performance, today announced that it has secured a new round of equity and debt funding totaling $3.8 million. The funding will be used to drive accelerated growth and market penetration for its solutions aimed at the virtualization market. New investor LTI joins existing investors M/C Venture Partners and Morgan Stanley Venture Partners for the round.

Hyperformix will use the funds to expand engineering, marketing and sales of its IT capacity and performance solutions for virtualized environments.

The increasing importance of virtualization management in large scale IT shops has revitalized the market for IT capacity planning. According to Peter Klante, Hyperformix President and CEO, this funding will allow Hyperformix to solidify and accelerate its leadership position in this new and exciting market.

Hyperformix software’s advanced techniques produce accurate predictions of performance and capacity of key applications and deliver actionable insights through compelling interactive dashboards. Hyperformix can automatically assess the current health of IT systems and predict near- and long-term capacity and performance issues. Hyperformix solutions can be used in planning phases for IT changes, in test environments and to manage production environments.

DEMO 09 Launch: AppZero, Formerly Known As Trigence

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AppZero (formerly Trigence) is launching today at the DEMO 09 Conference a set of tools for creating Virtual Application Appliances (VAAs). This new approach to provisioning and deploying applications on physical or virtual servers running anywhere, is designed for the cloud environment and for movement of server applications — datacenter to cloud, hosting environment, or cloud to cloud. VAAs package a server application with all of its dependencies, but no operating system component (zero OS).

AppZero’s first public demonstration of its VAA technology will show a live production application provisioned in seconds to on an Amazon EC2 cloud, and moved in less than one minute to a GoGrid cloud computing environment.

Designed for instant server-based application provisioning and deployment, VAAs enable an application to run wherever the business requires without the burdensome licensing issues that inclusion of an operating system (OS) introduces – VAAs contain zero OS. AppZero VAAs work with mission-critical applications across all tiers: web servers, application servers and database servers. Enterprise middleware from Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and Open Source servers like MySQL as well as in-house developed applications can all be easily transformed into VAAs without changing a single line of code.

Cloud providers, integrators, ISVs and IT professionals find AppZero’s wizard-based tools simple to use for creating VAAs and provisioning them on servers at the click of a mouse. This instant provisioning allows scalable resources to be used on a pay-per-use basis, without cloud lock-in.

AppZero software creates, maintains, and administers VAAs. The key enabler of AppZero’s VAA toolset is isolation and encapsulation technology created at Trigence, an early developer of multi-platform datacenter virtualization technology. Under its new name, AppZero, the company is focused on extending the proven concept of virtual appliances to server applications. AppZero is led by CEO Greg O’Connor, who was previously the founder of Sonic Software (acquired by Progress Software NASDAQ: PRGS) and pioneer of the Enterprise Service Bus, the foundation of Service-Oriented Architecture.

AppZero VAAs encapsulate applications at a level above the operating system, turning server applications into discrete objects that run protected from other applications and the underlying operating systems. In a virtual environment such as VMware, Xen and Microsoft Hyper-V, AppZero drives higher server consolidation ratios by provisioning applications to virtual machines (VM) with almost no overhead. VAAs significantly reduces VM sprawl and dramatically speeds the time to get an application up and running. AppZero VAAs also simplify the use of existing configuration and server provisioning solutions, such as HP-Opsware and BMC’s Bladelogic, allowing these systems to manage server applications as discrete objects.
AppZero’s VAA toolset runs on Windows, Solaris and Linux and includes three tools: the AppZero Creator for building a VAA; the AppZero Director, a run time system; and AppZero Administrator for administering a VAA. AppZero has made available a library of single-click server based VAAs for free download at vaa.appzero.com. The VAA toolset is available immediately via the website and is priced from $500 per VAA.

Hyper9 Raises $8 Million Series B Round, Mike Maples Joins Its Board

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Hyper9 has raised $8 million in a series B funding round led by Venrock, a highly respected venture capital firm. Joining Venrock were current investors Matrix Partners, Silverton Partners and Maples Investments.

Hyper9’s new breed of virtualization management technology provides virtual infrastructure administrators with the visibility they need to effectively do their job as well as provide the control that is necessary to manage such a dynamic environment. The Hyper9 product will be generally available early March, 2009.

The company also announced that Mike Maples Sr., a private investor and tech industry veteran, joined its Board of Directors. Formerly Executive Vice President of the Worldwide Products Group for Microsoft, Maples has a proven track record in advising software companies as they expand product lines and enhance business operations such as sales and marketing. Prior to Microsoft, Maples held senior positions at other market leading companies such as IBM, Lexmark, NetIQ, and Sonic restaurants.

Racemi Introduces New Versions Of DynaCenter Software

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Racemi recently announced new versions of its DynaCenter data center automation software specifically built for rapid server recovery, disaster recovery and server consolidation implementations.

Racemi DynaCenter uses virtualization to automate the movement of server images, including operating systems, storage and network configurations and applications, to dissimilar hardware — reducing infrastructure costs along with the time and risk typically introduced by manual processes.

The new product offerings include:

  • DynaCenter RSR (Rapid Server Recovery), which enables rapid, automated recovery of failed systems to dissimilar hardware within a single data center for a faster return to service at a lower cost.
  • DynaCenter DR (Disaster Recovery), which improves business continuity by restoring critical operations quickly across multiple sites. The software automates recovery across multiple locations in circumstances where it is too expensive to have redundant equipment for e-mail, web servers, and other systems.
  • DynaCenter DCC (Data Center Consolidation), which simplifies complicated data center consolidation and relocation efforts by automating the movement of entire business systems to dissimilar hardware.

The DynaCenter software compares the configurations of the source and destination servers and reconfigures the necessary components and device drivers “in-flight” to ensure that the image can be run on the new hardware. Systems supported include AIX, Solaris (Sparc and x86), Windows, Linux and VMware.